NYT

I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I can provide you with a definition of parental love, but I will tell you this: Two of its major active ingredients are fear and guilt. Fear of the vast and bewildering spectrum of terrible things that might befall the object of that love, and guilt that you might not have done enough to prevent them. Of course, I’m biased, but this forceful apprehension of the world’s expansive treachery, in contrast to the innocence and beauty of the tiny creature you have just brought into it, seems to me to be the only sane reaction to having become a parent. I was strangely reassured, at any rate, to find that it was also more or less the reaction of my wife, who is nowhere near as prone as I am to indulging in generalized gloom. One evening a few months ago, as our son slept in his crib beside our bed, she said something that struck me as just as devastating, in its tender severity, as anything I had ever read or heard. “If I had known I was going to love him this much,” she said, “I’m not sure I would ever have had him.”