“Back then I could leave him all day in the resort’s
child-care program. This time he was clingy and heavily Oedipal. I began to
call myself Jocasta; he began to call me darling.
“Every afternoon when I’d pick Sam up at the kids’ club, it
was as if he’d spent the day in a workshop on Surviving the Loss of Your
Mother. When I’d appear Lazarus-like to take him back to our room, his joy was
huge.”
- Lamott, Traveling Mercies
He is reaching that particular kind of clingy stage where
this really resonates. Every time he sees me, he acts like I’ve been gone for a
year instead of five minutes.
