Ultimately, I accept that there is no perfect substitute for the claim that a parent and child have on each other’s heart. But families can be made i… - Sonia Sotomayor

Look at another person and understand no matter how much you disagree with them… if you look, you will find good in them.

I have followed my mother’s approach to family, refusing to limit myself to accidents of birth, blood, and marriage

The differences were plain enough, and yet I saw that they were as nothing compared with what we had in common. As I lay in bed at night, the sky outside my window reflecting the city's dim glow, I thought about Abuelita’s fierce loyalty to blood. But what really binds people as family? The way they shore themselves up with stories; the way siblings can feud bitterly but still come through for each other; how an untimely death, a child gone before a parent, shakes the very foundations; how the weaker ones, the ones with invisible wounds, are sheltered; how a constant din is medicine against loneliness; and how celebrating the same occasions year after year steels us to the changes they herald. And always food at the center of it all.