The Thing Around Your Neck

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

is one of the things she has come to love about America, the abundance of unreasonable hope.

where restaurants served one person enough food for three.

It amused her, how “cooking dinner” was made to sound like difficult work when it was really a sanitized string of actions: opening cartons and bags and placing things in the oven and microwave.

She had come to understand that American parenting was a juggling of anxieties,

life was a struggle with ourselves more than with a spear-wielding Satan; that belief was a choice for our conscience always to be sharpened.