Every time I went back to the West Coast, which was fairly regularly, I felt as if I could breathe again. I had not realized how important the ocean was to me, and how suffocating it would feel to live so far from it.A sweet and placid baby, Chelsea fit in easily with her sisters, who doted on her. The girls were so adorable and funny that I began to take it for granted that they would remain little. I had always pictured myself as the mother of small children, and in my own myopia and self-absorption I couldn’t imagine that they would actually grow up and become women. If I had thought more about their development—as well as my own—rather than just reveling at being in the moment with them, I would have been stricter. I would have been diligent about imparting life lessons and establishing regulations and tasks. I would have consciously modeled behavior for them and taught them to cook. They just got me as I was—and that’s what they learned about being a woman. In retrospect, I seem to have insisted on a single hard-and-fast rule: no juice after five p.m., as I was convinced that the sugar in the juice would make it difficult to put them to bed.
