‘Do you think I’ll be a good mother?’ I must have asked him this a thousand times. ‘Are you kidding? You’ll be wonderful. You’re patient. You’re resilient. You’re kind.’ He was right, I was these things, I didn’t doubt it. Yet I suspected that being a good mother had little to do with possessing those traits good mothers ought to possess, that it hinged on something else entirely, required other, obscure qualities that could be neither honed nor harnessed.
