The Mothers

by Brit Bennett

Oh girl, we have known littlebit love. That littlebit of honey left in an empty jar that traps the sweetness in your mouth long enough to mask your hunger. We have run tongues over teeth to savor that last littlebit as long as we could, and in all our living, nothing has starved us more.

Grief was not a line, carrying you infinitely further from loss. You never knew when you would be sling-shot backward into its grip.

Maybe she’d never really known her mother at all. And if you couldn’t know the person whose body was your first home, then who could you ever know?

We’ve seen what this world has to offer. We’re scared of what it wants.

How could she be proud of lapping her mother, when she had been the one to slow her down in the first place?

washed his hands with pink soap that left his skin feeling soft and smelling like powder. It made him feel unmanly, so he started washing his hands with the orange dishwashing soap in the kitchen instead.

The author really wants to make it clear that this is a heterosexual man

The pier was nothing but a long piece of wood that kept crumbling until it was rebuilt, and years later, she wondered if that was the point, if sometimes the glory was in rebuilding the broken thing, not the result but the process of trying.

Every heart is fractured differently and she knows the pattern of her cracks, she traces them like lines across her palm.

This was a strange, lopsided universe, all saints but no sinners, angels but no demons. An off-kilter world where girls mothered old women and betrayed their best friends.

She could find a nice man and live in this eternal summer.

Is this the point of her affair with Luke, a realisation of her desire to live in a suspended, eternal state. Maybe this is a characteristic she has inherited from her mother, a lust for eternal summer.

magic you wanted was a miracle, magic you didn’t want was a haunting.

Who would you be when you weren’t just you anymore?

She got her mother in her, holding the knife, and her own spirit flinted over, and each time they struck, she would spark. Her whole life, a spark.

Nadia will never be able to settle until she confronts her mother, the Mothers and how she has let herself be defined by motherhood.