“You sold Grandma’s locket so I could have my shirt.
You worked two jobs.
You never once gave me up.” He held on tighter.
“You did all of it for me for a really long time.
It was just my turn to help.”
I have thought about that sentence every day since. It was just my turn. As though love were a thing that took turns.
As though he had simply been waiting, all along, for the day he was big enough to carry a piece of it back.
I had spent two years believing that the great failure of my life was that I could not protect my son from his father — that a good mother would have found a way to keep the war away from him entirely, and that my inability to do so was proof I had failed at the one job that mattered.
On that courtroom floor, with his chin resting on my head and his small arms around my neck, I began, for the first time, to understand that I had the whole thing backwards.
I had not failed to protect him.