The last time Anna and I went to London together we marked the fact that she had just entered the “double digits” – she was 10 and mostly wanted to hang out at Harrods’ toy department and Yo Sushi. Last week we left our guys at home to celebrate her upcoming high school graduation. What a difference eight years does and does not make.

My girl and I took off for our five-day extravaganza with a vague plan to see some shows, eat at Yo Sushi (again) and shop. And then squeeze in a few museums between more shopping. That’s what I thought we agreed to in principle, but then reality reared its black and white head.

I observed a side of my daughter I intuited, but couldn’t exactly articulate before our trip. Anna, princess over the sloppiest sovereign space in our house, likes order, craves structure. I get claustrophobic at the thought of being tethered to an organized tour. Not Anna. She likes to climb up to the top of that double-decker bus and listen to the guide.

On Day 2 of our London adventure we went on the London Eye – a super slow Ferris wheel, powered by sustainable energy – that eventually provides panoramic views of London. Compared with eight years ago, Anna was not as happy to pose in front of various landmarks in our little bubble compartment – “Go, go there’s a great view of Westminster Abbey,” I said a bit too shrill. “How many times can you photograph Big Ben?” asked Anna, princess of the perfect eye roll.

After we hopped off the London Eye, I thought we’d pop up to Madame Tussauds. After all, Anna loved Posh and Beck’s wax figures on our last visit. But my girl had my number. She knew I was willing to schlep on the tube and suffer through two transfers just to get a picture of me standing next to Colin Firth’s heart-racing likeness. Colin was featured in an advertisement for the iconic museum at a tube station. “Don’t even think about it,” warned Anna, princess of the perfectly raised eyebrow. She told me to step away when I approached the poster. One person’s idea of vandalism is another person’s idea of procuring an innocent souvenir.

No poster, no Madame Tussauds. We negotiated and decided to go to the Tate Modern as long as I got to walk across the Millennium Bridge and flit around Saint Paul’s Cathedral. “Princess Diana was married at Saint Paul’s,” I told Anna breathlessly. That fact did not impress my daughter, who barely remembers Diana. I also insisted we walk across the same bridge that Bridget Jones sauntered along in the first movie. Again, my motives were embarrassingly naked. “You won’t see Colin Firth no matter how many times you walk back and forth across that bridge. Oh and I hate bridges as much as you hate sitting in the middle of a row in the theater.”

Eight years on, and a wisecracking teenager had replaced my little girl. But I found my sweet girl the next day on the Harry Potter tour. The last thing I wanted to do was go to the English countryside to look at ossified movie sets from the various Harry Potter movies. But this was Anna’s trip, so I shelled out way too much money for the two of us to go on the tour. I love Harry Potter as much as the next person. I took Anna to a bookstore at midnight for one of the series’ releases so she could be the first kid on the block to read the doorstopper of a book. The anticipation on her face on that long ago night was delicious.

There was the same look when she happily posed in front of a replica of the Hogwarts gates. I loved watching my daughter having so much fun strolling through the Great Hall and peering into Harry’s closet bedroom under the stairs of 4 Privet Drive. And, yes, we posed for a picture in front of the exterior of what is arguably the most infamous Muggle house in the United Kingdom.

At night back in London, we strolled on the Strand or in Covent Garden. We also made a nightly stop in the hotel’s business center to check Facebook – hers and mine. Subtle parent that I am, I asked her what was new on her page. “Everything’s fine,” she said gently.

The next day Anna and I went to the Queen’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace and saw an exhibit of Leonardo Da Vinci’s anatomy drawings. I was astonished by the way my daughter so carefully went through the exhibit and pointed out the flaws as well as the prescience of Da Vinci’s work. Suddenly, I realized that more and more Da Vinci moments would replace the Harry Potter ones.

Little girl. Big girl. The next time we go to London, Anna will be a woman, and I will finally pose next to Colin.

“Philosophy,” Plato once said, “begins in wonder.” Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg quotes Plato early in her intelligent, luminous memoir Surprised by God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion. Rabbi Ruttenberg’s moving inquiry into faith is consistently inspired by her ongoing sense of wonder and appreciation for Judaism. She grounds her exploration in story—her story and the stories of our ancestors—and ultimately offers readers a blank page to write their own stories.

It is tempting to summarize Ruttenberg’s book as “Girl Meets God.” But such glibness would miss the point. As Ruttenberg explains, faith is a workaday project that is both personal and communal. Ritual operates in tandem with faith “on multiple planes at once: emotional, physical, theological, familial, social, liturgical.”

For Ruttenberg faith and ritual slowly emerge after her mother’s death and an intense phase of post-college partying in San Francisco during the dot-com era. All the while, Ruttenberg is also searching for a meaningful spiritual life, even if it is punctuated by moments of suffering. “I would discover,” she writes, “that pain and fear were a hundred thousand times better than this unconscious sleepwalking through parties and distraction even when it was harder.”

I met Rabbi Ruttenberg a few years ago among a group of seekers and skeptics at a Boston community mikveh to help them prepare spiritually for the High Holidays.  She noted that although the word “spiritual” means many things to people, it can also be too amorphous for others. She described a period of intense grief during her senior year of college when she took midnight walks which made her world momentarily “softer” and  “plugged her into God.”

Daily ritual takes over where reverie leaves off. Ruttenberg remembered, “There was never a moment when I deliberately and consciously decided to say the Mourner’s Kaddish, as an adult child traditionally does for the first eleven months after a parents’ burial.”

During her year of mourning Ruttenberg attended synagogue almost every day to say a prayer of mourning she did not initially understand. Her persistence paid off and she gradually became familiar with daily services.

Na’aseh v’Nishma—we will do and we will understand. It’s the transformative response from the Israelites as Moses reads the Torah for them for the first time at the foot of Mt. Sinai. Ruttenberg’s early religious practice exemplifies Na’aseh v’Nishma. When she consistently does, she is graced with spiritual insights. She lives for those moments and learns how to access them through meditation.

Meditation happens. It happens spontaneously on long walks; it happens during focused episodes seated on a cushion; it happens in a packed synagogue. In her book, Rabbi Ruttenberg recalls a moment in which she becomes so aware of her breath while meditating that her tendinitis painfully flares up. She writes, “For me meditation is about awareness. I don’t push away thoughts. I simply keep on breathing. If I don’t grab on to my thought, they’ll eventually fall away of their own accord.”

Grief often bubbles to the surface. “There are many halls in the King’s palace, and intricate keys to all doors, but the master key is the broken heart,” said the Ba’al Shem Tov—the father of Hasidism.

The group at the mikveh reflected on the Ba’al Shem Tov’s wisdom, but no one was entirely sure what it meant. The woman next to me was quietly crying. Her breath came in fits and starts. “Everyone is broken-hearted in some way,” Rabbi Ruttenberg assured them. “Entering pain in whatever degree we can alleviates true suffering.”

I thought of the Binding of Isaac. On Rosh Hashana we read about his near death experience as a sacrifice to God. One midrash points out that Isaac not only accepted that he would be sacrificed, but on the altar he asks his father to tighten his bindings so escape is impossible. Kierkegaard argues that the story is bearable because in the end Abraham did not believe that God would allow him to sacrifice his son. Although he was seemingly prepared to kill Isaac, Abraham went through the motions with a profound trust that God would do the right thing.

I thought about Kierkegaard’s insight. Is he saying that Abraham had keen intuition?  “Intuition is how God talks to us,” Rabbi Ruttenberg told us. “Intuition is the way we navigate into a space that becomes deeper, richer, fuller and bigger.”

She sensed the group’s skepticism about achieving kavanah—intentionality—in a crowded synagogue. How can intuition complement set prayer? How can one create a meaningful space in a crowded row of seats? And how can one experience spiritual solitude in a makeshift sanctuary accommodating an overflow crowd? Personally, I was not convinced any of these things can be achieved. But like Abraham, maybe God wants me to be there, needs me to be there to participate in the conversation.

Rabbi Ruttenberg expounded on the salutary effects of meditation. “For me meditation is the warm up. It gets me to a place where I can pray.” Did that mean that praying is like exercising? “Not exactly. Set prayer in the machzor—the prayer book used on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur—pushes us to a place we don’t automatically go to. The service can be a way to start our journey.”

Language is both the most and least effective tool we have for reaching God. Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav often went into the woods alone to address God out loud. On the advice of my rabbi, I’ve tried to talk to God a couple of times when my house empties out in the morning. Even though I’m alone I’m self-conscious, as if someone is watching me talk to an imaginary person.

Only grief snaps me out of my uncomfortable awareness of self. A few months ago I was driving home from an evening meeting. My best friend had recently died. Suddenly grief overtook me. I pulled the car over. The soft clicking of my flashers kept time to my wailing. Sometimes I miss my friend so much that I am sure I will never be able to climb out of the void her absence has created in my life.

“There is nothing more whole than a broken heart,” says Rabbi Nachman. I like that saying for its intense grouping of joy and sadness, but I never quite understood it until that night in the car. Broken heartedness is the time when we are most open to God in our fragility and vulnerability. “I hate you God,” I screamed. At that moment only those words could serve as my prayer to God.

The Catholic monk Thomas Merton acknowledges the discomfort, even the embarrassment, of going public while praying. Publicly prayer often feels superficial to me. I bow and repeat on cue. Perhaps that is the reason I have not been able to pray for a couple of years. Rabbi Ruttenberg explains that my inability to pray is a valid form of worship. “Bring whatever you’ve got. It opens up the connection. Telling God you can’t pray, you want to pray or even that you are angry with God begins the conversation.”

Man plans and God laughs. So goes the Yiddish saying. After reading Danya Ruttenberg’s memoir, I am convinced that is a cynic’s perception of God. Only a cynic cannot see the wonder of God all around her. “The Gates of Prayer may be closed after Yom Kippur,” Rabbi Ruttenberg pointed out to us, “but the Gates of Weeping are always open.”

And I have a hunch that the Gates of Weeping lead to the backdoor of God’s palace.

My colleague KJ Dell’Antonia, editor of The New York Times parenting blog Motherlode, pointed out in a recent post that there are 940 Saturdays between the time your child is born and the time she turns 18. KJ’s calculation comes from Dr. Harley Rotbart, a parent, a pediatrician and author of a wise book called No Regrets Parenting.

The days of early parenthood are long and chaotic and exhausting. Sometimes those days lead into nights that are puzzling or downright scary. I still remember the times when Anna or Adam’s cries broke through the scrim of night or light sleep. Ken and I felt helpless as we asked each other the same question over and over: What do you think is wrong with her?

“I don’t know,” the other would say. “What do you think is wrong with her?”

There’s an old chestnut that says the very definition of insanity is repeatedly asking the same question, but expecting a different answer. The truth is there was no answer. We never found out why our babies cried. We never understood why Adam’s colic descended like the darkest cloud and then lifted just as suddenly five months – yes, five months – later.

As the mother of an almost 18- year-old who has an exact date for when she starts her first year of college, I’ve put aside Dr. Rotbart’s calculations. I simply pretend that time is still on my side.

But then the finite amount of time I have with my children took center stage last week when I heard my rabbi, Michelle Robinson, sermonize about the Omer and parenting. The Omer literally means to count and that’s what’s done during the 49-day period between Passover and Shavuot. The Omer originally staked out the time during which wheat was harvested and counted in preparation for a sacrifice at the Temple. Save for the Western Wall, the Temple is long gone. But Talmudic Judaism still observes the Omer by ticking off the days between the holidays.

Counting the Omer was not the only thing on Rabbi Robinson’s mind when she delivered her sermon. Like KJ, she too had just read “No Regrets Parenting.” As the mother of three children, she was deeply impressed with Dr. Rotbart’s approach to mindful parenting and his wisdom that although the days are long with young children, the years are short.

Rabbi Robinson’s sermon then pointed me to my friend Aliza Kline’s recent blog post about Omer. Aliza is the founding executive director of Mayyim Hayyim and has been instrumental in bringing the ancient ritual of immersing in the mikveh into the 21st century. She and her family have been on an “extraordinary” sabbatical in Israel this past year, which is coming to an end next month. But instead of counting down the days until she leaves Israel, Aliza is counting up the days just as the Israelites counted up to the day they received the Torah. Aliza astutely writes:

It’s an interesting idea to count up. Rather than thinking about all that we have to do before a deadline we can focus on all that we get to do once we’ve reached that momentous day. Counting also provides that helpful reminder to be mindful of each day, to be aware of time passing. To be “present” regardless of whether the day or hour or minute brings joy or sorrow.

So between now and mid- July, when Anna turns 18, and then four weeks later when she sets foot for the first time on a college campus as a matriculated student, I need to count up. I hope that counting up will help me to distinguish that the milestones of Anna’s life are not the tombstones of my parenthood. I will try not to think of what I’m losing, but what I am gaining by sending my girl off to school.

First and foremost, Ken and I are giving our daughter one of life’s most vital resources – an education. As my mother used to say, no one can take your education away from you. My mother was all about independence for her daughters. She went back to school for a teaching degree when I was 5 and never looked back. A few years later, after she landed her first full-time job, she opened her own checking account and contributed significantly to her three children’s college tuitions.

Maybe this next phase of our family life will be as exciting for me as it will certainly be for Anna. After all, I won’t have to drive the 15-mile round trip to her school when she forgets her soccer cleats. I won’t have to look at the messiest room in town every day. But I know I’ll get weepy when I see the return of that sloppy wasteland because it means Anna’s in residence.

I envy KJ, Michelle and Aliza for the hundreds of Saturdays still ahead of them with their kids. As for me, I have 11 Saturdays until Anna turns 18 and 15 Saturdays until she leaves for college.

But who’s counting?

 The subtitle of Melissa Faye Greene’s memoir, out in paperback this week, breezily summarizes the plot. But the narrative slows down into a story that is filled with the joy, the pathos, and the frenzy that comes with a big family bound together by loving-kindness.

Greene has nine children—four of whom are biological and five of whom are adopted. With the exception of the first child that Greene and her husband, Donny Samuel adopted, four out of their five adopted children were born in Ethiopia. But it’s Jesse’s adoption from Bulgaria that builds the scaffolding of Greene’s enchanting memoir No Biking in the House Without a Helmet.

My husband Ken and I talked about adopting several years ago after close friends adopted two sons from Ethiopia. I watched the tapes sent to our friends from the orphanage in Addis Ababa. Each time a new child was introduced on film, I was terrified and excited all over again. Who would my friends choose? At the time these children were the ages of my young kids—beautiful, innocent, sweet—and they broke my heart over and over again.

I can’t give you a good reason why we didn’t adopt. I can give you a million reasons why we should have. We had a lot of love to give and compared to most of the world, an abundance of resources to bestow on a child.  And I felt I was getting better at this parenting thing. As my kids grew older, I could see the bigger picture. I knew that I wasn’t stuck with diapered, runny-nosed, colicky babies forever.

I thought about adoption anew when I interviewed Greene five years ago about her fourth book, the award-winning There Is No Me Without You—a compassionate, vivid account of an orphanage in Addis Ababa and the remarkable foster mother who founded, grew and ruled the place.

In No Biking, Greene begins the book with the hard-won wisdom that expanding her family was not solely about filling an empty nest. Adoption for the Greene-Samuel family was about loving a child, reconfiguring the family to integrate that child into the family, and reveling in a new group dynamic.

Greene writes about four-year old Jesse’s early rages—he was a madman on the flights from Sofia to London to Atlanta. At home he horded food. And if anyone came near his food he threw an earth-quaking tantrum. His language was as mangled as his behavior. Jesse suffered the physical and mental deprivation common in children languishing in run-down Eastern European and Russian orphanages. Greene waited for Jesse to come around, and more poignantly, waited to have an affirmative answer to the question that haunts many adoptive parents: Do I love him yet?

Jesse blossomed into a charming if mischievous little boy.  And within his new family, he took the lead in welcoming his sister Helen, who was the first to be adopted from Ethiopia. Greene and her husband are committed Jews who are aware that Jewish identities were never one-size-fits-all for their children. Rather the potential and the desire to be Jews were nurtured in each of them. In the case of Jesse and Helen, early on brother and sister bonded when Jesse served as Helen’s impromptu mikveh guide.

Greene writes that with the exception of his circumcision under anesthesia, Jesse had loved converting to Judaism. “Now in the backseat of the car, he excitedly prepared Helen for her visit to the mikveh. ‘The blue-green water will cover all your body and make you Jewish,’ he enthused.”

Soon after Solomon and then biological brothers Daniel and Yosef were also adopted from Ethiopia. The question of conversion was trickier for Daniel and Yosef who were eight and eleven and had been raised as Ethiopian Orthodox Christians. But the boys eventually came into their own as Jews and chose to be bar mitzvahed.

My urge to adopt was recently reawakened as I wandered around the mall and came upon a gallery of photographs of kids waiting to be adopted. The pictures were captioned with just a first name and a biographical line like: “I draw exceptionally well. I want to be a superhero.” One girl with the lovely, hopeful, yet somehow fragile name of Destiny wanted to be a teacher.

That day in the mall I wanted to take every one of those kids home with me. But as Greene so wisely observes, adoption is not a good response to a humanitarian crisis. “Adoption is the appropriate response to only one situation: the need of a child for a new family, combined with a family’s desire for a new child.”

As difficult as it is to contemplate, I think I have my answer to why we never adopted a child. But I’m in awe of families like my friends’ and Melissa Fay Greene’s who truly forge bonds, never falling into the trap of serving as a way station or a group home or becoming one of those families who “collect” orphans.

And I pray that Destiny and her cohort soon meet the loving parents they deserve to have.