Every Last One

Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.

Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.

There's something undeniable about the posture of a person trying not to acknowledge your existance

This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their friends: by sitting in the driver's seat and keeping quiet.

It's only before realities set in that we can treasure our delusions.

In the aftermath of death Small talk feels too small, big talk too enormous.

We've made hyper motherhood a measure of female success.

there is still a kind of unique loneliness to child rearing for women. We so often do it in isolation. Add to the fact that in our competitive, perfectionist culture, in which the price woman are required to pay for freedom still seems to be martyrdom, almost everyone lies about motherhood. Part of that lying is loyalty - I can't let on that my kid is the only one on the playground who can't read or play the piano - and part of it is self-protection, since we've made hyper-motherhood a measure of female success. The preferred answer to the question "How are you?" is always "Fine," and the answer to the question "How are the kids?" is supposed to be "Great!" That's true even if the accurate answers would be "terrible" and "a mess." I think it produces its own kind of desperation, especially for women, who yearn to be emotionally open.

A loose end - that's what we woman call it, when we are overwhelmed by the care of small children, the weight of small tasks, a life in which we fall into bed at the end of the day exhausted from being all things to all people.

How many times in the past three months have I been reminded of Ruby's two selves, the careful courteous young woman who spoke so sweetly to strangers and the person she let loose at home, where she was safe, where she could be spiky and harsh and uncertain and at sea? I have two selves now, too, the one that goes out in the world and says what sound like the right things and nods and listens and sometimes even smiles, and the real woman, who watches her in wonder, who is nothing but a wound, a wound that will not stop throbbing except when it is anesthetized. I know what the world wants: It wants me to heal. But to heal I would have to forget, and if I forget my family truly dies.

Out lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.

She say guilt is a useless emotion." "Oh, please," says Nancy. "Guilt is what separates humans from animals.

She is not what I envied in high school, the popular girl. She is something I'm not even sure existed then, the sure-footed girl. She gives the impression of being completely herself, and only a part of that impression is false.

it is the only time I can rest without sleeping, think without deciding, speak and hear my own voice. It is the only time I can be alone. Slightly less than an hour each weekday when no one makes demands.

My friendships have a certain symmetry at the moment: Alice is always asking me what she should do, and Nancy is always telling me what I should do.

This is what it is like to be married: conversations in which no one actually speaks.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell,

Here is what I know about dressing like your teenage daughter: She will always look better than you

I Remember how we put in a security system to keep intruders out of the house, and how we only used it when we went on vacations. It didn't matter: OUr intruder had a place at our table, kew where we hid the Easter eggs and where we'd buried the pet guinea pigs, was so familiar that when I saw him in the bedroom doorway that last time I thought he was my own son, come to kill me.

So much of friendship is about being in the right place at the right time.