ABSTRACT
My wife showed signs of being pregnant. At the same time, I was somehow taken with the idea of trying one more time to be a dutiful son to my mother. We had left her in the countryside with many kids to look after, but no one to look after her. Each of her own children had their own reasons for not being able to take care of her. Those reasons aside, my wife thought the neglect was just too terrible. She somehow exempted me from the ranks of the neglectful, perhaps because I often went along with her when she went to the country to visit my mother. My mother was less forgiving. When I went along on the visits, she would screw her face into a grimace and declare, ‘Dear me, you’ve gone and pulled him along again.’ My wife would say, ‘I didn’t pull, he followed along on his own.’ I laughed at such exchanges. My wife worried about my mother being neglected while my mother detested her son tailing after her.
