“This is one of the weird things about motherhood. You can predict that some of your best moments will happen around the toilet at six am while you re holding a pile of fingernail clipping like a Santeria priestess.”
“It would seem that something which means poverty, disorder, and violence every single day should be avoided entirely, but the desire to beget children is a natural urge.”
“I also know that I won t go forth and have children just in case I might regret missing it later in life; I don t think this is a strong enough motivation to bring more babies onto the earth. Though I suppose people do reproduce sometimes for that reason - for insurance against later regret. I think people have children for all manner of reasons- sometimes out of pure desire to nurture and witness life, sometimes out of an absence of choice, sometimes without thinking about it in any particular way. Not all the reasons to have children are the same, and not all of them are necessarily unselfish. Not all the reasons not to have children are the same, either, though. Nor are all those reasons necessarily selfish.”
“I used to fear their deaths--the car! the dog! the sea! the germ!--until I realized it need never be a problem: on the trolley, on the way to the mortuary, I would put my hands into their ribs and take their hearts and swallow them, and give birth to them again, so that they would never, ever end.”
“She caught herself working so hard at mothering that she forgot to enjoy her children. -from ~Homecoming Season~”
“I ll remind you of that someday , Maura says. when you re married to a man who once looked into your eyes and promised to forsake all others. I ll remind of that after you ve just had his baby and you have postpartum depression and feel as fat as cow and you are pumping milk into a plastic containers in the middle of the night while he s running around with some twenty-two-years old named Lissette. I ll remind you of that. Maura to Jess.”
“I think I m smart, and I know I was a good mom. But there wasn t a lot I could point to and say, that s why I m special.”
“One unforeseen advantage of having a child was that it gave me the excuse to talk to myself to my heart s content and pretend it was for my daughters benefit.”
“For a long time, I tried to make my ilfe work, to make our family work. I got tired, though. Five children wears you out until the only thing left inside you, the only thing you ve got to give, is a memory of what you thought you d be.”