March 2007 (cont.)

I have never been a mother who lived through her children. My life has been too complex—and, frankly, too interesting—for that. Nonetheless, I cannot help but feel now that only half of me remains in the world. I had a son and a daughter. Only the daughter remains. As she wings across the world on one business trip after another—she was in China when news of her brother came—I find myself overwhelmed by a sense of fragility . . . my own life, hers, the lives of my beloved grandchildren, the life of this planet.

Peter was not the perfect son, if there is such a thing. (Surely in some mothers’ eyes there is.) Nor was I the perfect mother for such a boy as he. To say that he was oppositional when he was young is to apply a neat word to a messy reality. At home he was loving, inquisitive, energetic, and he generally had one foot over the line. In school he was bright, bored, pretty much non-functioning, despite—or perhaps because of—his family’s strong bias toward education.

After the first day of first grade, he gave thanks in his bedtime prayers for his beginning reader. The second day he got into trouble for reading to the end of it. In the third grade he discovered that he had the amazing power to make perfectly nice lady teachers walk up walls and across the ceiling without ever being a bad boy. All he had to do was not do his work.