He couldn’t bear it that in some way I had the power to dictate his future, that I had somehow become mother again.
It took his attempt to make me agree. It’s not that my religion forbade it – although the prospect of Derek being consigned to hell through his own desperation was a terrible one. (I chose to believe that God, a benign God, would understand our sufferings and forgive us our trespasses.)
It’s just that the thing you never understand about being a mother, until you are one, is that it is not the grown man – the galumphing, unshaven, stinking, opinionated offspring – you see before you, with his parking tickets and unpolished shoes and complicated love life. You see all the people he has ever been all rolled up into one.
I looked at Derek and I saw the baby I held in my arms,
