Women and Children First

by Alina Grabowski

What if it’s all in my head? she asked one day, after a doctor suggested meditating twice a day to prevent the flashes. It’s not, I said. But even if it was, it’d still be just as real.

I can listen and I can pull people’s stories out of them, which means I could be a phone sex operator or a priest.

How do people without best friends live? Half of life is just waiting to tell something to the person who knows you best. And if you don’t have that person, you wait forever.

Sometimes I think that we already know what our futures hold—we’re just waiting for the right moment to stop hiding from ourselves.

No one protected her. And this is something our own daughters will never understand. That we were never girls, not really. For a moment we were children, yes. But a girl and a child are not the same. A child is a pet. A girl is prey.

I used to feel so high and mighty for being the breadwinner, but now I understand that I had to feel that way in order to convince myself all that exhaustion was worth it. There’s no real empowerment in this life. Just the people you commit yourself to and the ways in which you love and hurt one another.

IT’S DIFFICULT TO SEE WHAT’S shaping a kid when you’re in the process of raising her, in the same way that you don’t sense the design of a place when you’re standing in it. My first time on a plane, I was shocked to look down and see the ground’s uniform patchwork of carefully plotted tracts and roads, all stitched together like a quilt.