From the Editor’s Desk: Mother (Premium)

Yesterday was Mother's Day, my annual reminder that most people have a much healthier relationship with their parents than I do. But this Mother's Day served as another unhappy reminder of the past when our son Mark, who planned weeks ago to visit for the occasion, passed out while driving here and found himself on the side of the road, scared and confused.

He's probably OK. He was close enough to home when this happened that his friends came to pick him up so he didn't have to drive anymore. And he spent the day, literally the entire day, in a hospital, taking tests, after first visiting an emergent care facility. Long story short, he appears to have a heart arrhythmia, which sounds scary, and is scary (to me), but is apparently common and easily treatable.

And that would all be well and good were it not for two mitigating factors. He's deaf because of a near-fatal bout of bacterial meningitis at the age of one, and he had two cochlear implant surgeries at an early age to give him some semblance of hearing, so it's not like he needs another medical condition. And I'm his dad, and I die a little bit inside every time something bad happens to him. Every single time.

And that, really, is the central paradox of being a parent, the one thing, ironically, my mother was right about on this topic. That no matter how old they are, no matter how mature or independent, they will always be your child. And you will always be afraid for their wellbeing. Feelings that can consume you if you're not careful. Feelings that I believe to be amplified when you've held the lifeless body of that child in your arms when he was a baby, as I did, and can now never forget.

When I was a child myself, I had vivid dreams of me flying our neighborhood in Hyde Park, a suburb of Boston in which we lived before moving to Dedham when I was 7. Looking back on this now, I assume I had seen a movie or TV show depicting such a thing because my memories of these dreams still seem realistic to me, and it's unclear how I could have possibly imagined this viewpoint at such an early age. But whatever the inspiration, it stuck with me, and whenever a group of kids would have that inevitable conversation about which superpower we'd pick if we could have one, my answer was always the same: I wanted to fly.

As an adult, I can't say that I think about superpowers all that much. But in some ways I do, because I often think about whether I'd go back in time if I could and correct the mistakes of the past. Not little mistakes like personal embarrassments. Major mistakes. Like the circumstances that led to what would have been the death of our son had a particularly good doctor not realized what he was seeing, properly diagnosed what was then an impossibly rare condition, and saved his life.

The answer, ultimately, is no. Not because I don't want to make things right, but because I would never deny my children the lives they've had and will have in the future. I would not...