“[Our family is] a wonderfully messy arrangement, in which relationships overlap, underlie, support, and opposeone another. It didn't always come together easily nor doesit always stay together easily. It's known very good times and very bad ones. It has heldtogether, often out of shared memories and hopes, sometimes out of the lure of my sisters' cooking, and sometimes out of sheer stubbornness. And like the world itself, our family is renewed by each baby.”