A Mother Always Knows

Habitual fretting about her children, her husband, her sister, the help, had rubbed her senses raw; migraine, mother-love and, over the year, many hours of lying still on her bed, had distilled from this sensitivity a sixth sense, a tentacular awareness that reached out from the dimness and moved through the house unseen and all knowing. Only the truth came back to her, for what she knew, she knew. The indistinct mumur of voices heard through a carpeted floor surpassed in clarity a typed-up transcript; a conversation that penetrated a wall, or better, two walls came stripped of all but its essential twists and nuances. What to others would have been a muffling was to her alert senses which were fine-tunes like the cat's whiskers of an old wireless, an almost unbearable amplification. She lay in the dark and knew everything.

Ian McEwan, Atonement p. 66.

* - I will be travelling this week and since I am preparing an essay which takes a little bit of research effort you might have to wait a bit for my next post. I leave you with an excerpt from what has been called the "best novel" by, who some refer to, as "our greatest living novelist".