A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after--oh, that' s love by a different name.

But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul.

She has changed in this way that motherhood changes you, so that you forget you ever had time for small things like despising the color pink.

That means you're my kid," I explained, "and I'm your mother, and nobody can say it isn't so.

Mother, you can still hold hold on but forgive, forgive and give for long as long as we both shall live, I forgive you, Mother.