I have this picture of my mother holding me as a baby, and we're both looking into a mirror. I'm perhaps seeing my own face and my mother's reflection for the first time. I know that baby is me because the woman in that picture is obviously not the same 20-year-old who gave birth to my half-brother 8 years earlier. She's smiling radiantly, but you can see the lines of worry already impressed on her forehead and a certain telltale weariness clouding those big, open eyes.

I could idolize my mother, imperfect as she was. She worked so hard and suffered so much to raise my half-brother and me on her own, how could I not? The price she paid was more than enough to cover a host of defects, let alone her small stack of sins, especially when I consider how many mothers would have abandoned or exploited us under the same circumstances or — worse yet — subjected us to stepfathers from Hell. Given her history with men, that could have happened. I'm not surprised, then, that she chose no male role models for us over bad ones.

I could also judge her as negligent, as others have, for