For years, I despised my father nearly as deeply as I needed him. I could not forgive him for neglecting my sister and me after my mother divorced him, and yet that 5-year-old girl I had been at the time of their split still ached for his love and guidance.

Eventually — (that is, on the other side of 30 and with the assistance of therapy and other self-help practices) — my anger and longing cooled to indifference. In this new state, I felt level-headed and mature. “I no longer hate my father,” I told my husband and friends with a tinge of surprise. I had released him from the prison of my disappointments.

When, some years later, he reached out to me through Facebook, I treated him like a stranger — with pleasant and guarded responses. He was like he always has been — jovial and full of shiny words that, even so, fell flat against my screen. Phrases like, “my darling daughter” and “the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.”

If he’s not even interested in explaining his past choices or asking for forgiveness, I thought, I can’t take this man seriously. In one message, I told him as much, and I could hear his Zeus-sized laughter in my mind, the kind of boisterous roars you can pinpoint in a crowd.

“Oh, my daughter,” he shot back, “cheer up.”

His response seemed both light-hearted and reprimanding. I felt old flames of resentment igniting. Later, while trying to return to my neutral state, I recalled a soft side of him my memory does not own. Instead, it comes from a story my mother told me about a year ago. In the delivery room, on the afternoon of my birth, she said, my father had cradled me and cried.

When I try to imagine that moment, a part of me wishes I could go back in time and carve out that piece of him that wanted to be a dad. How I wish I could incubate that parcel of him until it grows muscle and gristle and, eventually, bone, strong enough to emerge from its encasing and step into the role of father. Wholly.

But there is no certainty in parenting. As much as I cherish being my son’s mom, I have not gotten it all right. I love that through the work we do here at L.A. Parent, we get a front-row seat to the many Angelenos who share their parenting joys and challenges, the experts who guide us in our blind spots and the writers who pull the veil back on their own parenting foibles and discoveries.

In this issue, you’ll dive into articles on topics such as what it’s like to parent young kids when you’ve just been diagnosed with cancer, how to use astrology and play as guideposts and finding a sense of whimsy and surprise in our everyday routines. Allow these voices to steady you as you kick off another year of parenting.

I hope your 2024 is filled with the kind of laughter that bridges even the most impossible divides.

Happy New Year!

Cassandra Lane is Editor in Chief of L.A. Parent.