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to kiss her dad. Good-morning kisses, good-bye and welcome-home kisses, good-night kisses—we grabbed every opportunity. We were (and are) a very tactile family, and I took special delight in the girls’ plump little lips and the way they would hold hands by tightly gripping just a finger or two. Even as we were working hard to raise our family, though, I was mindful of how important it was for Diane and me to maintain our own relationship. So when Sarah was not quite two, I prevailed on Diane to take a short vacation alone with me to Bermuda. She was reluctant to leave Sarah, but I pestered relentlessly until she agreed. Diane’s sister, Lynn, came up from Atlanta to collect Sarah for the few days we were away. At the appointed time, we were all ready to depart at Logan airport, Lynn with Sarah to Atlanta and Diane and I to Bermuda. I handed Sarah to her beloved aunt and said good-bye. When she reached back to me from Lynn’s embrace, I burst into tears. We were well over the Atlantic before I composed myself. Diane still gets a good laugh out of that.

I won’t claim that our daughters had typical childhoods. As well as providing emotional riches, Diane and I were learning as young downtown lawyers and business executives to navigate a new world of privilege and even occasional luxury, and the girls came along for the ride. We traveled all over the country and much of the world together. There were summer camps and riding lessons and dance recitals and town soccer, a hilarious affair where all the six- and seven-year-olds chase the ball without regard to zone or even who is on the same team. We took winter trips to the Caribbean with family friends, and the girls shook the hand of the president of the United States in the White House. They knew how to pronounce concierge and how to use one. At five or six, Sarah asked her aunt Lynn why there was no avocado in her salad.

When Katherine was in kindergarten, her class was studying the changes in the seasons—what happens in winter, spring, summer, and fall. Her homework assignment was to describe the four seasons to Mom and Dad. When she was ready, she proceeded to describe her several visits to the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C. “First you drive up and the doorman takes your car,” she said.

“That’s exactly right,” said Diane gently. “But that’s not what the teacher is asking.”

In other ways, however, Sarah and Katherine were typical. Though they are close friends today and marvelously composed, witty young women, they bickered constantly as preteens. During one family visit to the Greenbrier in West Virginia, they harangued each other so bitterly in the dining room that Diane swore they would never come on a nice trip with us again. Once, driving on the Jamaicaway in Boston, they were so unbearably fussy in the backseat that I pulled over and put them both out on the side of the road and drove off. They were on to us, of course. When I circled the block to pick them up, confident that I had scared some sense into them, they were hiding in the bushes, purposely giving their parents the fright of their lives.

My work often took me away from home, and I readily acknowledge that Diane carried the parenting load far more than I in those years. I often took tearful calls from one of the girls complaining about a setback or mishap or their mom, only to be followed by a similar call from Diane. While everyone knew what I was trying to do for us as a family, I still carry a lot of guilt about having been absent. Yet the girls know that I love them. I say it and show it often and randomly, and it sometimes embarrasses them when I do, but it’s important to them and to me that they have no doubt. That was a hole that my surrogate parents helped to fill in me, and I have tried to ensure that my own children never feel that absence. I’ve also tried to provide the girls with a love that reinforces their own self-worth.

Katherine, for example, once asked me to take her to a 50 Cent concert. I knew she was a big fan of the infamous rapper, whose real name is Curtis Jackson, but didn