The desolation and terror of, for the first time, realizing that the mother can lose you, or you her, and your own abysmal loneliness and helplessness without her.

The sentence anatomizes a primal moment in emotional development: the child’s first clear apprehension that the mother is not an invulnerable constant but a separable, mortal presence. “Desolation and terror” name the shock of contingency—loss is possible in both directions (“the mother can lose you, or you her”). The phrase “abysmal loneliness and helplessness” suggests that the mother has functioned as the child’s existential ground; without her, the self confronts an unbuffered world. In Thompson’s hands, the insight becomes not merely psychological but metaphysical: attachment is revealed as both sustaining and precarious, and love’s intensity is inseparable from the fear of its rupture.