Parenting in Your Childhood: Why you can go home again

Here's what happens when you pack up and move 2,000 miles across the country to live in your hometown.

You walk east to Lake Michigan with your daughter, mindful that you walked this sidewalk to that lake when you were 10 and 20 and 30 and 40.

You swim with her in your lake. You drop her off at your old school.

You meet old boyfriends, now new friends, with their kids at the park where you swung/swang/swinged as a 6th grader, a sophomore in high school, a sophomore in college, a new mother, now a not-so-new mother.

You sound like your mom, look like your daughter, trace your finger over your old 7th grade locker you shared with a playwright you now read about in The New York Times.

At ‘the Jewel' in produce a woman brushes past me, looks back and there's that glint of recognition: Who are we to each other? Were you my....Was I your.....Babysitter? Gynecologist? Student? Father's patient? High school acquaintance who once shared a sobbing moment of adolescent collapse in the girl's bathroom that one time?

It's ‘This Is/Was Your Life' all day, every day.

You seem like you're home, my daughter says, walking east toward the lake, for dinner at Blind Faith Café, in whose booths I have had every important conversation of my life.

Because I know everybody?

Nope, she shrugs. Just seems like you're home.