Have you ever thought of leaving him? I asked. She said she had throughout the marriage, but she would not. I don’t want my children to grow up and think a man can be abandoned in that state, she said. Yet she had tried to kill herself—an attempted abandonment of both her husband and her children. But this I did not say because it was exactly what many people would say to a situation like that. One has to have a solid self to be selfish.
