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

Chapter 15 — What I Learned to Forgive

One afternoon she found me crying at the kitchen table, and when she asked what was wrong, the truth came out of me.

“I failed as a mother,” I said.

“I raised a monster.”

She sat down beside me and took my hands.

“Brock is in prison because of choices he made as a grown man,” she said.

“You didn’t make those choices for him.

But you saved my life when you had the power to, and that is what tells me who you are.” It was that sentence that finally sent me to a therapist in town, a wise woman named Dr.