My daughter M picked me up from the airport today wearing a shirt as blue as the ocean. Why does it amaze me that she is a grown-up? Why does it seem both like yesterday and a million years ago that I dropped her off at college with the split between her dad and me still running off us like fresh blood? In the car M and I talked about family and the narrow ideas that some still hold about what that means. M and her sister have a brother who will be 42 this summer. The younger of their two brothers born to their dad and his new wife has not yet celebrated his first birthday. Our family is bi-coastal, multi-racial and cultural, straight and lesbian, Democrat and Republican, carnivorous and vegan, smoking and non, atheist, Hindu, Catholic, and god-knows-what. We are deep and wide and not necessarily the calm blue ocean. We are tsunami just as much as we are tranquility, and almost five years out from the end of my marriage I see more and more of the shoreline of the continent of my happiness. And oddy, much of that happiness is due, I think, to my divorce. We are the sum of our experience, and experience is mysterious and deep.