In surely one of the most moving passages ever written in the English language, former US slave Frederick Douglass penned words that remind me of something vitally important.

‘I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life, and each of these times was in very short duration, and at night. She made her journeys to see me in the night, travelling the whole distance on foot, after the performance of her day’s work. She was a field hand, and a whipping is the penalty of not being in the field at sunrise, unless a slave has special permission from his or her master

…I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day. She was with me in the night. She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone. Very little communication took place between us. Death soon ended what little we could have while she lived, and with it her hardships and suffering. She died when I was about seven years old…

I was not allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial. She was gone long before I knew anything about it. Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.’

All this, to us, must be a reminder of how elemental, once perfectly formed, is the unbreakable chain of affinity between the individual who brings forth life, and the life of the person created, who grows into the most remarkable, individual personification of evolution’s astounding bounty.

Of course in the example of Frederick Douglass above we have a mother who was removed from her child against her own will, unlike today, where separation is also by choice.

The tragedy of our era is that the power and the tenderness of the mother–child relationship is beginning to be forgotten.

(This review is an extract from my first non-fiction book, The Remade Parent. [Currently out of print.])