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We believe, as our mother, that we are doing it right, that we are good mothers doing the right things for our children. Perhaps we are even a bit smug about the ways in which our young children are prospering. Love is enough. Love is a compass that will show us true north. So we navigate by the stars.

We say to ourselves, “Of course!” when some crisis resolves. “Of course!” As we say it we hear our mother's voice piously quoting from the Old Testament, “Bring a child up in the way that he should go and in the end he will not depart from it.”

In Brookline, many years from our walk to the cherry tree, things begin to go wrong with my Stephen. I talk to my mother and my sisters. As always they listen, consider, offer advice. Yes, they agree that maybe a private school is a good idea.

“Yes,” my mother says. “You're doing the right thing.”

But when the troubles exacerbate, when I begin to suspect drugs and guns, when Stephen's withdrawal becomes so profound he refuses to speak to me, eat at the same table, when he exhibits behavior I never imagined from one of my children, I call my mother and sisters less and less, then not at all.

My reports of Stephen's behavior have begun to shock them to silence. I hear their restraint. In their silence I believe that I am hearing their judgment of my son and me.

No, they have never experienced anything like this. How can they help? Would it help if they visited, or maybe I should send Stephen to them for a week or so. But in these offers I think that I detect caution in their voices, which I interpret as fear. I imagine them wondering how a visit from this wild nephew might affect their household.

“Don't worry—we'll figure it out. It'll be all right in the end,” I say, thinking to let this cup pass from them. They continue to write and call, voice their support, and offer help, but I become evasive.

I am afraid. My identification with my son and my feelings of responsibility for his behavior are strong. I am ashamed.

How can I tell my good sisters, with their young sweet children, about the things Stephen is doing? Daily I navigate by shame that carries me far away from my son and my family. Surely any child who behaves this way has a mother who has done something wrong. What wrong? Something, something very wrong.

It's been years, anyway, since I've been home. I've lost touch with my family. I've been finishing graduate degrees, writing, divorcing, remarrying, moving my children with me across country, overseas to London, and back again. My life has taken a course different from my sisters'.

I battle guilt from my smugness, personal and cultural, that confuses and paralyzes me: in my mother's and sisters’ eyes, certainly in my eyes, my son Charles has “turned out fine.” That was my doing, wasn't it? He is a good young man now in his first year of college, an excellent student with friends he is proud to bring home, wonderful, polite boys who call me “Mrs. Digges,” who carry my groceries from the car, open doors for me, boys whose company I thoroughly enjoy This is because of my good mothering of Charles, right?

Then what about Stephen? Why is he so troubled? Why does he act out in this way? How can two sons of the same mother and father be so different? These are the questions that make me angry. I believe that Stephen is intentionally challenging me and I want him to stop. I want all this trouble to stop. I actually believe that he can stop it.

After all. Look at all I've done for him. Think of how when he was tiny I carried him everywhere against my heart in a Snugli. How many nights I rocked him through his colic, slept with him next to me, forwent school and sports events with his brother because he was sick, or fussy, or tired?

The time he was choking, just as he began to lose consciousness, I was the one who reached down his throat with my finger and pulled out that piece of a toy. And who built for him with my own hands skate ramps, read to him every