#Statement: Toward the end of June of this past summer, I invited my mom to come to the beach with me. We set off at about 2 p.m., baseball caps and books in hand, and drove 45 minutes to the North Shore of Boston. We played ’90s rock the entire time with the windows down. As I think about what is a normal part of growing up, I’ve started feeling a serious need to understand my parents as the people they were before they had kids. When they stopped being responsible for almost everything in my life, it opened a new vision of them as individuals with their own histories, ambitions and uncertainties. What were they like? What were they interested in? On my beach outing with my mom, specifically, I found myself wondering: Who did she date? It’s amazing to think that your parents dated and loved other people before they met each other; for me, at least, it almost feels illegal. It clashes with the fixed, parent-only roles I had always seen them in — my mom, my dad — that revolved around ...