The other day my son cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner, all in a single frying pan. Scrambled eggs, grilled cheese, shell steak. That last required my assistance, a shorthand recipe typed into my handheld in the middle of a drowsy late-day meeting. "High heat," it began. An hour later the meeting was still going on and a return message arrived: "Thanks for the help."

A friend whose children are just a little older than my own told me once that parents fool themselves, pulling away from the quad with an empty SUV and tears in their eyes, that sending a child to college constitutes the great separation. The real breach, she said, came after the car, full once more, left the quad with a mortarboard and a diploma tossed in the back seat.

During college there were those long winter breaks, the occasional weekend, the summers in which the high-school friends reappeared at the breakfast table, if pancakes at 1 p.m. counts as breakfast. But then, college over, real life began. The unfamiliar names of workplace acquaintances. The inconvenient or nonexistent holidays that come with the bottom rungs of the employment ladder. The tiny apartment in the new neighborhood. The frying pan.

That frying pan used to be mine. It was in a box consigned to the basement, along with the crummiest cookie sheets, a dented stockpot, a saucepan, a couple of lids. The frying pan was the best of the bunch, a heavy stainless-steel omelet pan that my elegant Aunt Catherine gave me for my own college graduation. She believed that a girl who could make an omelet would never be at a loss, for food or friends.

"This is a great pan," Chris said. "You can use this pan for everything!"

First they are helpless. The rocking, the burping, the bathing, the nursing. The endless nursing. And then they learn to use a spoon, and then a knife, and chopsticks, and the oven, and a panini press. I don't believe food is love, precisely, but I believe everything looks better in the morning if there are eggs Benedict. I learned to cook from my mother, me at the stove, her in a wheelchair, when I was doing a college year abroad in the country of chemo. Her message was pretty clear: a full plate is what you will need to survive.