My son was quietly making breakfast the other morning while I sat at the kitchen table doing a jigsaw puzzle. Suddenly he lifted his head from the stove and asked, “So how did you learn to be a parent?” I kept flipping puzzle pieces even as my heart did its own little flip. Here was a topic equal to a mother’s heart, the standout thing that has defined my life for 33 years, the underpinnings of which my children have never shown interest in before. Now, suddenly the boy who made me a mother, about to be a parent himself come June, had a need to know. “First of all, I observed other families,” …