The third is that lately I’ve been rereading Winnicott: his good-enough mother is everywhere, as some things are when we most need to hear them. What you do and know, he says, to his imaginary young mother, simply by virtue of the fact that you are the mother of an infant, is as far apart from what you know by learning as is the east from the west coast of England. I cannot put this too strongly, he says. Just as the professor who found out about the vitamins that prevent rickets really has something to teach you, so you really have something to teach him about the other kind of knowledge, that which comes to you naturally. We know, I tell myself. Sometimes we forget we know, or mistrust that we do, but we do know.

There is so much we need to learn, and you are here to teach me too, and we learn together.

But deep inside, we know.

We understand so little of love, and we let fear get in the way: fear that we won’t be good enough, or that we’re not ready, or that we’ll fuck it up. Fear that we won’t love well, or maybe enough. As I grew you in my body, so too I grew you in my mind; that latter task no less important, a turning inwards, a kind of vigil, the dark art of imagining you into being. When you were born, of course, you confounded all 150expectations; withheld yourself; so simply were that for the first hours and first few days all I could say to your father, in a kind of bewilderment edged with panic, was that I didn’t know you. Until, imperceptibly and then all at once, something shifted, and you were just you.

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I wish I could tell you my struggles, in a way that would be meaningful or even of some practical use. But the secret, most important battles we fight are almost untranslatable to anyone else; and besides, you’ll have your own seething weirs of tigerish waters to cross.

I repeat to myself daily that every day, every moment of each day, is a chance to respond to the world with love, not fear. That fear is not an equal and opposing force, but rather the absence of love, a symptom or signal of something askew or astray. But I am terrified of making the wrong choices. Of doing the wrong thing. I am terrified of getting in the way of your life. I mark the margin of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening where Edna Pontellier says: I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself. I don’t dare ask myself, or maybe the better verb is answer, if it’s true. 151

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