The other day, I saw this bumper sticker. Raise Good Humans. Crisp white font on a plain black background. Its simplicity stunned me, shuttled me back in time.

When she called in tears that autumn day in 2017, my daughter 3,000 miles away, a freshman at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, I was concerned, of course, but also confused. What did she mean she was falling apart, needed to come home for the weekend?

My husband and I had been there three weeks earlier for parents’ weekend and her glow! her joy! She had friends and fun, intellectual stimulation and academic challenge. Her second week there, her advisor selected her to be one of five students having dinner at the college president’s house. Five freshmen, the president, and his wife. After dinner, when the wife asked the students if they had any criticisms of the school, my daughter was the only one to respond. “Not a single bathroom on campus has tampons or pads. They should be free and accessible.”

I mean. Badass. Thriving. Promising. So what had changed?

Depression and anxiety have a funny way of working, an insidious way of doing business, of derailing plans, deflecting dreams, dismantling hope. And even when you think you have conquered them, figured them out, they will morph again and again until you accept — surrender — that living with mental illness will never be a straight line.

Several months later, my daughter returned home for good. She wrote a stunning essay about her experience leaving school, about depression, anxiety, and refusing to see herself as a failure. But it took a few years before she regained solid footing, before my shining daughter returned to the light.

I filled those years with so many mistakes — driven by fear and ego. I mean, the mommy and me’s and Gymborees, summer camps and sing-alongs, private schools, parenting books, tutors, tests, softball, sleepovers, love, and love and more love, they weren’t supposed to end up here, with me, terrified, standing in her bedroom doorway yelling, “Get the hell up, you’ve been sleeping all day!”

I struggled to shut out the noise, the chatter of expectation and grief and fear. I struggled to be present for my daughter and myself. To be right there, making choices that served her needs, not my anxiety. I struggled with setting reasonable boundaries and realistic expectations for where we were, not where I wished or thought we would be.

My husband and I, in concert with her psychiatrist, said she had to take classes or work, she was capable of doing something. Nothing was not an option. So shortly after coming home, my daughter started babysitting. Several months later, a family offered her a full-time nanny position. We were thrilled.

“But, you don’t want her to be a nanny when she’s 30!” said a friend — now former — with a condescending laugh, when I shared the news.

Why not? Why would I care if my daughter was a nanny for the rest of her life? For god’s sake, in those days all I cared about was her waking up to live another day. Any parent of a struggling child knows that fear. Fuck college or careers or future plans. Just stay alive for one more day.

But it was hard. Of course, I didn’t want her to be a nanny for the rest of her life because I wanted her to do, become, achieve. I wasn’t comfortable — secure enough — in myself to be genuinely comfortable with where she was.

My brother and I are adopted, not biologically related to each other or our parents who raised us. In 1985, my brother dropped out of college. My parents forced him to return until eventually he dropped out of three colleges and they gave up. None of it was graceful or loving. It was ugly and a warning for me. Stay in school. Do and be what they want.

When he reunited with his birth mother, my brother learned no one in her family attended college. But our well-educated parents — a doctor and a teacher — made choices from their lived experience and class expectations. The possibility that my brother just wasn’t built for college never entered the conversation. They did not see him for who he was, only who they wanted him to be.

As I wrestled with what to do for my daughter, I thought about that a lot. I didn’t want to repeat my parents’ mistakes but didn’t know how to change the tape, shift the narrative. I went to college, got a master’s in social work, checked the boxes, followed the script. When I was 40, I finally found the courage to pursue my dream of becoming a writer. As much as I knew forcing her to be a student was wrong, letting my daughter be where and who she wanted terrified me.

Shutting out the judgment of others, shifting your dreams, adjusting your focus, being present, sitting in stillness — that’s the work of the Buddhas, the goal of an enlightened life. Learning to live that way is especially important for parents. It’s a lifeline for us and a gift to our children.

“You need to back off. She has a job. She’s doing great. She needs you to send the message that she will be okay, that you trust her to figure it out.”

When her psychiatrist said that to me, it was like the heavens opened and hope descended, but also like, what? That’s it? I don’t have to fix her? We’re not supposed to make her better? No. She wasn’t broken, just human.

Let her know you trust her to figure it out, send the message you trust that she’ll be fine.

Those words changed my parenting and my life. My parents never said them to me and I had never said them to myself. Trust yourself to figure it out. You will be fine, trust that. Trust that you can handle whatever comes your way.

Six years later,I go back to these words daily. On the inhale and on the exhale, in the shower, staring at the ceiling at 3 a.m., walking the dogs, reading the newspaper. I said them through months of quarantine, after the colonoscopy, before the mammogram. I’m saying them as I write this.

It’s funny how troubled waters work. How, if you’re lucky, hard times illuminate and clarify, and strengthen your sense of self. If you’re lucky, you learn to be present and still; you learn to release attachment to an idea and surrender to what is. Fighting reality made me a bad parent. It made me lose sight of what the whole endeavor is all about.

Three years after my daughter left college, rattled by a pandemic and no longer wanting to be a college athlete, my son — two years younger than my daughter — left school too. He took a year off to work with my husband, realized that for the time being, college wasn’t for him, and now has a full-time job in a field he loves.

Like all second children, he benefitted from not being first. We learned some things and handled his struggles better than we did his sister’s. Even so, I worried. My ego bristled. The what will people say crept in.

What will people say? Who cares? I know what I will say. My children are kind, decent, productive, loyal, self-respecting, honest, hilarious, and smart. They live authentically, with integrity. When they need help, they ask for it and give it to others in need. They are — and have — fabulous friends. And they are my favorite people in the world.

They are good humans.

It’s that simple. That’s our job. Not perfect humans. Not reflections of ourselves or extensions of our egos. It’s not the Ivy League or the master’s degree or the Goldman Sachs, the bank account, the house, the picket fence, their marriage and children or god knows what other measure we think we’re supposed to use. Raise good humans and stay human ourselves.

Today, my daughter is living and working 3,000 miles away. Thriving, glowing, emerging. Authentically, on her own terms. Her journey teaches me about love and forgiveness and grace, and how to live with my own depression and anxiety.

As former monk and author Cory Muscara says, “Finding your true self is an act of love. Expressing it is an act of rebellion… The more comfortable you become in your own skin, the less you need to manufacture the world around you for comfort.”

Living that way ourselves is the best parenting advice I could ever give. Teaching our children to live that way is the best gift we can give them.