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There are some things you learn best in calm, some in storm. —WILLA CATHER
No one could hurt you if you didn’t let them. A good offense was the best defense.
“Nothing I do or say is right. Honestly, she breaks a little piece of my heart every day. She swears she’ll skip school if I go to career day. Apparently a mother in the military is only slightly less humiliating than one in prison.”
She should have known better anyway. She knew better than to count on anyone to stand beside her, to stay. And yet even knowing that, knowing that she was alone again and that she was strong enough to take it, she felt herself breaking inside.
“What’s worse,” she said quietly, “a man who cries when you go to war or one who doesn’t?”
She needed him now, maybe for the first time, and he had let her down. Just like her parents.
The cost of war was here, in this room. It was families being torn apart and babies born without their parent at home and children forgetting their mother’s face. It was soldiers—some of them his age and others young enough to be his sons—who would come home wounded … or not come home at all.
We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us. —MARCEL PROUST
A house, divided against itself, cannot stand.
