The highlight of 2023 for me was my mother’s death, which gave me a chance to celebrate her long, extraordinary life.
I owe my career as an attorney in no small part to Mom. 
Her life’s anthem was that rules were made to be broken and she imparted her “never take no for an answer” philosophy to me. My mother’s creative outlook helped me to establish my own adoption law firm after adopting my two sons and then to pivot to surrogacy and donation when assisted reproduction became a groundbreaking alternative for creating families.
Although Mom grew up in a stultified era for women, married at 19 and had my twin sister and me at age 22, she retained an essential openness and later became a feminist and a believer in gay marriage. She reveled as my practice grew to include LGBTQ parentage.
One of her last independent trips was to travel from Florida by herself to meet me in Washington, DC in 2015 when I received an Angel in Adoption award from the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute. Her love, pride, and fierce independence helped deepen the honor.
My mother’s philosophy of imaginative determination is an inspiration to me and reverberates for the beautiful families I have had the privilege to help create in 2023.