It was so nice to find my friend Mary's* blog yesterday. Her entry "If I had a daughter..." reminded me of what a huge influence she'd had on my attitudes about being a mother and a woman.

My cousin Max had introduced us because I was pregnant and she had a baby. That was it. Something like introducing 2 people for no other reason than they both have cats or Volkswagens or size 12 feet. At the time, I thought it was one of Max's more ridiculous reaches and I only agreed to meet her to stop his incessant you-really-should-meet-Mary comments. But, ever since Max and I had been in grade school, he had probably known me better than anyone – he was right about my meeting her.

I saw Max last at his mother's house this past January. He has 2 sons in grade school now and a new puppy that they were training. Max said he's learned so much from training the dog that he wished he'd had one before he'd had kids. I thought that was funny, and it made me think then that I was glad I'd had a good example to follow in Mary because I'd already trained puppies by the time I had a kid. What I needed as a new mother was someone to show me how to throw out a lot of the rules that I'd thought parents were supposed to follow.

* By the way, it was Mary's literary reading that I mentioned in my first public post.