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

But an instinct is not a moral compass.

It is a force, and forces have to be governed, and the whole difficult work of being a decent person is learning which of your strongest feelings you must, sometimes, refuse to obey.

I loved my son with everything in me, and I turned him in, and those two facts do not contradict each other — they are, in fact, the same fact, because I loved him enough to refuse to let him become a man protected in his monstrousness, cushioned in it, taught by my silence that there was no floor beneath which he could not fall and still be caught.

There was a floor.