You just stood up to your mother.... I should think now you could take on the world.

But the mother was marvellous above all, and worthy of honourable memory: for when she saw her seven sons slain within the space of one day, she bore it with a good courage, because of the hope that she had in the Lord.

Most young men are such bores. They haven't lived long enough to learn that they are not the wonders to the world they are to their mothers.

She also understood there was a hole in her heart where her son should be, that she was a wicked, selfish woman for wishing him back.

We found that mothers showed no differential behavior toward their sons versus their daughters. They weren't being nasty to their sons or encouraging to their daughters.

I suppose the mothers of most twelve-year-old boys live with the uneasy conviction that their sons are embarked upon a secret life of crime.