Larger Than Life

by Jodi Picoult

When the matriarch is gone, so is the herd’s collective memory.

There is a reason people say being a mother is the hardest job in the world: You do not sleep and you do not get vacation time. You do not leave your work on your desk at the end of the day. Your briefcase is your heart, and you are rifling through it constantly. Your office is as wide as the world, and your punch card is measured not in hours but in a lifetime.

I think about the moon, which is always in the sky, but only comes to life when she is wrapped in the arms of the night.

And I tried to think like a scientist, not a daughter—making lists of all the times she had slighted me, all the things she had never said. Objectively—biologically—I knew I was an adult, that I could survive without her approval or attention. There was no reason she had to be part of my life, now that I was grown and independent. But love, you know, isn’t science. My mother was prickly, mercurial, maddening, demanding, infuriating—but she was still my mother.

She was a part of me, and if you carved away a part of yourself, you bled to death.

As it turns out, you can love someone too much. Then, when they leave, your heart goes missing. And no one can survive that great a loss.

You’re a fixer, Grant mused. You’re also a colossal pain in the ass. The thing is, it’s the pains in the ass that change the world.

I’m crying for all the things we lose that we cannot get back.

“For someone who knows so much about the brain,” my mother says, “you know absolutely nothing about the heart.”

I had to learn how to be a mother before I realized how lucky I am to be a child.