拥有着她的新朋友们和她自己的爱好，她没有依赖任何人，她的生命现在是她自己的。

但是时不时地，她也会想起那个危急的时刻，那一刻，身为母亲的爱让一切变得不同。

In springtime, when our first lambs arrive, I go out to the sheep-pen to watch the ewes, see them nursing their young, tenderly, contentedly; licking the wet coats, bleating reassuringly.

And I say to myself, how basic the maternal instinct is. Being a mother is easy; all you have to do is follow your nature. No call for careful planning, balanced judgements, knife-edge decisions, like everywhere else in life.

Before long, however, motherhood takes on another aspect: When your treasure turns her innocent gaze upon you and says ‘no’; spits out the nourishing good food you have prepared for her, stamps her little foot and announces that she hates you.

If you were a sheep, this is when you’d decide that time has come for weaning; turn your back on the offspring and enjoy chewing your grass in peace, without someone tugging at your udder.

We, of course, can’t do that. Our children need us and will continue to do so, long after the maternal bond starts to give.

To love them just as much can be a challenge. But this is where we start to learn from our young: lessons of patience, empathy and forbearance.

Being a mother is no longer easy. But it does bring its own rewards.

Once I found myself in an air emergency. Before attempting to crash-land, we had to spend an hour circling to burn up excess fuel.

It was a very long hour. The stranger in the seat next to me held my hand and told me his whole life was passing before him.

My own mind was following a more morbid course, picturing my funeral, pondering whether there would be enough left of me to put in a coffin.

Then another image broke through, the agonising thought my unconscious had been fighting to suppress: the toddler I had left behind, the image of him coming into our bedroom in the morning, getting into his mother’s bed to start the day with a cuddle.

I saw him entering this room day after day, with a bed that remained empty, where he would never again feel his mother’s arms wrapped around his warm little body.

It was then that I realised the terrible encumbrance of parental love. How it keeps us fettered to this life, held to ransom, so that we can’t even die gracefully, without our hearts being broken.

Since that day, I have only one prayer for myself: that I may live long enough to see my child able to get on without me.

My only child has just started boarding-school. The house is painfully empty. It was the boy himself who wanted to go, backed up by his father.

I resisted, with rational arguments and less rational emotions. In the end I confronted my husband and asked him why he wanted to send our son away to school. “Because I believe it would do him good,”was his straight answer.

In the sleepless night that followed, I had to admit that he was right. By daybreak I had accepted that, whatever my own feelings, I had no right to hold up a process that would assist my child in his social and academic development.

And I remembered the lines my mother wrote in a notebook the day I left home to study in a foreign country:

When you were born,

I said to myself,

I shall never again be alone.

Little did I realise

that the infant I cradled in my arms

was given to me on loan,

to care for and prepare

for the day when I would hand her over,

to another life

that I can share