Hes already 35 years old, with neither wife nor children
Last week, I found myself with my son in my mother-in-laws creaking old cottage along the banks of the Thames. A childhood friend of hers, a lady named Edith, was there as wellshe drifted through the house like a pale memory wrapped in tweed. Edith spent the whole afternoon trailing after my son, her sighs like distant bells.
Its such a pity I have no grandchildren, she murmured, her words floating through the parlour like mist.
Edith had become a mother when she was already well into her thirties. She adored her son, long-awaited and cherished, letting him run wild through her life. Her husband had departedsnatched by bad luckwhen the boy was barely walking. Edith raised him on her own, juggling two jobs: librarian by day, waitress by night.
When her son, George, turned thirty-five, she finally summoned up the nerve to ask him, over weak tea and scones, when she might hear the clatter of tiny feet in her house.
George replied, sounding as cool as an autumn breeze: Never.
He explained, almost dreamily, that it was her parenting, her care, that had coddled him into a childlike state. He had become, in his own words, content with simple comfortsa life of boiled eggs, puzzles, and soft jumpers. No woman, he claimed with a strange kind of certainty, would ever want to act as a second mother to him.
Im quite happy as I am. I wouldnt change a thing for someone else, he added, gazing out the window at a rain-blurred world.
Youre really all I need, he said, as if that settled everything.
Edith, her voice trembling like a forgotten melody, confessed, Ive failed to teach him the most important thing: how to be a man!
Do you also feel that a mothers love is a double-edged swordcapable of shielding a child, yet sometimes strangling the growth of their own selfhood?
I would be glad to hear your thoughts, as if they drifted in with the morning post.
