Glitter and glue

"One of the things you should know about Kelly Corrigan is that she is the daughter of Mary Corrigan, a woman of conviction and grit who taught her kids that No Means No and Actions Speak Louder than Words and if they wanted a bunch of Rah Rah Lovey Dovey, go talk to your father--so Kelly did, over and over again, exiting her childhood with the sense that she'd always have more shared ground with him. But when she arrived in Australia in the summer of 1992, the only job she could find was as a nanny. She thought she was signing up for carpools and babysitting and some light cooking, but what she walked into instead was a household still reeling with grief from the recent loss of the mother. Completely unprepared, Kelly spent five months trying to help the Tanner family pick up the pieces. And to her surprise, she found herself quietly deferring to the wisdom of Mary Corrigan, who once told the young Kelly that her charming father "may be the glitter, but I'm the glue," a pattern that would become more pronounced years later, when Kelly's own daughters were born, and it turned out that each and every day demanded her mother's signature conviction and grit. This is a story about growing up and stepping up, but most of all, it's about the great adventure of motherhood"--.