I didn’t expect to get parenting advice from Coop’s dad in Your Friends & Neighbors, but that is exactly what happened this past Monday night. By the way, henceforth Cooper will go by “Coop,” and he is played by Jon Hamm, who often wears the same mildly brooding look of disbelief gifted to him by the creators of Mad Men.

It all goes down after Tori, Coop’s daughter, declines Princeton. Sorry, spoiler alert. After four years of high-octane achievement mishigas, she is not accepting because she does not know what she wants, and her parents have not given her much room to figure that out. Bah humbug. Tori storms off. Mel storms off after her. There is some light screaming. Mel and Coop regroup outside, exchange a few tense words about who is and is not helping, and then Mel stomps off. Again. Coop lowers himself onto a lone stone stair in front of what used to be his home, the one he shared with Mel. His father joins him. They are both decked out in Princeton orange and black, a challenging color combination — except, of course, when found in the natural world — made only slightly less offensive by a petite, perfectly pruned green hedge.

Then this:

“It’s hard when you reach the point where you can’t protect the kids the way you used to. Not from the world, not from their own choices.”

Coop replies:

“I’m her father. If I can’t protect her, then who?”

And then Ron, in one of the better parenting speeches I have heard in a long time, says:

“It’s not that you can’t. It’s that she won’t let you. Because you have raised a smart and fiercely independent daughter, which doesn’t mean that she is not gonna screw up. Because she will, a lot. And that’s when being a father becomes really tricky, because it’s no longer about telling her what to do. It’s about finding a way to let go while still finding a way to keep everyone close.”

And then, the line that really got me:

“That’s the hardest part, because your job is no longer to stop her. Your job is to stay on the sidelines. Just make sure she knows you are there for her when she realizes she needs you.”

And the Oscar for Best Parenting Advice goes to…Ron Cooper!

You know why it worked?

Because it did not sound like a Hallmark card.

Sometimes people say things like just calm down, just let go, it’s not too late, and it all sounds so empty. Just calm down? Really? When Sienna has clearly broken her tooth on the trampoline and may need it extracted? When your child is hurting? When they are making choices you are not sure you can bear to watch? All I have to do is “let go”? Of the way of thinking I have spent my entire adult life perfecting?

Uch, please.

What made Ron’s advice believable was not just the wording. It was the fact that you could feel, even through the screen, that he had suffered. He was not tossing wisdom down from some ivory tower, despite that being the exact subject matter of this scene. He had lived long enough to know what it costs to love someone you cannot control. He had lost that fight already. And because of that, he could sit beside his son and say something honest.

That is what I think people are actually looking for when they ask for advice. More specifically, they are looking for someone who has been through enough of life to mean what they say.

I think about this all the time in my work as a coach.

Not because I believe I need to have lived every version of what my clients are living. I have not. Oh boy, have I not. But to guide someone through something hard, I need to know about being in the dark. About wanting control and not getting it. About gripping too tightly. My kryptonite.

I write a lot here about motherhood. About career. About Heated Rivalry. And also Bridgerton. And part of what I am always circling is this: the hard thing is rarely just the hard thing itself. The hard thing is who we have to become in order to get through it. Like when a couple fights about loading the dishwasher — which, candidly, I always do better than my husband — you know it’s never really about the dishwasher. It is about something else. Something potentially supercharged, like one of those clouds with lightning inside of it.

I guess what I am trying to say is twofold. The first thing is that you cannot walk around life. You have to go through it, which sort of sucks, because it seems really scary. And the second thing is that you never know when someone’s words will resonate — either like a gut punch, the kind that knocks the wind out of you, or like a cool breeze on a hot day, arriving so suddenly that you say, out loud, to no one and to anyone: did you feel that?