“I will look after you and I will look after anybody you say needs to be looked after, any way you say. I am here. I brought my whole self to you. I am your mother.” —Maya Angelou

Yesterday my son called me to say thank you for being his mom since he and his girlfriend just got a puppy, and they are being kept awake and feel overwhelmed.

“You were the best puppy,” I said. “Just perfect.”

He really was. He slept, he smiled, he made us laugh and cry and feel like the luckiest parents in the world. He also obliterated my ability to detach, to write, to manage to be the struggling writer I had been in Manhattan replaced by being a struggling mother in Dallas, Texas. He owned me completely and knew it.

He came after a childhood filled with anxiety and careless violence, an adolescence shadowed by sexual assault, alcoholism, and major tragedies, the sudden death of my beloved best friend, and my sister. I had two abortions alone, deeply saddened as I longed so deeply to be a mother. One when I was at the height of my alcohol and drug abuse, the other, an accident, right after the death of my sister when I was sliding into a suicidal depression. Six months later I got married drunk and was a victim of domestic violence.

But I got sober. I left the husband, went daily to a twelve step program and intense therapy that included medications to keep me from suicide. After nine years of sobriety, publishing two novels, teaching in universities, I had my baby, this boy who taught me how to love without fear. I deeply loved his father and for the first time in my life I felt safe. I was terrified by motherhood having been neglected as a child, lost two women I loved deeply and determined to avoid that sort of grief for as long as possible. He held my life in his dimpled hands, but I knew that he would not, could not, should not save me. I had to grow, find others to love, remain sober, and give him the stable freedom I had not been given in my childhood.

The teenage years were hard, but we never left each other completely. One night he didn’t come home, and I stood in his empty room in such pain I could not breathe. But I found him through Facebook and friends and phone calls. When I drove to the house he was being loaded into an ambulance with frostbitten feet and yet I remained calm and later that day we talked, I made him breakfast, and he said he was sorry. I understood because that wildness, that need to stop feeling had been a cornerstone of my own life. But he had his own higher power and just like when he was the boy at the top of the jungle gym, the child with both balance and strength, I needed to let him, tethered to me, find his own way. It nearly killed me but it didn’t.

Now? He is someone I feel proud to know. Not proud of my doing anything. Yes I fed him broccoli and orzo and fresh parmesan cheese for ten years, but proud that such a human exists. My 72 hours of hard back labor was worth ever minute. He is kind, smart, successful, loves someone, and is loved in return. He is happy. Sometimes he reminds me of our past together and tries to apologize. But I believe this child, this man, taught me everything about love, about trust and about how to feel and express unconditional love.

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach

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