My daughter is turning 30 soon, something I wrote about last week. I’ve been thinking about it since, mostly about what I’ve learned in 30 years of parenting.

When my kids — now 29 and 26 — were teens, I wrote an essay about things I discovered about being a parent. Little did I know how much more there was to learn. You have this idea that once they reach adulthood, there’s little left to learn, little left to discover. Oh, how wrong that is. Parenting is a never ending quest to get it right. It doesn’t matter if your children are 15 or 25, you just never stop learning. You never stop getting it wrong. And you never stop striving to get it right.

I learned the hard way that there’s no real way to make up for things you’ve done wrong as a parent. I learned — through trial and error and therapy — that accepting the mistakes you’ve made, apologizing for them, and moving on is the best tactic. Over-compensating or obsessively thinking about those mistakes is definitely not the best way to proceed.

I learned that you can’t fix everything. You can fix broken bikes and frozen computers, and you can hand out Band-Aids and Tylenol, but you can’t fix broken hearts, and all the love in the world won’t fix depression and anxiety. You want it to, you need it to, but it doesn’t work that way. If love could fix everything, parenting would be a breeze, wouldn’t it?