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he didn’t want to hear about the pedestrian struggles of functional people because his trials were far direr.
“Land of the overeducated and underaware,”
Life was so disappointing. You could be reunited with your kid after fifteen years and still find yourself, two minutes in, talking about television.
David, so open and credulous and respectful. She could have killed him.
And he realized, then, how silly it seemed that you could ever know another person—really know her—and how silly it was to think that he had any idea what it was like to be her, day after day after day.
He couldn’t say these things to his children explicitly; it was an inconvenient caveat of being a dad.
This was arguably one of the life-saving rationalizations for the institution of marriage, one party consumed with worry so the other could sleep through the night.
People here were so nice that they seemed almost deranged.
She remembered, distantly, a lecture from one of her college English classes about Aristotelian poetics, about things being at once surprising and inevitable.
“I just love being a mom. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had.”
that childish fuck-you logic present in most marriages, the contrarian impulse to do something simply because your husband didn’t want you to.
“I think so much of making a relationship work has to do with choosing to be kind even when you may not feel like it.
She liked her children best, then, when they were sleeping.
sweet hope in the midst of the bitterness of life.
“If you don’t give your body the respect it deserves, you’ll be surprised by the ways it can fail you,”
Oak Park: the land of wide lawns and narrow minds,
Marriage, she had learned, was a strangely pleasurable power game, a careful balance of competing egos, conflicting moods. She could turn hers off in order to allow his to shine.
he was sick of telling people that he was willing to settle for their shitty behavior.
This was the point of having a family, these fleeting moments of absolute pleasure.
She wanted to tell him that the accretion of these kinds of days could be fatal to a marriage.
So much of marital misunderstanding stemmed simply from trying to keep the peace.
She started laughing, the kind of laughing where you were also partially crying; she had always associated it with exhaustion and psychopathy and her mother.
Occasionally pockets of humanity shone out of teenagers.
She was ambitious, like her father. He’d gone to medical school and she, conversely, had made herself appealing to men who were also planning on going to medical school
“Nobody’s ever prepared to care for a child full-time, is what I mean. Nobody understands what that means until they do it for themselves. We’re all just holding our breath and hoping nothing catastrophic happens. And how deeply you get hurt doing that! It’s constant pain. It’s a parade of complete and utter agony, all the time, forever.”
You made me recognize that my heart is in fact a bottomless hole of simultaneous pleasure and despair.
You gave my life meaning and ruined it at the same time.
“God, it’s hard to be a person in the world, isn’t it?”
The best thing about the cold was the comfort that came from escaping it.
“You’re so nice until you’re not. And then you’re the biggest asshole on the planet.
And it was weird, she thought, feeling adult and aware, how a thing so terrible as losing someone could yield goodness in the ones who were left.
At some point your children crossed a threshold from being children to being real people and it never seemed to announce itself dramatically but rather in quiet moments like this one.
she hoped they would provide a legacy of happiness, or at least the earnest pursuit thereof.
“Is it hard? Having such pretty sisters?”
“To being rode hard and put away wet.”
“Tell her she’s the most fun I’ve ever had.”
Sometimes it was enough just to listen to voices that weren’t your own.
Wasn’t that every sister’s dream from the beginnings of consciousness, to have your siblings under a spell?
But this was the thing: sometimes being a sister meant knowing the right thing to do and still not doing it because winning was more important.
that seemed like a pretty seminal thing, the realization that your parents could feel sad or scared.
“I’m healthy. I’m busy. I have two boisterous German shepherds and a fair amount of joy in my life.”
“Your stairway lies on the whisperin’ wind.”
The people we hurt the most are the ones we know won’t abandon us?”
it occurred to her that it was moments like these that made being alive feel worth it, little blips of contentment amid the mayhem and status quo.
way back before the world had grown so much larger than their grasp.
The world as it was would almost never be the world you wanted it to be, and there was a certain pleasure in finding your space in the schism.
to be peopled at all was a high-order gift, but to find people beyond your people was nothing short of miraculous, finding a person away from home who felt like home and shifted, subsequently, the very notion of home, widening its borders.
