A Field Guide To Now: What this book is about

It's a crazy, amazing, surreal thing: to hold your first book in your hands, the book you've spent months writing, and say simply, this is a book about ______________. In this case that fill-in-the blank can be filled with so many things: wonder, heartache, sweetness, jammy little-boy hands, longing, painting, making messes, spilling open, laughter, learning to fly, navigating uncertainty, nurturing a creative practice, growing big within small moments, finding solace, baking bread, living intentionally, and praising the simple utter glory of each singular day.

But simply, truly, I wrote this book you.

Yes you.   It's for...   Anyone who is hungry to be an apprentice to their own abundant life.   Creative, adventurous souls who know the simultaneous tug of wanderlust, and the desire to put down roots and claim a place as home.   Anyone with the desire to discover or reclaim your creative pulse — amidst the overwhelm and distractions and responsibilities in their daily life.   Mamas (and dads) who want to re-locate themselves beyond the boundaries of perpetual giving and neediness and messes and wonderment that raising young children demand.   Anyone with a dream of a creative project or bold undertaking (this book is proof: it's possible.)

* * *

And as we head into the holiday season that is inevitably filled with busyness and rushing about, family and friends, days filled to the brim with making and doing, I hope this book can be a gift for you: of rest and wonder, and also a guide book of sorts, for being in the small ordinary moments, documenting them, and discovering yourself through them anew.

Studio Update: A Field Guide To Now Blog Tour

One of the best things about having made a book to share with the world, is that it has connected, or reconnected me some incredibly wonderful kindred creatives. It's made me feel lucky and grateful beyond words to have their support, grace, and insight. I hope you'll enjoy exploring their sites and worlds as much as I do:

A few posts you might have missed last week:

The Habit of Being

Tara Bradford

The Long Meander

And many coming up guest posts, reviews + giveaways*:

Renee Tougas at Fun In My Back Yard :: November 7th

Amy Bowers at Mama Scout :: November 7th

Michelle at A Way Of Being :: November 8th

Anna + Ian at Life On The Green Line :: November 12th

Meghan Davidson at Life Refocused :: November 13th Jessica Brogan at In Search Of Dessert :: November 14th

Veronica Armstrong :: November 15th

Art & Soul Radio with Lesley Reily :: December 4th   *Many others to come as well!

Also, this is a must read:
"How To Support The Work Of Someone You Respect" by Dan Blank

How it is:

The Decision

There is a moment before a shape hardens, a color sets. Before the fixative heat of kiln. The letter might still be taken from the mailbox. The hand held back by the elbow, the word kept between the larynx pulse and the amplifying drum-skin of the room's air. The thorax of an ant is not as narrow. The green coat on old copper weighs more. Yet something slips through it-- looks around, sets out in the new direction, for other lands. Not into exile, not into hope. Simply changed. As a sandy track-rut changes when called a Silk Road: it cannot be after turned back from.

-- Jane Hirshfield

A love letter to you:

Dear you (yes, you). It’s been a long time coming, this change.

I want to start by telling you how much I adore you. How much your comments and support and emails and questions have changed my life for the better in inexplicable, remarkable, profound ways.

I want to tell you how much I love that some of you have stayed with me since the very beginning, when the word blog wasn’t one people said out loud; and that I appreciate how others of you have found me just recently and have said the kindest most thoughtful things my words here, on twitter, and here in the comments.

It means so much to have your eyes reading; to know that my words and images are, if only in the smallest of ways, igniting in you a desire to embrace your life right now, to the very best of your capacity.

That is what I love to do, more than anything else: to dwell in the mess and sweetness of life as it is, to share it a way that gives of sparks that you can light your own tinder of curiosity with: driving straight to center of your own courage, and claiming whatever story it is that you need to be telling.

And this is what I hope to do more of in the days and the weeks ahead, at a new url.

Mytopography has held for a long time. It has described, accurate, the way my showing up in this space has been my narration of the shape of daily life. Still, as I’ve gradually found my tempo and voice and focus, I’ve found the confines of that title too small. I’m ready to claim my own name, and with it, open the door to some bigger and bolder and more vibrant insights, offerings, narratives and possibilities.

All this to say, sometime this week I’ll be moving my blog over to christinarosalie.com. That way, I’ll be able to keep all the archives here, the accumulated narrative of voice, and magic, and timing. That way I’ll be able to keep the nearly 14 thousand comments you’ve shared with me here. That way there will be a connective thread from the beginning, to what is beginning to emerge.

In the new space I’ll still tell you stories about Bean and Sprout and T and long dirt roads, and the way the seasons arrive, unpacking their many colored quilts of promise: the new tendrils and fragile foliage of spring; the ardent green of summer when the orioles turn the air above the apple trees to streaks of vermillion and gold; and the soon-coming fall when the light slants and tart apples sweeten, and my heart aligns inward with the gravitational tug of the Earth as the night sky spreads with the ink of darkness sooner, and again the longest season starts. Winter, with nights of stars and frost and days of falling snow and introspection.

But I’ll also be sharing more about taking action and creative process. And about mindfulness and motivation, and the alignment of those. I'm also looking forward to making some changes to the overall look and functionality of the site so I can respond to your comments better, so that together we can share thoughts and words and ideas that speak to the bigness of becoming.

Some things to look forward to in the new space:

Another pay-what-you-can studio tag sale! A whole bunch of interviews with some of the artists and writers that inspire me. Book launch festivities! And the launch of an special, bold, beautiful e-course I’ve been working on for a while now.

Stay tuned.

I’m so excited for this shift. I hope you are too!

I'd love to know: what would you like me to write or share more about.

xoxo, Christina

Photos by Thea Coughlin

Glimpses from around here lately:

I wanted to share a few glimpses from around here lately. Life is finally starting to have the tempo of summer: friends for breakfast on the weekends; running; time with the boys. I relish the weekends more than ever now. They are my time to defragment, to settle, to find the pulse of now among the blooming peonies, or sitting on the couch with Bean as he sounds out words, or watching the goldfinches and rose breasted grossbeaks at the feeder.

This week I'll be in the NYC for a few days at Blog World (for work) and the Book Expo (I finally get to meet my wonderful editor, Mary Norris in person!) That should be an adventure. I'll be tweeting quite a bit, if you're into such things and would like to follow along. And I'm sure I'll be posting photos left and right to Instagram (@christinarosalie). I'm always so inspired by the pace and colors and rhythms of the city after spending time meandering down dirt roads that are lush with green meadows on either side, and the frothy constellations of blackberry bramble blossoms, sweet now, and blooming more than I remember from any other year.

What are you up to this week?

Showing up for summer (#4)

The fourth thing I want to show up for this summer is: Friendship. Sharing food and drinking wine by the open fire, after dark, all of us sitting around in Adirondack chairs; or gathering in town at Bluebird or Farmhouse, or Maglianero for coffee. Time together, where ideas collide makes me happier than almost anything. (#1 , #2 , and #3).

// What do you want to show up for today?

Showing up for Summer (#2)

The second thing I want to show up for this summer is: Eating dinner outdoors with my family outside every night if the weather holds. We carry a white metal tray stacked with plates and aged balsamic, salt + pepper, cloth napkins, flatware. Then we light citronella candles, say a grace of gratitude. Eat, and worry not at all of things fall to the grass. (#1 here.)

// How about you?

This, right now:

After the boys are asleep, I go back outdoors into the soft night with my notebook, and sit by the fire pit to watch the evening gather.

I'm here. Just here, at the edge of the sloping field where the grass is growing tall. Here, at the edge of the woods at the top of the valley. Here, where the sounds of a hundred different bird calls fill the gloamy twilight: finches, robins, grosbeaks, vireos, warblers, thrushes.

And then I hear a pair of geese, circling and calling as they do, and soon others find them, and they land, one after the next with a heavy-bodied splash in pond at the edge of the field below us. Their alto honking punctuates the dwindling sentence of day, and theirs is a message that I understand: to be right here. To let the air be everything, the softness be everything. The final calling of the robin and the first flight of the bat:everything.

Now there are crows with sooty backs and beaks and breasts, perching on the quince tree, and in the distance, the sound of traffic. Nearer, through the open windows of the house, the dryer clatters, tossing a load of delicates round and round, and above me the sky has been rinsed of blue.

It turns to lavender, then paler still, until it is the exact color of the blossoms on the lilac tree where the wind chimes hang and the birds go to rest after gathering seed from the feeder.

The air is sweet with woodsmoke and it smells like summer.

It smells like childhood, like family, and all the things I ever want to remember about traveling in a camper with my parents and sister: the Grand Canyon, Half Moon Bay, Point Reyes, Death Valley, Bodega, Four Corners, Pikes Peak, The Great Divide. We'd light campfires in the evenings, and do the very thing my boys did after roasting marshmallows tonight: burn the ends of long sticks in the licking flames, and then hold them aloft, smoke spiraling upwards into the gathering night.

The songbirds slowly settle among twigs and newly furling leaves in the woods, and the sky blushes with a final rose. Above me there are contrails, golden still, then fading to white, marking the path of silver-bellied planes, carrying people wherever it is they want to go above me.

And while they cross time zones and topographies, I am here.The peepers in the vernal pools beginning there tremolo chorus as night draws close, and this is all of my life, again and again.

We are no more and no less than the sum of the moments that make up our present tense. And this now, and the now after this will be marked by a gathering of clouds, and the last surprising flight of a dozen red-winged blackbirds overhead.

//

I've started writing again.

Mostly in my Molskine, with scrawling haphazard script. But I'm finding the moments, and feeding them slowly.

To show up, to show up, to show up.

//

How do you show up?

From Instagram, with love.

Hi. It's been a busy handful of days. There has been catching tadpoles, and picking apple blossoms; meeting my twin nephews and watching my boys play with their cousins; birthday cake and deadlines; air turbulence and taxi rides; an end of the week business trip to NYC; then riding the train up to CT to the wedding of one of my oldest friends.

There's more to that last story for another day. So much more.

But for tonight there are a handful of photos from what I've been up to since graduating. (Thank you for all your awesome comments and appreciation for the big work of my thesis. I so adore you all.)

On Finishing, Persistance, & the reason for everything

I had no idea what my capacity for self discipline was when I began. No idea that two years and a book later, I'd sink to the grass on the Friday after turning in my thesis and cry tears of gratitude that it was all over. But that is what I did.

I lay with my arms akimbo; the grass pressing up into my palms and the clouds moving above me, a symphony of cirrus, and hungrily felt the weight of my body being tugged by gravity close to the barely wakening surface of the earth. How I've been longing for that: to feel my body next to the earth. To feel like I am of it, not just tangential to it. To feel my pulse thrumming steady and slow, keeping time with the pulse of the nearly blooming crab-apples and service berry.

In the weeks when I was finishing, the world was turning to spring: first the coltsfoot like a hundred thousand scattered suns along the muddy edges of the road; then the wood trillium, green and pale with purple freckles, poking up among the pine needles in the shade at the back of the yard along the stone wall. I knew these things because they happen every year, familiar and certain. But this year, I only saw the coltsfoot from the car windows and the trillium in passing. This year, the robins came one day while I was researching. It was the weekend. I remember. The boys were outside playing in the sandbox, and their voices would come lilting up to me through the cracked-open window, the smell of spring coming wild and cold through the screen. I remember glancing up to notice the way the sun was slipping westward, and then heard it. Warbling, golden, liquid: the setting sun in song.

I grew used to watching the day pass from the windows.

And really, it was one of the hardest things to full-out sprint for so long. To try and to keep trying, even when I was exhausted. To work, to go to class, to come home and play with my kids, and have dinner, and do all the bedtime choreography and then sit down to begin several hours of work. To miss the entire blooming of a day: to not have felt rain falling on my cheeks, or hail on my tongue. To have spent week after week circling myself, in front of the computer, making something happen.

And still, though it’s not a pace I could have kept forever, the thing that I feel now, already, after a few days with a little more rest--is that we give up on ourselves too easily too often.

We get the message all around us that things should be easy, and when they aren’t—especially for any prolonged length of time, we tend to panic—it’s hard not too.

But there is something to persisting, to showing up, and showing up, and finishing; to discovering that you are capable of more. It’s the only way, really, to find that out: to do the hard stuff, the impossible stuff, the stuff that makes you want to weep and yell and sing hallelujah all at once.

And now look! The world is full of wind. The treetops are fat with new sweet leaves. The goldfinches have arrived and the sky is full of cumulus and turbulence and new tomorrow will dawn new and bright—and this, this is the reason, again and again for everything.

This is possibly the hardest thing I have ever done.

Finishing this work. A year without weekends. I am so tired. So. Very. Tired.

(And I'm not finished yet.)

A parenthesis in time:

All week I've been wanting to tell you About how I slipped away last Friday night with T and my beautiful friend Hilary. We went North on a road marked with farm houses and fields, the land as flat as a tucked sheet. We saw snow geese, hundreds of them, and remarked about the solitary trees that stand like sentinels in the middle of wide fields; their branches some small haven for wild birds and wild winds.

We crossed the river at the blue hour Across the wide metal bridge into a city Where the syllables are soft, and the consonants luxurious.

And found our way to our hotel, among cobble-stoned streets Where the cathedral towers were making love to the fat crescent moon.

We had dinner at Holder: mussels with cream and white wine, duck confit with arugula and garlic, white wine and red, chocolate ganache, and espresso.

And then found our way to the Corona theater, which is truly lovely and just the right size place to hear Gotye play, up close and intimate his music still new and experimental and sweet in the way that it wasn't utterly rehearsed. Kimbra played first. So much soul in that small slender body in a crumpled champaign dress; and then the drums of Gotye, making our hearts thrum.

It was good, so good to get away. To slip out of my mind for a night; to be with two people who I adore; the easiest of combinations.

The next morning we had breakfast at Olive & Gormando which quite possibly has the most lovely pastries in Montreal... And then we wandered around taking photographs.

I can't help myself: I must share them all. They make me happy. Even now, as I'm in the thick of one of the hardest weeks; with too little time. Far too little, to finish all the work that I must for my thesis to be done in two short weeks.

Here's to parenthesis! To moments stolen. And to trying to let the be enough.

xo!

Kinfolk Vol. 3

Good morning! After a tender, quiet weekend full of work and small moments: toast and bacon and good cappuccinos, cleaning out my closets and building blanket forts with Sprout on the bed, and many hours spent in my studio writing (my thesis), it is a new week has begun. And I'm excited to share that a little piece of mine called "Morning Rituals" is in Kinfolk Volume 3.

It's the kind of magazine you want to hold in your hands: the texture of the pages, the heft of it, the dreamy grain of the photos, and words that inspire you to be right here.

Get yours. You'll be happy you did. Perfect for reading over breakfast with toast & bacon and small boys.

On loving someone for a while:

There is a slow magic to knowing someone for a while; to loving them for longer than a decade; to waking up beside them morning after morning. It isn't an effortless thing, or something you just stumble into. Rather, it's a thing of shared dreaming: Of taking each other's hands, of walking side by side, of saying yes, and imaging what our future holds together.

I don't take a single day for granted. Each day I wake up committed and eager to try again, to grow, to live this life side by side, and so does he. I think this makes us among the lucky ones.

Yes.

The truth is, after a dozen years, he's still my favorite.

I love him more than I ever did when we first were dating, that's for certain. He has better biceps now; more smile lines; less hair; more scars; deeper laughter; wider love.

Have I ever told you about how we met? He asked me to go downhill mountain biking the day after we'd met, and I said yes, even though I'd never done such a ridiculous thing before. We road the chair lift up the mountain together, and somehow while taking pictures with a disposable camera we dropped it, and even though we rode down and looked for it, we never found the camera that had the first evidence of us together on it, his arm around my shoulder.

He let me ride his bike because mine was not really cut out for hurtling down such steep terrain, but somehow he broke my front wheel in the process, which was a great guarantee, really, that we'd have to see each other again.

And when we did, I remember thinking: How could anyone be this good, this solid, this open hearted? And then he kissed me.

We were in college still.

Now we're at a stoplight driving into town with the boys in the back seat and the dog in the trunk and we both stare in wonderment at the group tour of the UVM campus that's crossing the road in front of us. The kids are so young; so fresh faced and slouchy and hesitant in their posture. Their parents stand upright, arms folded, or hands clutching catalogs and brochures or handbags; and they look anxious and skeptical and worried and old.

How is it possible we'll be them in ten years? Instead of the younger ones, looking careless, their arms and legs like question marks, their clothes too baggy or too tight. How is it possible that Bean will be one of those boys, his sandy hair all shaggy, stubble on his cheeks?

We shake our heads. He reaches out and rests his warm palm against my thigh. Then the light turns green.

Remembering my father:

I have to use the calculator to remember: he would have been 78 today, which means the inconceivable. He died ten years ago.

None of this makes any sense as I rock back and forth in the mostly dark with Sprout on my chest. Bean, up in his bunk bed is humming along with me as I pick up a tune and begin to sing and then I realize: I'm singing the song I sang to him over and over as he lay dying. I'd sit there for hours beside his bed, watching the shadows cast by the dancing leaves of the cherry tree on the pale yellow wall.

The song is an old Gaelic blessing. I learned it in school as a child, at the end of my fourth grade year before all of us were released for the summer to climb trees and run wild. By then I lived in a tract home in the Northridge hills. There was an olive tree that spread over the front driveway, and the driveway would get stained by the dark purple fruit that would also stain our feet when we ran on it barefoot. In the backyard we had a redwood hottub that my parents could never afford to heat, but in the summer we filled it anyway and lolled about ducking to the bottom and popping back up, the water running in rivulets off our cheeks and eyelashes.

What I remember about my father from that time was his office that was separated from the house by a workshop. It had sliding glass doors that opened on to the back patio, and you could reach it by either going through the workshop, picking your way through pipe clamps and table saws, or from that sliding door. I remember watching him at work through that door, his back to me as I'd swing on the swing he'd hung from the patio veranda. It was something I did a lot, growing up: Watch his back as he worked on his computer.

My boys will likely have a similar memory of me.

"Shush, Mommy's working."

I try to sit at the dining room table and let their busy world spin around me, but like my father, I crave the silence of uninterruption; the solitude of that comes with focus.

Now I'm rocking in the tender dark of my son's bedroom. Sprout's limbs are already lanky in my lap. He's three; the years are galloping.

After I tuck him in and rub noses with both boys and kiss their cheeks, I search for a box at the back of a closet: With photo albums in it from a decade before I was born. I sift through the pictures of my father then; wondering what he must have been like in that alternate lifetime before I was even an inkling in it.

This is just it, this life: An inkling, a hundred inklings, and then blink.

A Spirit Session With Thea Coughlin: the gift of being seen

I've been meaning to tell you since the leaves were falling and the grass was still waving waist high in the fields about Thea Coughlin, and the magic that happened when she took my picture.

To start at the beginning--I needed an author photo.

I thought a long time about how I wanted those photos to be. And I was nervous about hiring a photographer.

In the past whenever I’ve had a photographer take my picture, I’ve always felt like that set of circumstances manages to bring out my most introverted awkward self . I start acting dorky. Inevitably I slouch, or make wry, ridiculous expressions.

Behind the lens I feel confident and easy; and over the years I’ve taken many self portraits that are straight from the heart and true to who I am in the moment. But in front of someone else’s lens I feel gangly and uncertain. With the exception of a handful of the off-handed candid shots by those closest to my heart, whenever someone takes my picture I end up smiling a little rigidly; or looking far too serious, and the outcome when I look at it on the screen or printed always feels a little foreign.

Also, I had no idea what to wear.

So I emailed Thea a shy, hopeful request: Would she maybe take a few photos of me that I could use for my book, and for other future workshops and sundry places where I might need a photo that reveals a little glimmer of my soul?

I'd seen the portraits Thea had taken at Squam of Elizabeth, and, having spent time with Elizabeth I understood just exactly the extent of the magic she'd achieved. Thea had captured something essential and ephemeral about Elizabeth that comes through in person but often gets lost in translation of film or pixels.

I hoped for that.

Still, when she showed up on an overcast fall morning, I was nervous. For about eleven seconds.

Because then she hugged me, and her beauty and light simply filled the space where any hesitation would have lived; and we sat my kitchen island and drank tea and got to know one another in the most easy, lovely way.

And then I brought her up to my bedroom and she poked through my dresser of barely folded clothes and my overstuffed closet with things falling of hangers, and she asked me to find my favorite pieces: Stuff that I love to wear; stuff that feels like me.

And because she was so perceptive and intuitive and grounded, something that I’d been dreading became fun. Instead of struggling with finding something to wear, I found many. She convinced me to try combinations I never would have, paring my love fore ruffles and beauty with my tomboy self that lives in ripped jeans and sorrels. Instead of feeling nervous, I started feeling giddy and beautiful.

And then we wandered up into my woods and fields where I always take walks and feel deeply at home, and she shot picture after picture until I began to feel the way I do inside: brave and beautiful, feminine and strong, confident and a complete goofball.

And that’s just exactly what she captured.

I want to tell you this because doing a Spirit Session with Thea was one of the biggest gifts I’ve ever given myself. It isn’t just about the photos she takes—-its about the way she takes them. The way that she is attune to the energy dancing between the her subject and the lens; the way she makes you feel in the photo just exactly the way you feel in your soul.

If you ever find yourself needing a photo like this. One that makes your heart sing because it feels authentic, and gorgeous and true to you and the creative work that you do, seek Thea out. She's pure magic.

{All photos by Thea Coughlin}

On a walk after sunset

It's cold out tonight.The kind of cold that makes me fold my arms around myself, feeling my pulse in my glove clad finger tips, as my breath floats up in the air around my head like a halo or a thought caption.

My footsteps make loud sounds across the frozen ground as I follow the dog, clipped on a length of rope I've wrapped around my palm. She dashes off ahead following the wild scent of deer or squirrel or rabbit across the pale snow. I follow after. Lurching, stopping, feeling the way my heartbeat makes thunder in my ears.

It's cold the way it hasn't been all winter and my unaccustomed cheeks burn bright, while overhead the almost full moon, that bowl of milk, spills its light all over.

There are moon shadows at my feet, squat and dark, following now before, now after as I turn towards home.

The weather has been a yo-yo, indecisive, shaky in its course. One day the road's all mud; the next the puddles hard again while in the woods, the trees know their certain secrets.

On the mild nights, owls fill the woods at dusk; on the quiet days, silence. It is the same with my heart: lifting off and landing a thousand times right here. Startled, steady, mild, wild.

Wekend Notes: The violet hour

The light a few days ago was just so lovely. It was the violet hour; just at dusk when the shadows are long and the hills purple. You can feel the way the earth is tilting now, closer toward the sun. The days are lengthening, even as snow falls from pale skies. Most days the roads are mud, not frost. And when we take walks we can see the slender maple buds are growing fat. It's time for cutting forsythia and carrying it indoors by the armload, to plunge into warm water and then arrange in jars on sunny window sills, to find in a few days time the promise of the season to come, bursting yellow and delicate from every stalk.

Plans for the weekend: Riding the lifts and maybe making pumpernickel bread. Also thesis reading, and making a mobile for my dearest friend's new baby boy. Did you see I updated my current crushes & inspiration? I'd love to hear... What are your plans for the weekend? And also: what music are you listening to lately?

On writing: The song of my music box heart

The snow is wet, but it's falling. The first snow, really, of this entire season. Flakes like goose down drifting from the torn featherbed of the quiet nigh time sky, yet I've already seen the robins with their fat vermillion breasts, and even though it's a leap year, February is almost spent.

I have until April. Until the twentieth, to be exact, to pull off something bright, provocative and well-researched for my thesis, and I have dozens of articles in a printed stack beside me; sheaves of evidence; proof of where my focus should be in every spare minute; in every fragment of time left at the end of the day.

And yet the only thing I want to do at the end of the day is write.

Like this.

I can feel myself, in the weeks when writing is scarce, become like a Bread and Puppet specter; a disjointed creature with long limbs and dark circles under her eyes.

Then, everything in me resists the pre-determined course I've vowed to take at 8pm: research, interviews, and organizing paragraphs to defend a logical conclusion. I become like a vintage music box too tightly wound: impatient, stuck, off key. It is the practice of writing; the meter of showing up; the tempo of reflection here, at the page, after twilight has been tucked into the soft dark pocket of the night, that unwinds the thin filament of my soul, and aligns the brass pins of my music box heart so that it can play again its winding calliope of song.

Being brothers

This is what being brothers looks like.

A jar of apple butter. A jar of peanut butter. Two spoons. A completely unsanctioned snack that was Bean's solution to the ravenous feeling they both have at about 4pm.

I decided to instead of saying no, to just hang out and watch them from behind the lens. I like doing this. Sitting back, seeing without interrupting or intervening. Just letting them be their silly selves. I love their unintentionally matched shirts; their nose rubs; their eyelashes; the way their body language is synchronized.

Best decision ever: to have both of them. Brothers rock. They have this bond that makes me feel like they're gonna be okay no matter what. I wonder if they'll feel that way about each other when they grow up? (Is that something that a parent can actually influence at all?)

Tell me about your family. Do you have siblings? Are you close with them? How did that relationship evolve?