Oh mother, let me hold you.
Oh mother, I want to rock you.
Be my baby.
Be my son.

Mother, I want to rock you.

Don’t cry.

Please.

Can you not cry, just this once?

How can I ever comfort you if I am nothing but your daughter? Don’t you get it?

I can’t comfort you if you won’t let me become you.

So do me a favour: smile from the depths of your being. I know you didn’t love my father. Maybe that was hard for me to accept as a kid but you must realize that my father was MY FATHER! Not yours.

You chose him for whatever – oh, you didn’t. It was either him or a life as handmaiden to your brothers and sisters. Would it have been a life more lonely than the pining, keening, curling and clenching loneliness of the farm? The farm! That was the crux, wasn’t it?

You did not want to go back to the farm. It was not one of those decisions that you could change your mind about, once it was done.