After Judy's pregnancy/abortion and experience with pot, she wonders if she’s just like her mother after all. Do you think it's inevitable that we end up like, or partially like, our parents, or can we chart our own courses?

Most people I know carry a marked similarity in some things to the parents who raised them. However I do think that we all end up quite different from our parents too though that may be nothing more than our adapting to changes in the social structure of our lives happening a generation after them and all the changes that have occurred.

I believe that if there is something that your parents did that you didn't particularly like that you can overcome these things and chart your own course. I personally have tried to take the best of what my parents did and change the things that I didn't like to make life better for my children.

Cassie was raised by a domineering woman and she chose to deal with the situation by turning to drugs and a free-style way of life and practically running away from responsibilities. She chose to wallow in her low self-esteem and have people do things for her rather than growing up and taking responsibility for her own life and those of her children.

WE can chart out own courses. OUR parents give us our roots and we grow from them. Judy came from 2 entirely different parent types and even though she was torn between the 2 different personalities, she eventually chose her own path.

Having witnessed the very different personalities of fraternal twins from birth I can honestly say that gentics play a big part in who we are. These twins while different from each other had distinct traits of their parents. One has her father's temperament, the other her mother's.. However, though we might have genetic predispositions, what we do with our lives is a matter of choice based on past experiences. We can choose not to be like our parents or discard those traits we find objectionable.

I'm a believer that although there are some things that we inherit from our parents we choose our own paths in life. I know that I have consciously chosen different ways of doing things from the way my parents did them because I didn't agree. I like to think that by learning from the mistakes our parents made we are bettering ourselves and our societies.

I think most of us desire to maintain the good characteristics of our parents and expunge what we consider to be the bad characteristics. I think to some dgree we can change these things but some of them may be imbedded pretty deeply. Many times, I have found myself doing something my mother would have done. Sometimes, these are things that I vowed I would never do. I think what would save Cassie is the very positive influence that she has had from her grandparents and father. Also, by the end of the book, I believe she was pretty aware of her mothers limitations.