Glitter and Glue

And it occurs to me that maybe the reason my mother was so exhausted all the time wasn’t because she was doing so much but because she was feeling so much.

The mother is the most essential piece on the board, the one you must protect. Only she has the range. Only she can move in multiple directions. Once she's gone, it's a whole different game.

But now I see there's no such thing as "a" woman, "one" woman. There are dozens inside every one of them. I probably should have figured this out sooner, but what child can see the women inside her mom, what with all the Motherness blocking out everything else?

Your father's the glitter but I'm the glue.

I had thought a good mother would not elicit such comments, but now I see that a good mother is required to somehow absorb all this ugliness and find a way to fall back in love with her child the next day.

Raising people is not some lark. It's serious work with serious repercussions. It's air-traffic control. You can't step out for a minute; you can barely pause to scratch your ankle.

The thing about mothers, I want to say, is that once the containment ends and one becomes two, you don't always fit together so nicely... The living mother-daughter relationship, you learn over and over again, is a constant choice between adaptation and acceptance.

Pulling at the hem of my emotion was the creeping sense that it might well take until 2036 for this child in my arms to feel a fraction of what I already felt for her.

The only mothers who never embarrass, harass, dismiss, discount, deceive, distort, neglect, baffle, appall, inhibit, incite, insult, or age poorly are dead mothers, perfectly contained in photographs, pressed into two dimensions like a golden autumn leaf.

What is it about a living mother that makes her so hard to see, to feel, to want, to love, to like? What a colossal waste that we can only fully appreciate certain riches--clean clothes, hot showers, good health, mothers--in their absence.

It may be that loving children, radically and beyond reason, expands our capacity to love others, particularly our own mothers.

named his recollections of Ántonia “My Ántonia” not to show romantic possession, but because he understood that his Ántonia was only one version of her and, at least partially, his creation.

It's easy to love kids who make you feel competent.

I snap and storm around and then spend long nights thinking of the most damaged adults I know and wondering if my particular brand of maternal fuckups are how they ended up like that.

The idea is that readers don't come blank to books. Consciously and not, we bring all the biases that come with our nationality, gender, race, class, age. They you layer onto that the status of our health, employment, relationships, not to mention our particular relationship to each book--who gave it to us, where we read it, what books we've already read--and as my professor put it, 'That massive array of spices has as much to do with the flavor of the soup as whatever the cook intended

In addition to helping the girls parse the world, and all its awful truths - time only goes one way, things end, affections wax and wane - I was the sole distributor of the strongest currency they would ever know: maternal love.

At first parenthood was as I had expected, exhausting, sometimes heinous, and occasionally divine. I held my children close enough to feel them breathe, laugh, swallow.

They get on with it. Even after imagining all this fineness—the girls (check), Edward (check)—I bawled, stuck on the awful thought that the reason I’d ended up in Ellen Tanner’s house, the reason no one had hired me as a waitress or bartender, the reason I’d been fired by Eugenia Brown and answered an ad from a widower, was so I could see how a family goes on, so I could witness their suffering, their slow but indisputable survival.

I live within my means and worship my girlfriends, especially the ones who play cards and rag me about keeping the thermostat set too low. I don’t long for other mothers anymore; I don’t even wonder about them. I was meant to be her daughter, and I consider it a damn good thing that she, of all people, was the principal agent in my development.

If my mom died and I couldn’t call her up inside myself, I’d pull on a pair of elastic-waistband pants, pour a touch of Smirnoff over ice, and phone a girlfriend to play cards. If that didn’t work, I’d try reading a library book on a beach chair, and if that didn’t work, I’d take her rosary beads and shake them like a shaman until she came back to me, until I could see her and hear her and feel her again.

It's like a good book: You don't have to be able to decode every passage to want to hug it when you finish.

I see that, sturdy though my mother was, she must have been gutted by the sound and sight and sheer vibration of her rabid daughter roaring, I HATE YOU! I HATE YOUR GUTS! I HATE YOU FOREVER! I had thought a good mother would not elicit such comments, but now I see that a good mother is required to somehow absorb all this ugliness and find a way to fall back in love with her child the next day.

I went from wondering endlessly about mothers to becoming one over a slow and almost relaxing seventeen hours involving a delicious opiate called Fentanyl. Mothering Georgia has forced on me many decisions, and by many, of course I mean millions. The first big one was baptism. The issue had come up before, loosely during the pregnancy and intermittently since she was born. I’d been baptized, as had Edward. But did we believe enough to pass it on?

But it's my home, and not just because I grew up pledging my allegiance and taking tests on the Electoral College and Pearl Harbor. It's in me, running through me like my mother's blood.

Old people and their hyper-calibrated radar. They can't hear a word, and they can barely get out of their chairs, but they've got six or seven other senses, scanning, collecting, decoding.

I was meant to be her daughter, and I consider it a damn good thing that she, of all people, was the principal agent in my development.

Raising people is not some lark. It’s serious work with serious repercussions. It’s air-traffic control. You can’t step out for a minute; you can barely pause to scratch your ankle.

But now I see there's no such thing as a woman. one woman. There are dozens inside every one of them. I probably should've figured this out sooner, but what child can see the women inside her mom, what with all that Motherness blocking out everything else?

my dad did a load a day, folding it in front of whatever Eagles, Flyers, or 76ers game was on TV.