Kindle Notes & Highlights
Eventually I felt like a Mom de Sade, trolling for ideas of how to create rewards and penalties.
I was merely creating situations where my child was incentivized and disincentivized! I was doing what any person would do in an intensely interactive relationship that was constantly evolving, hierarchical, loaded, often claustrophobic and highly emotional. One in which I was temporarily bigger and smarter. Maybe smarter.
The sad truth is, wealthy women have only the children they want to have. They will always be able to get an abortion if they want one, and relatively speaking, all of us women, those five women getting the abortion with me, in 1960, they were wealthy compared with the general population. So if it becomes illegal it will only be the poor women who won’t be able to get an abortion, because the wealthy will always have a way. And those poorer women are exactly the women who need to have that choice the most.
And I’m sure Noam Chomsky would have a heart attack over how I’m conflating attitudinal tone with phonological tone, but uh . . . suck it Chomsky.)
“You know, these public schools are really best for two types of kids. One type is the kid who needs extra help and attention. Kids who have a real mental disability. Or the opposite type. If your kid is very, very smart they can get into the accelerated, well-funded high-honor school. But if your kid is middle-of-the-road, it’s actually not a great place.”
“We live in the quintessential small town,” I said to Michael. “No, we live in a town, where if you have enough money, you can buy the small-town experience,” Michael said, smiling.
I have lived a particularly privileged life. I was able to choose not to be a mother, and I was able to choose to be a mother, on my own terms. I was able to choose to move to a place with good public schools, just because we can afford to pay these kinds of taxes. I was enabled by a system where the deck was stacked in my favor, and now I am able to stack it in my daughter’s favor. I am well aware that I am lucky beyond reckoning.
Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride. —Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes
people live and move around, they fall in love and create kids, there are economic and environmental upturns and downturns, people move and shift some more. I see all of us as on a river, floating along, bumping into one another.
Thinking through this whole family experience has made me feel less attached to places and things, and more invested in experiencing being with people I love.
I think of us as such a small random unit, passing through this life together in a big, unforgiving, frightening, unpredictable, beautiful, luxurious, breathy world.
