Loving Your Child Is an Instinct; Shielding Him From the Consequences of What He Did to Another Human Being Is Something Else Entirely — I Learned the Difference at Sixty, at the Door of a Chicken Coop

I would not make that purchase.

I grieved my son, and I let the law have the man he had become, and I have never been able to see any other honest way through.

People have said to me, in the years since, that they could never do what I did — could never turn in their own child.

They say it as though it were a compliment to their love, and I understand why they think so, but I have come to believe they have it backward, and I want to say why, because it is the hardest and most important thing I know.

The love that cannot turn in a child who is destroying another person is not a larger love.