One day, toward the end of my mom's recent trip, she came into the kitchen chuckling after a typical display of feeling from our son.

“I can’t get over it. You were just like him,” she said.

Before last summer, I would have scoffed at the comparison. I remember myself as a kid who knew from an early age that there was a right way to be and a wrong way to be. And I was going to be right. Which made me good.