I want to be there for my kids. I’m not sure where “there” is, but you know, I want to do the right thing. Most moms do.

A lot of people tell me that the reason they don’t have ten zillion kiddos like me (but who’s counting?) is because they’re afraid they can’t be there for all of them. In fact, a stranger told me so again this week. It happens to me a lot—these out-of-the-blue stranger confessions—I think, because I look very approachable in the grocery store. I’m not sure what it is. Maybe it’s because they see that I hide the chocolate under all the produce in my cart. They nod their heads and say, “Yeah, lady, me too.”

Anyway. There’s something to be said about being there for your children. I feel good about my being here for my children right now, but it’s mostly because I can hardly move. Being nine months along makes it easy to be here than anywhere else.

But seriously, when you strip away all the psychobabble and other junk, kids just want you to be around. To look at them. To play Uno with them. To hug them when they walk by in the kitchen.

Peggy Noonan, author a book called Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness tells of a conversation with her brother-in-law in which she asked him what the best thing was about his mother when he was growing up.

“And, immediately he said, ‘That she was there.’

‘There for you,’ I said.

‘No’, he said, ‘actually there. In the kitchen. For twenty years she stood in the kitchen stirring the gravy. Every day I came home from school, she was there. When I came home with a broken arm or blood coming out of my lip, she was at the door. That’s the big change. Kids have no one home now. I don’t mean one-parent families, I mean two parents and both are out. And we’ll never go back to the old way again, ever.’”

The easiest way to go back to “the old way” is to never leave it. Just be there and stay.