A child went to stay for the first time with her aunt. Her aunt was anxious that the weekend should go well, and she was not made any less anxious by the child’s mother’s insistence that, “You must tell her every morning at breakfast, in detail, what will be for lunch and supper. Otherwise, she will not believe that there will be food, and she will spend the day in frantic fear of going to bed hungry.”

The woman had been the child’s mother for a couple of years now, which begs the question, how many hot meals on the table at six o’clock sharp does it take to untie that terror?

Which raises the further question, how much hot anger must this mother spend before she can embrace her daughter wholly, for all that she is and with all of the history that she brings to lay at the feet of her family?

Which leads to one more question: How in hell does God do it?