The preschool pickup. For nine long months, it structured our days. We had a routine:

• Announcing that it is time to go get Sam.
• Corralling squirming toddler.
• Putting shoes, coats, and hats on us both.
• Finding car keys.
• Finding wallet.
• Re-corralling squirming toddler.
• Glancing at the car's clock while buckling in the squirming toddler, and gasping at our lateness.
• Throwing myself into the driver's seat, swearing because I'd left my car keys next to the squirming toddler in the back, climbing out to retrieve them, and throwing myself into the driver's seat again.

Just as I was ready to peel out of the driveway, there would inevitably come a small voice from the back seat: "Mama, I want music."

"Music?" I'd say breathlessly, senselessly, as if getting the two of us into the car and belted in was exercise strenuous enough to drain me of both oxygen and thought. "You want music?"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah!" she'd sing out. "Music!"

So I'd smack on the radio button while trying not to make the clutch squeal, and tear down the road–at least until I reached the first stop sign, 500 feet away. By then the music would be rising from the speakers like a mood-altering drug. "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." "If I Had a Million Dollars." "Izzo." The Pogues, the Beatles, the Byrds. I turned the music up loud, and we sang along, my baby girl and I, in our shoes, coats, and hats. We clapped our mittened hands with They Might Be Giants, and turned a cap into a cape with "Silent E." And by the time we'd navigated the three perpetually red traffic lights and the two chronically congested left turns, we'd be coasting on a music high, immune to all the irritations of the busy street, blissfully ignoring our inevitable rotten traffic karma. Slow drivers, garbage trucks, telephone pole repairmen hanging over the road, eighteen-wheelers backing up, street sweepers – none of them could bother us, in our steel and glass listening cage.

One day, late in the year, we came to pick Sam up as we always did, turning into the preschool parking lot with the windows down and the radio blasting, suddenly sheepish before the array of minivans already parked there. Late again, we squealed to a disreputable stop, with my baby girl still nodding her head in time to the bass. I allowed one precious extra minute so that she could finish listening to the opening beats: "Party people rock da house!" Then I turned the radio off to disgruntled protests from the back seat.

In the classroom, we fumbled to recover all the bits and pieces that must come home with Sam every day. Above the table stacked with flyers, the day's crop of finger-paintings, and lunch boxes, I spied a new class project taped across the length of the wall. The teachers were clearly pimping the upcoming Mother's Day holiday: the project asked kids to finish the sentence, "I love when my mom…"

My first, involuntary response to any fill-in-the-blank sort of activity is to roll my eyes like the bored teenager I have never quite ceased to be. But after I'd finished rolling my eyes, I felt a sudden twinge of sharp curiosity. Wouldn't I love to peek into my child's head and see what it is he truly loves best about living with me, in our little family? And further, to see a cross-section, a veritable sociological data set of what n five year olds love about their mothers? Might there not be some profound lesson in mothering here on this bedecked wall, in this preschool smelling of bleach, on this Wednesday in this month of this year? I had no idea what I was getting into when I packed us into the car that morning. It was like approaching the Holy of Holies with a sticky, yogurt-covered lunch bag in my hand. I trembled. Did I dare? Could I bear to look into the heads of these children–currently mauling my squirming toddler with affectionate hugs, as they were–could I look to see what they think of when they think of us, we mothers squealing to a stop in our pulsating minivans, gathering lunch bags, pouring our hearts and souls into these whirling, singing, laughing little beings in their fifth year upon this spinning planet?

I lifted my eyes to the wall feeling reverential. Twenty kids in the class, twenty different glimpses into the mirror image of mother love, each carefully illustrated in magic marker and signed by the artist. And this, this will tell me what it is we do that is most valued upon this earth…

"I love it when my mom… buys me toys."

I tried to mask my choking with a sudden, severe coughing spell. Does it not figure that the Holy of Holies of motherhood would turn out to be a trip to Toys R' Us? Well. How many times have I watched my own son's face suffuse with joy as he clasps a new trinket from the endless aisles at Target? How many times has he spontaneously burst out with "I love you, Mama!" from the back seat after extracting from me a promise to open the aforementioned new trinket the very moment that we get home? Obviously, I thought, these are my child's reflections on what is most meaningful to him about him about his relationship to me.

I sighed with resignation and searched for the name in the corner of the picture, only to discover another child's name upon it. I couldn't manage to be properly relieved, though. This particular little materialist was not mine, but the next one? Or the next?

As it happened, however, most of the other responses appeared to have been written by Hallmark rather than Geoffrey the Giraffe. One child loved when his mom baked cookies; another loved when his mom bought dinner from his favorite take-out place. Other children mentioned bedtime stories, hugs, and kisses. One child answered simply, "I love when my mom loves me."

I read through them all with my mouth hanging open while my squirming toddler made threatening gestures in the direction of the class gerbil, and the remaining preschoolers milled around like an experiment in Brownian motion. It seemed too basic to be believed. The simplest acts of mothering –hugs, kisses, take-out food grabbed on the run for the sole purpose of preventing hungry children in the back seat from whining to death–these are what dominate our children's perception of their relationship to us? I expected something complex and profound, something I would contemplate for years to come. I got something as simple and sweet as a restaurant sugar packet, gulped experimentally, leading to an instant and fleeting sugar high. Our kids love when we love them and care for them. Is that all there is to this parenthood business after all?

But I had one response left to read: Sam's, captioning a drawing of a red oblong with wheels. My son had dictated to the teacher: "I love when my mom takes me on road trips."

Road trips? I coughed again to cover up the spitting out of my metaphorical sugar packet. He loves when I take him on road trips? I thought he was supposed to love it when I did something more, you know, maternal. Everyone else's kid got the Hallmark memo but mine. And why road trips? I mean, we go on the occasional summer vacation, and we drive back and forth to the grandparents' houses–but I had no idea they played such an important part of his conception of his own childhood and his time in my care. Nor could I figure out what on earth was it about road trips that captured his imagination so. Contemplating the mystery, I had a sudden vision of myself as the Jack Kerouac of soccer moms, wandering ceaselessly back and forth across the nation, searching for the ultimate epiphany, making mad scribblings on bits of paper while all of us in the car take long swigs from sippy cups. "Sam," I'd say to my boy, "we gotta go and never stop going till we get there."

"Where we going, Mama?" he'd say.

"I don't know but we gotta go," I'd answer. "We gotta go. To, um, the grocery store. That's where we gotta go." And we'd strap on our safety belts in the grooviest kind of way, hearing the deepest meanings in the click of the latch in its groove, feeling the poetry of the world in our shopping list: a loaf of bread, a container of milk, a stick of butter…

By this time in my reverie, I'd somehow managed to herd both Sam and his sister out of the preschool and to our car, in all its prosaic, petroleum-fueled ordinariness. I shook my head again in puzzlement: road trips? Then I turned on the music again, and pointed us in the direction of the grocery store. From the stereo speakers rose one of Sam's earliest musical loves:

And we set off, my kids and I, natural-born roadrunners, on yet another road trip into the sweet unknown of parenthood.