Crazy family

I’ll save us both from the One Direction lyrics that I could quote, and say instead that both of these people are wishing they could turn back time. Only by a few seconds. Or, maybe back to when smartphones and Snapchat weren’t yet a thing. For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for. She can watch him, as a child, play the games she was not allowed to play; she can invest in him her ideas, aspirations, ambitions, and values -- or whatever she has left of them; she can watch her son, who came from her flesh and whose life was sustained by her work and devotion, embody her in the world. So while the project of raising a boy is fraught with ambivalence and leads inevitably to bitterness, it is the only project that allows a woman to be -- to be through her son, to live through her son.