I waited until he was through. I waited, heavy of heart, until his foolish fires of revolt had burned themselves out. And it didn’t seem to add to his satisfaction to find that I could inspect him with a quiet and slightly commiserative eye.
“You are accusing me,” I finally told him, “of something I’m proud of. And I’m afraid I’ll always be guilty of caring for my own son.”
He turned on me with a sort of heavy triumph.
“Well, it’s something that you’ll jolly well pay the piper for, some day,” he announced.
“What do you mean by that?” I demanded.
“I mean that nothing much is ever gained by letting the maternal instinct run over. And that’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re trying to tie Dinkie to your side, when you can no more tie him up than you can tie up a sunbeam. You could keep him close enough to you, of course, when he was small. 29 But he’s bound to grow away from you as he gets bigger, just as I grew away from my mother and you once grew away from yours. It’s a natural law, and there’s no use crocking your knees on it. The boy’s got his own life to live, and you can’t live it for him. It won’t be long, now, before you begin to notice those quiet withdrawals, those slippings-back into his own shell of self-interest. And unless you realize what it means, it’s going to hurt. And unless you reckon on that in the way you order your life you’re not only going to be a very lonely old lady but you’re going to bump into a big hole where you thought the going was smoothest!”
I sat thinking this over, with a ton of lead where my heart should have been.
“I’ve already bumped into a big hole where I thought the going was smoothest,” I finally observed.
My husband looked at me and then looked away again.
“I was hoping we could fill that up and forget it,” he ventured in a valorously timid tone which made it hard, for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom, to keep my throat from tightening. But I sat there, shaking my head from side to side. 30