It was a wall I built in front of it, brick by brick, with my whole will, and behind the wall the terror went on screaming the entire time.

That is the thing no one tells you about a mother’s strength in the worst moment: it is not fearlessness.

Fearlessness would be useless; fearlessness does not fight to survive.

What a mother does is far harder and far lonelier than being unafraid.

She stays completely, privately terrified, and she takes that terror and locks it in a room inside herself where her children cannot hear it, and she stands in the doorway of that room and speaks to them in a soft, steady, lying voice about slow breathing and holding hands and everything being all right — knowing it may not be all right, knowing she may be singing her sons to sleep for the last time — because the calm is the only shelter she has left to give them and she will give it even if it costs her the last of her own sanity.

I built that wall in the dark and I held it up with everything I had.