Magpie

the tragic flaw of parenthood is that you equip your child to leave you.

they had to adapt their dreams, to cut the starry cloth of their imaginings to fit the circumstance of their reality,

No matter how much time she has spent in this house or how long she has notionally been part of this family, Kate always feels so out of place: an interloper from an alien race.

Ha could not see that his mother had behaved like a proprietorial harpy, and to explain it to him would require the dismantling of over 30 years of toxic maternal influence. Annabelle had wound her way into his psyche like a twisting wisteria.

Jake would sound different when he talked to her [his mother]. More needy, somehow, as if he were still craving approval. Kate found it odd that a grown man should have such a regimented yet cloying relationship with his mother.

What was the point of hope when it existed only to be extinguished,

Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

She supposed she was sad, but the sadness now went so deep she had forgotten how to understand it.

She had mistaken the bubbles of anxiety in her stomach for a simmering romantic passion, wrongly believing that love felt unsettled, like a half-packed suitcase awaiting a trip that never comes.

Not because his death would leave an absence in her life, but because his existence had.

Oh, no no no. I don’t want to be any bother.” He seemed so weak and so old. She realized he would probably die quite soon and when she thought of it, she felt a pang of incipient loss. Not because his death would leave an absence in her life, but because his existence had.

See,” she would have said to her mother, standing in front of an abstract work of splattered reds and oranges, dripping across the canvas like butcher’s blood. “I am someone.

But when she thinks back, Marisa realizes Jas was right. She had misinterpreted his unpredictability for passion, mistaking her anxiety for the butterflies you were meant to get at the beginning of love. And so she kept trying different tactics to keep his interest. If she could just need him a little bit less, Marisa would think, if she could stop issuing demands or ultimatums when he wouldn’t listen to all the other ways she had attempted to express her desires, if she could just cut off this part of herself and then this one and then that one, occupying an ever more limited space so that she would barely be any trouble at all, then she would be rewarded. Then she would be worthy of his undivided attention.

She watches him walk around the room, naked apart from those silly flip-flops he's put on because his feet feel the cold. She marvels at his lack of self-consciousness. He has a good body: tall and broad with a pronounced rump and the mearest hint of a thirty-something pounch, but he appears unaware of his physicality in these moments in way that a woman never would be. A woman, Kate thinks, would be worried about her flabby belly or her wide thighs or the fact that her breasts are more saggy that she'd like and she would assume she was being monitored by the male eyes in the room. Yet Jake treats his body as his own, inhabiting it with confidence. - (Page 277)

What must it feel like to be so calmly confident about one’s place in the world? To not have to try to make people love you?

although Marisa should have felt indignant at this retrograde parcelling-up of the domestic, although she should have questioned the underlying implication that home and babies were her sphere while earning the money to keep both afloat was his, she secretly liked it.