Kindle Notes & Highlights
The stories of our lives can be told in so many ways, but no one account, no matter how carefully rendered, is completely true. Words are, at best, only an outline, something I discovered years ago whenever I was asked about my childhood.
Changing the subject is something I’m particularly good at. This, too, I attribute to foster care. Deflecting unpleasant realities is a foster child specialty.
“Change isn’t bad—it’s just different.”
When exactly did all our communications become about the business of our lives and stop being about things that really matter?
“Like ashes in the wind. Everything good inside her shriveled and died, and after his death she went wherever the wind blew her.”
“She gave me to her mother to raise, like a fairy-tale sacrifice to an evil witch. And if that sounds overwrought, believe me, it’s not.
Robin was in over her head, but she didn’t know it. I wondered what she would think if I was ever completely honest with her. Which of us would the truth destroy faster?
“I used to hide food. I got thrown out of one foster home because my stash of graham crackers and moldy cheese attracted mice.” “We get a lot of that, but not the throwing out part. I give every new girl a plastic container with a secure top to hide whatever she needs to. Thwarts the mice.”
“Some people think if we wallow in the past, eventually it will cease to have power over us. Others say if we just tell the past to take a hike, it will. Maybe not always, but that last one’s worked pretty well for me.”
Blocking worked for a long time, but some days now the voices are too loud to ignore.”
“I live in a world where most people can’t be trusted. If I don’t let them in, when they finally disappoint me, it’s no big deal.”
I’ll share a secret those of us who have been abandoned know, and it binds us together in the saddest of ways. Despite everything our parents did or didn’t do for us, we miss them until the day we die, and worse, we will always be certain, deep inside, that we were the cause of their desertion.
Because even one small island of success in a river of failure is worth whatever we have to do to achieve it.”
“They kept me for maybe six months. Then, when it was clear I wasn’t going to learn any good tricks, they snapped on my leash, took me back to the pound and said they didn’t want a puppy after all.”
I wasn’t sure which was stronger, fear or desire. Because for the first time in my life, how this turned out really mattered.
Sometimes you have to launch yourself into the void and hope there’s somebody there to catch you.
For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’”
“It’s easy to get obsessed with other things and forget the people around you.” “I never forgot you. I just forgot you might need more from me.”
It’s never possible to know everything that happened in the past, so we are forced to fill in the blanks, hopeful we’re on the right track, hopeful we’ve thought out all the possibilities and chosen the most likely scenarios. But unless we lived through every part of it, none of us can ever know for certain what really went on years ago. Not just because people lie more than they tell the truth—at least some people—but because our guesses are often completely wrong.
“Then as your reward I’ll teach you a lesson about why some people survive terrible things and go on to flourish, at least more or less. Somebody loved them. Somewhere along the way somebody cared enough to stretch out a hand and help them along.”
If the survivor is blessed with strength and some modicum of insight, then he or she may find the courage to keep moving through the bad times. It’s all about percentages. How much bad. How much caring. How much strength and insight, not to mention mental health.
I was given a talent and the ambition to use it. And those horrible years convinced me there was nothing left to lose, so why not plunge in headfirst and take whatever chance presented itself?”
I couldn’t wait for this day to end. The whole scene was a photographer’s dream, but for me, being here was closer to a nightmare.
In each moment the fire rages, it will burn away a hundred veils. And carry you a thousand steps toward your goal.’”
When we were sisters, young and heartbroken, we had learned to watch out for each other. We were still sisters.
“Nobody can know what it’s like to be at the mercy of strangers except somebody who has been.
“As memories fade, your touch, your face I reach for you through time and space. Did you look back or did you go Without goodbye, without hello? I’ll never know. At the mercy of strangers We are borne on the winds of fate At the mercy of strangers We wait.”
