It is an easy assumption to make about a mother.

A great many sons make it.

Most of them are even right.

That is the quiet tragedy underneath this entire story, and I have made myself look at it squarely rather than pretend I was only a victim in it.

A mother’s love really is, for most practical purposes, bottomless — that is not a flattering exaggeration, it is simply the biology and the truth of the thing — and so a child learns, very early and very deep, that it is the one resource in his life he never has to be careful with.

He can be careless with friends and they will drift away.