“The duty of the moment is what you should be doing at any given time, in whatever place God has put you. You may not have Christ in a homeless person at your door, but you may have a little child. If you have a child, your duty of the moment may be to change a dirty diaper. So you do it. But you don t just change that diaper, you change it to the best of your ability, with great love for both God and that child.... There are all kinds of good Catholic things you can do, but whatever they are, you have to realize that there is always the duty of the moment to be done. And it must be done, because the duty of the moment is the duty of God.”
“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.”
“Then there is the matter of my mother s abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.”
“The only good poem I’ve ever written is you. A daughter is a poem. A daughter is a kind of psalm. You, in the world, responding to me, is the song I made. I cannot make another.”
“Billie wanted to ask if motherhood was always that way- waiting for rest to find you, for parts of yourself to come back together.”
“She was thinking a million things, some of which had plagued her even before she d found out: What if the state floods; we reelect that terrible man; if I m bad at it; I do it and then I decide I don t want to do it; if I don t do it and miss it; what if someone shoots me in the grocery store, the movie theater, my own home; what about the revisionist histories taught in schools; what if I m not self-sacrificing enough; if I m too self-sacrificing; if me and Liam get divorced, shit happens; what if the kid hates me; if I m cruel; if I really really love it and lose it; if none of this can be sustained, not our love or our planet? What if, in the end, we just dye the ocean and wish it well? For better or worse, she didn t know if it was responsible to bring new life into this world, but she couldn t spend all her time agonizing. She had to keep moving, keep breathing, or else she d cease to exist, so she gave Pia the simplest of answers, what it could all boil down to: Honestly? What will this baby do to me?”
“And I decided when you were born that I would hide my heart from you, because I worried I would love you into nervous oblivion.”
“The moms I knew when I was little didn t have to prove that it was okay to want a child. Sure, a lot of women I know wonder if they do want a child, but not why. It s assumed why. The question cis women get asked is: Why don t you want kids? And then they have to justify that. If I had been born cis, I would never even have had to answer these questions. I wouldn t have had to prove that I deserve my models of womanhood. But I m not cis. I m trans. And so until the day that I am a mother, I m constantly going to have to prove that I deserve to be one. That it s not unnatural or twisted that I want a child s love. Why do I want to be a mother? After all those beautiful women I grew up with, the ones who chaperoned my classes on field trips, or made me lunch when I was at their house, or sewed costumes for all the little girls that I ice skated with — and you too, Katrina, for that matter — have to explain their feelings about motherhood, then, I ll explain mine. And do you know what I ll say? Ditto.”
“Balance is an illusion. Balance is just another word for control.”
“Love is what remains when everything else is gone. This is what I should have told my children when we left Texas. What I will tell them tonight. Not that they will understand yet. How could they? I am forty years old, and I just learned this fundamental truth myself. Love. In the best of times, it is a dream. In the worst of times, a salvation. I am in love. There it is. I ve written it down. Soon I will say it out loud. To him. I am in love. As crazy and ridiculous and implausible as it sounds, I am in love. And I am loved in return. And this-love-gives me the courage I need for today. The four winds have blown us here, people from all across the country, to the very edge of this great land, and now, at last, we make our stand, fight for what we know to be right. We fight for our American dream, that it will be possible again. Jack says that I am a warrior and, while I don t believe it, I know this: A warrior believes in an end she can t see and fights for it. A warrior never gives up. A warrior fights for those weaker than herself. It sounds like motherhood to me.”
“In the end it doesn t matter if this creature is really our mother. We feed it things and tell it about our problems. It s still all about us.”
“I have my fingerprints all over you. & I don t need the world to see them to know that they re there.”
“We are all so obsessed with protecting out child, aren t we? That s how we got into this mess in the first place. We want to paint a lovely picture that we hang over their window to block out how the world really works, to give them these lives. And to do that, we think we need to keep ourselves perfect too. But no mother in the history of the world has been able to protect her child forever. the world barges in through the front door eventually.”