Throughout, my mother told me how lucky I was to experience the “real world.” I did my best to believe her. I enjoyed feeling like I was part of a cause, even if I had only a vague sense of what that meant. At the same time, I hungered for stability.

In the end, my mother was devastated that I never became the radical she dreamed I’d be. “I have to accept that he is no revolutionary,” she wrote in her diary a decade after I left home. “I do need to deal with my grief over this.” She also wrote that she was having trouble sleeping because of “Peter’s betrayal of class struggle.”

My mother’s diaries made clear that she saw being a good mother and good revolutionary as the same thing, that there was no tension between the two and that those who thought otherwise just didn’t get it. She was angry that some of her friends and relatives thought I would be better off with my father and that she would feel unburdened, “as if delivering my child to the enemies of the revolution would ‘free me up’ somehow to make revolution.” That, she wrote, was “not the kind of revolution I’m into.”

She saw her rejection of traditional “good mothering” — constrained by the nuclear family and the creature comforts of capitalism — as proof itself that she was a good mother. Still, during the days I spent in an Ecuadorean hospital bed recovering from a serious bout of diarrhea when I was 7, she acknowledged in her diary what she would never have said to me: “I feel kind of guilty for exposing him to such hazards.” But then she continued: “If he gets through O.K. he’ll have some understanding that he may be glad for later. We have been living in one of the largest slums in South America.”

I did not know until going through the diaries how worried she was that others, including me, might judge her to have been a bad mother. She wrote that when I didn’t call her it made her feel that she needed to ask for forgiveness.