“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.”
“Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can t protect her child - not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance.”
“And when she [her daughter] one day turns on me and calls me a Bitch in front of Hollister, Give me the strength, Lord, to yank her directly into a cab in front of her friends, For I will not have that Shit. I will not have it.”
“Are you scared of going in to see the raghnaid [the council]?” asked a gray female pup. “Are you cag mag [crazy]? If a bear was his Milk Giver, you think he’s scared of the raghnaid?”
“Mother doesn t cook, Ignatius said dogmatically, She burns.”
“She sat in the sunshine watching the life on the street and guarding within herself, her own mystery of life.”