Guilt and Accountability Theme Analysis

There’s no better way to get people to cooperate in this country than by seeming a little unhinged.

I gasped. The sun was streaming in the windows, or at least through the panes not streaked with paint. It also shone through in spots where the paint was thinnest, casting the off-white walls of that room in the lurid red glow of a garish Chinese restaurant.

The only way my head was going truly somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not to a different airport. “Motherhood,” I condensed in the park. “Now, that is a foreign country.”

You make me feel bad; feeling bad makes me mad; ergo, you make me mad.

“It’s very dangerous,” I said. Indeed, just about any stranger could have turned up nine months later. We might as well have left the door unlocked.

The whole time I was pregnant with Kevin I was battling the idea of Kevin, the notion that I had demoted myself from driver to vehicle, from householder to house.

Only the untouched, the well-fed and contented, could possibly covet suffering like a designer jacket.

I panicked, thinking, There’s nowhere to hide.

After all, you practiced rounding up on Kevin from the day he was born. Me, I’m a stickler. I prefer my photographs in focus.

The secret is that there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its suppression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect.

You can blame your mother, and she can blame hers. Leastways sooner or later it’s the fault of somebody who’s dead.

A poor substitute for the sort of passion we like to extol perhaps, but real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness.

“Just cause you get used to something doesn’t mean you like it.” he added, snapping the magenta, “You’re used to me.” “Yes!” I said.

Impatient with the slow pace of made-for-TV combat, he grumbled, “I don’t see why Cone Power bothers with all that little junk, Dad. Nuke ‘em. That’d teach the Raqis who’s boss.” You thought it was adorable.

When you love your kids, and you’re there for them, and you take them on trips, like to museums and battlefields, and make time for them, you have faith in them and express an interest in what they think? That’s when this kind off plunging off the deep end doesn’t happen. And if you don’t believe me, ask Kevin.

Almost to, what, know you’re alive. To show other people they don’t control you. To prove you can do something, even if it could get you arrested.

Because after three days short of eighteen years, I can finally announce that I am too exhausted and too confused and too lonely to keep fighting, and if only out of desperation or even laziness I love my son. He has five grim years left to serve in an adult penitentiary, and I cannot vouch for what will walk out the other side. But in the meantime, there is a second bedroom in my serviceable apartment. The bedspread is plain. A copy of Robin Hood lies on the bookshelf. And the sheets are clean.