In the Gottlieb house, you’ve got to grab the opportunity for family bonding whenever you can. That’s why I always welcome the brouhaha of March Madness. We spend hours discussing our choices for the Gottlieb NCAA basketball pool (no money exchanged), hooting over the long-shots we choose, crowing when we call it accurately, watching television together, and vying for family bragging rights.

While other families assemble for intimate dinners or gather round the kitchen table for endless hours of friendly Monopoly games, just about the only thing the Gottliebs can agree on is that we all love college basketball. Annie reminisces that one of her clearest childhood memories is being awoken from a deep sleep to the hootin’ and hollerin’ by her parents, aunts and uncles that accompanied Seton Hall’s near victory (it’s the only way I can refer to it still, nearly 20 years later) in the NCAA tournament. When ESPN Classic replays the 1989 final game, my kids text messaged me to turn on the television. I sit down to watch the final minutes with the hope that maybe this time the ref’s whistle won’t blow!

I’ve always felt a little bit jealous that one of my best friends regularly has poignant family moments with her two children, a 15-year-old and a 21-year-old. They go out to dinner as a family. They take vacations together, bike ride and climb mountains together. Meanwhile, the Gottliebs are quibbling over whether anyone in their right mind would have picked Davidson over Georgetown in the NCAA second round.

We’ve tried family dinners, but they aren’ particularly successful. Someone complains about the main course; someone else picks a fight; it all unravels rather quickly.

Family vacations also are a thing of the past. I’ve been able to rally the troops only twice in the last ten years – once for a family cruise to Bermuda that cost a fortune and once for an even more expensive five days in London (but Annie had to decline at the last minute because she got a new job so even that didn’t make it as a full family bonding experience). Thus, unless the destination is really alluring (read that expensive) I can’t get all three children together as a group.

So instead I’ve learned to cherish our moments gathered together around our television during March. It’s family bonding time at its best. The boys find great amusement in my unwavering loyalty to Big East teams (I managed once again to come up with an all-Big East Final Four); Annie crafts two grids – a sentimental favorites and the real one; Tom tracks the possibility of his winning electronically; Dan smugly sticks with the favorites.

I could lament the absence of traditional forms of family bonding, or I could celebrate the fact that we have found some common ground to continue our growth as a family. I choose to focus on the latter. As our children age, we need to meet them where they are. If that means listening to their choice of music when we are in the car together or watching their favorite television program with them, so be it.

As one of nine children, I am so used to being smothered by family that I always feel so sad when some one tells me they haven’t spoken to their brother in six months or they haven’t seen their sister in a few years.

My job as mother of my own small clan is to help my children forget all of the grudges and hurt feelings of their childhoods and form bonds and alliances that can carry them through to genuine adult friendships.

When I was a kid, my parents would drag us all together, kneel us down and say the Rosary as a family saying, “The family that prays together, stays together.”

The Gottlieb family ritual doesn’t ring with the same solemnity as that one, but I’m hoping that the effect will be the same. My fantasy is that years from now, my kids will come together as a family without their dad and me and wax nostalgic over the year that Mom had the audacity to pick the Hall as her Cinderalla team and win! (…I said this was my fantasy!)