No!
XIV
I should like to hold these things fast, for always.
I see them now as they really are, just as I see my son in his present form. But it is not enough to say: "I see them." I have carefully preserved all my pictures of him; I want to keep intact the memory of the heart he gave me.
This is not difficult to tell. Other feelings are too bound up with self for description. You'd have to explain a person's whole nature to understand them. Love is indefinable, grief is indefinable, but a mother's heart can open up like a book. It is uniform and simple, free from all alloy, and its very infiniteness is like finiteness.
My little boy is near me, awkwardly assaying his first steps in the garden. Without raising my eyes from my work I watch him and I thank him.
It is he. Although he changes from day to day, I know his ways by heart: the big curl in which the sunlight lies coiled, the almost imperceptible arch of his eyebrows, mere shades of lines, the red pollen blown on the petals of his cheeks, his profile of curves, his neck of mother-of-pearl, the spreading fan of his fingers, his unique form which is unique only to me.
I must rack my brain in order to force into my memory that once he lay hidden in my warm womb and I carried him as though he were one of my organs, as though he were a secret, that I carried him as one carries a joy or a pain. I no longer remember this.
I am in a hurry for him to grow up and be able to listen; I should like to talk to him. I have found words for the others, though they awoke in me only an uncertain love and set my heart in chaos. He has given me an intelligible emotion, and to him I have said nothing.
I love him as I love no one, because he is the sole human being for whom I am responsible. My love is responsibility first and foremost. If he bends over, I suppress a cry; if the sun shines too strong on him, I shield him with my body; if he makes a new gesture, a slight disquiet flits through me. In whatever concerns him danger seems to lurk. He is a lively, approachable child, people like him, and when they come up and speak to him, I smile a pleasant, natural smile, though his life and his death keep up an incessant sport within me and incessantly it devolves upon me to secure his life. It is a tragic stake, a terribly cruel problem; it is the entire basis of mother-love.