The Bright Years

People always say not to forget because then history will repeat itself. But maybe history will repeat itself anyway, and forgetting is how we bear it.

There are two kinds of grief at a wake: grieving the loss of what was and grieving the loss of what wasn’t.

A mother stays even when she's gone, like a muted moon in the daytime sky.

Everyone says gone but not forgotten, but it's ultimately the other way around. Generations later, a mother is forgotten but not gone- a pulse in the bodies born from her love

We begin to say goodbye as soon as we say hello

She wiggles and squirms and shifts, and fear hums beside me as I begin to understand that keeping a child is like keeping the sky— always with me but never mine.

Sometimes a woman's choice is between impossible and impossible and impossible, and she just has to make it. Survival calculations become more urgent than rightness.

You must not measure salvation like an ingredient that’s either there or not. Yes, salvation can be a heroic moment of rescue. But more often, it’s smaller. Slower.

Time can wash dirt off of a memory until it is revealed as something else entirely.

Because you have shown me that love is worth the losing of it.

this is where it starts. We begin to say goodbye as soon as we say hello. Death is a corollary of birth, and to welcome life is to guarantee loss.

keeping a child is like keeping the sky—always with me but never mine.

Shh, shh. Your mom will be here soon to feed you. We’re here at the beginning. I’ll paint a bottle of milk for you. I will not throw it. But I left my white crayon under the table. If we can’t take a drive, how about a little walk? I wake. Startle. She has been fed. Grown up. Hated me. Loved me again. I am old. Dying. And she is still here. This is a forgiveness I never gave my own father. But—Georgette! I close my eyes. Georgette.

The thing about alcoholism is that there’s sickness on both sides. Drink, you’re sick. Don’t drink, you’re sick. A blurred line between medicine and poison.

I’ve learned how big of a dream it is to have a small life. That the cost of ambition is high.

It's not that you don't need anyone-just that you don't need everyone.

What's the difference between an excuse and a reason?

It was our pain that pulled us together like magnets, that medicinal click of solidarity between two hurting people. But as powerful as pain might be, it was never going to keep us together.

it does something to a girl—even a grown girl with an awful father—to see her father hurt.

You can’t control anyone else’s choices, but you start with what you’re given and then you make your own.

If there’s any liar bigger than an alcoholic, it’s the alcohol, saying, All there is is now and It won’t hurt anyone and This is the last time.

Her heart is buried in the darkness of the earth, but it is also buried in the darkness of my body. Everyone says "gone but not forgotten," though it's ultimately the other way around: generations later, a mother is forgotten but not gone- a pulse in the bodies birthed from her love. Shit. I might want to have children. All that resurrection.

Love is worth the losing of it,

And I don't know if it's bad like abuse. Abuse is much easier to identify when it's not in your own kitchen.

One of the most disorienting parts of parenthood is how it can warp your sense of time. Or maybe not warp. Maybe what children do is straighten time out. Like clock hands, they keep us ticking forward even as we try to apprehend the lines and circles of it.