I don’t know what I want to do with my life, and neither does she. She loved her son, but she was bored, I could tell. That’s why she let him talk to other people. She was just a little tired of him talking to only her all day. Babbling, really; that’s what the look on her face said. Did she even know she was lucky?

My father works so hard he has to lie down at the end of the day in a dark room, alone, no sound. And my mother works two jobs that pay the same as one. So I don’t know what I want to do. I just know I don’t want to do what they do.

But that woman? She didn’t have to do what they do. She just had to read, play, sing, and stop for snacks along the way.

And I wonder: Does she regret that now, the snack, more than anything? That they stopped at Starbucks when they could have kept going, if she’d just had a little more willpower, a kind of firmness in her voice that allowed her to say no? Did the boy really need a cake pop that day, in the afternoon?

What kind of mom doesn’t know when to say no to her child?