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

It is a smaller one.

It is a love that has quietly decided that your child’s comfort is worth more than a stranger’s life — or not even a stranger’s, in my case, but the life of the daughter-in-law I had promised, at a wedding, to welcome as my own.

A love like that has simply drawn its circle small, around one person, and called everything outside the circle expendable.

And I understand the pull of it, God knows I do; the instinct to protect your child is the oldest and strongest thing in a parent, and it does not care in the slightest whether the child deserves protecting.