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

Okonkwo, who asked me, in one of our early sessions, a question that stayed with me for months.

“If you had stayed at the ranch all those years ago,” she asked gently, “can you say with certainty that you would have prevented what your son did?” I could not.

Of course I could not.

Through that work I began, slowly, to understand the thing I had not been able to understand alone: that owning my failure to see was not the same as owning his crime, that a mother can be guilty of looking away without being guilty of the harm itself, and that carrying blame that is not yours does no good to anyone, least of all the woman I was now trying to help live.

I had spent my whole life believing a mother must protect her child above all things.