Mario and Avril; the Dean’s office (pp. 767–768)
Avril couldn’t change diapers. She’d come to him in tears, he’d been seven, and explained, and apologized. She just couldn’t handle diapers. She just couldn’t deal with them. She’d sobbed and asked him to forgive her and to assure her that he understood it didn’t mean she didn’t love him to death or find him repellent.
Context
Set right against "His father and later Hal had changed him for years, never once judging or wrinkling their face," this is the one hard limit inside the omnipotent maternal grace — and it's telling that it comes out as her grief, managed. Incontinent till his early teens, Mario got his diapers changed by father and brother; the mother who loves him a hundred times a day "just couldn't handle diapers," and turned even that incapacity into a scene where the seven-year-old had to forgive her, understand her, and reassure her that she wasn't repellent to him. The love is total and the actual bodily tending it can't do gets routed to the men, while the failure gets processed as the mother's own wound requiring the child's comfort. Surveillance-love that can recite the definition of engulfment but can't touch a soiled diaper — the affection maximal, the caretaking selective, and the shortfall always somehow the child's to absolve.