The Good Liar

by Catherine McKenzie

No one had told her, before she had children, that being a mother would be like reliving her own childhood, only worse. That she’d have to re-feel all the slights and worries a hundredfold.

“Coincidences aren’t strange or the evidence of anything; they’re a part of life.”

Depression’s a funny thing. We don’t know what to do about it—as a society—unless we’ve been there ourselves. The person before us is not someone we know, and their unhappiness is often not something we can understand. So we downplay it, and we make the afflicted somehow to blame. No one would ever tell someone with cancer that if they tried a bit harder, if they got out of bed and took a shower, everything would be better,

“Everyone’s different, and no one’s better than anyone else,” Tom said. “Some people are luckier, and some people have bad luck, and some people work hard and get things, and some people work very hard and don’t get things. We’re all entitled to the same respect.”