MANILA, Philippines - I felt like the Michelin man, desperate to be relieved of Laura. We already had a name for our child, after Petrarch?s love object, for whom he wrote the sweetest sonnets.

Over Christmas lunch, this baby lobbed a mighty punch. The floodgates opened and, well, I missed Her Majesty?s Christmas message.

I?d had a difficult pregnancy. Before going under, I was still bargaining with the Almighty. Let Laura spring forth fully formed and I would forever be an instrument of His mercy. The infant was perfect, except he wasn?t a Laura. He was a Luke, and we were smitten.

?And what did you have? A boy or a child?? the mother in one of Douglas Kennedy?s books was asked. All babies are special, boys only more so.

Where did the years go?

Only yesterday, what dramatic gifts I may have had went into reading Thomas the Tank Engine to Luke.

Oh, the bribes we negotiated to make him eat something besides chicken and chips! Tooth fairies, letters to Santa to make sure he had our correct postcode, tears (mine) when he wore his school uniform for the first time, cars he vroomed and demolished, the little sister he begged me to buy at the supermarket.

The energy of this small dynamo! Like living in the path of a perpetual hurricane!

Within a few months of giving birth, I went back to work. Guilt was the tremble in my voice and the splinter of fear in my heart. We were very lucky with nannies.

Our lives ran on military precision: school runs, London trains, visits to doctors and dentists. How could a small boy?as beautiful and innocent as he was?upend our lives so?

I prepared a 14-page document for the nanny, covering playtime, bath time, meals, cuts and bruises, books to read, games to play, potty training, emergency numbers, treats. Years later, nanny Andrea wrote to say how invaluable the notes were; they?d formed templates for her own babies.

My husband and I would come home from work dead-tired, to give Luke his bath, put him in his jammies. I would tuck him in his bed, tell him stories, say our little prayers, the weight of the day draining away as my little boy closed his eyes, but not before saying ?I love you, mommy.?

Hours later, he would crawl half-asleep into our own bed.

We were unremarkable: a family of three, a house amid the orchards, a long garden for father and son to play football in, holidays in the snow and in the sun.

Every day a labor of love to build up our son?s emotional scaffolding, buttress his moral backbone, help him find his place in this big, oftentimes strange world.

Tragedy

And then, just like that, we were altered by our tragedy.

Can we ever know the ways of God, discern His purpose? Luke was on a skiing trip when his father died. This once gleeful boy was 13, and I was suddenly all alone in a crashing universe.

How to tell him it was okay to cry, that he didn?t have to carry my grief as well? ?It?s all so meaningless we might as well be extraordinary,? Bacon said.

My son put away his toys; when I woke up from a long, fogged sleep?homesick and heartsick for the past?he had become a serious, thoughtful young man.

How I missed the boy, with the smell of the sun on his lovely head! His father became an even more palpable presence, because of his precise absence.

Luke coming home from school to an empty house horrified me. He needed continuity, activity, a routine to give construct to his days.

Tonbridge School, one of the country?s top boarding schools, became his ?home? from 13, until he graduated, at 18.

We, in our separate ways, nursed our terrible grief: I in work, he in school, cricket and rugby.

I sewed hundreds of name tapes on his clothes, discussed his care and progress with his housemaster and teachers, left instructions for Matron.

I lived for half-term and summer holidays, Christmas and exeats, when he would come home, like Lawrence returning from Arabia, the fatted calf killed for celebration.

Sending a child to a top English public school felt like paying off the debt of a small Russian state. Bowed and bloodied, I survived. I entrusted a child in their care; they gave me back a man.

Minor miracles

Memories moved us, but we could not reclaim the past. The long separations were salved by the vacations in foreign parts that we took together and the letters we wrote to each other, his invariably ending with ?Mom, please send me some money.?

Whenever we had rows, usually over the neo-contemporary squalor of his room, he would remind me that I should count myself fortunate he wasn?t into drugs, in rehab, in trouble. Alleluia! In these trying times, these are, indeed, minor miracles.

At university, he fell in love for the first time. Charlotte was French and on a year?s study leave in the United Kingdom.

Long-distance romances rarely work out and I could see the baying doom round the corner. Coming home from Brittany after a summer on the beach with Charlotte, it was to me he cried his broken heart out.

Sometimes, only your mother can make you feel better. Truly I wanted to wring her neck, for this is love: When you want your son?s happiness more than your own.

First job

He?s landed his first job, in London. When he finds a flat he can afford to rent in the city, he?ll be leaving home again. And that?s as it should be. The child leaves the nest to explore, find his place in the world, play a straight and successful bat, find the girl, settle down. Have a sempiternally felicitous life, a fresh wind in his sail.

As I ponder the weight of impending solitude, I seem to have always been chronically late for my own life. Perhaps now I can relax a little, love again, greet the brand-new morn with a cheerful heart.

If we have done our job reasonably well, our children are our achievement. When asked what success meant to him, the richest man in the world said: ?When you get to be my age, you?ll be successful if the people you hope would love you do love you. It?s something you can?t buy. The way to be loved is to be lovable. You always get back more when you give.?

My son will soon leave the nest, knowing that the most precious parts of his mother?s life are bound up in his, and that he can always come home again.