I watched my son sleep in the car on the way home

Dear Delyara, His mouth had fallen slightly open and his head kept dipping with each turn, and I drove more carefully than usual because there is something so helpless and beautiful about a sleeping child in a car seat even when that child is now old enough to roll his eyes at you in supermarkets. He had had a hard day at school. Nothing terrible, just one of those child-sized heartbreaks that still come home in the body if not always in full words. By the time we left the after-school club, he was done. Completely done. I kept glancing at him in the mirror at red lights and feeling that familiar maternal ache — the wish to protect them from everything and the knowledge that you cannot, and the strange honour of being allowed to carry them through the exhausted part of it anyway. It was only a twenty-minute drive. It felt sacred.