Yes, he has always seen himself as a guardian of Claire and in the later season when both she and his wife are badly hurt and he wasn’t there when they needed him to stop it, he questions his usefulness and worth.
These scenes with Claire and Fergus are so important. With Jamie not in these scenes, it helps to show their bond and show why she sees him as a son in later seasons. Their family grows through the seasons by who they bring in and not just blood.
I like how Claire says she isn’t specifically La Dame Blanche since that is a witch who turns evil souls to ash, saying that “well then” she isn’t that fairytale sorceresses, but never actually says she isn’t a witch at all. Claire is a witch, just a different kind lol
Many of their best mother/son scenes are deleted scenes. He always behaved as a little son trying to be helpful and step up as a man to run things and protect his mother when his father is away. But he was a little boy none the less who needed love, reassurance, to be worried about, to be told not to do foolish things, to be comforted, and given many hugs by his mother, which is what he got. She always told him how much they need him, even if he wasn’t actually needed for a task like guarding Jamie, reassuring him of his value to them. Whenever she and Jamie were together and he addressed them, he always said Milady first. He always wanted to be like his father, but he deeply loved and admired his mother, and she adored him. And at the end of it all, she made the heartbreaking decision to give him up to save him when she sent him away to safety at Lallybroch, knowing she couldn’t follow and wouldn’t see her son again, in order to keep him and his unborn younger sibling safe. That is what it is to be a mother. When they are eventually reunited, he hugs her so tight, holding onto her cloak like he always did, and even at the age of 30 became that little boy in his mother’s arms again, and she finally got to hold her son once more. In the book, when he saw her again he actually broke down crying on his knees and began to sob in her lap. That is a mother/son bond.
