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A thought, an idea, a shared dream; parenthood is a story two people start telling together.
Unsupervised reading is a blessing for a certain kind of child.
She found her phone in her purse and spent the next ten minutes on 179th Street trying to find the picture to confirm her memory, but it had disappeared. It wasn’t in her texts, her downloads, her photo gallery. Just gone. As if the person who’d sent it had snatched it away.
become something larger, a prison of falsehoods.
Good mothers are a gift,
He’d always been so sure—a book man, a husband, a father—but now none of those roles seemed his to fill.
“I tried to be nice about saying no to Charles, but some men, you can’t be nice to them. If you’re polite, they think it means you’re undecided. They hear your tone and ignore your words. It makes life a lot harder for the woman, but I don’t think a man like that notices.
Every human being is a series of stories; it’s nice when someone wants to hear a new one.
History isn’t a tale told once, it’s a series of revisions.
‘Women only like jerks.’ That’s the mantra of dudes who have made themselves undateable but aren’t willing to take the blame.
When I was starting out, you got by on one income, and that was enough, but these days you’ve got to be poor or rich to survive on one income. You want to stay afloat in the middle, and you both are hitting that nine to five.”
“People call us witches,” Cal said quickly. She grabbed Apollo’s hand. “But maybe what they’re really saying is that we were women who did things that seemed impossible. You remember those old stories about mothers who could lift cars when their kids were trapped underneath? I think of it like that. When you have to save the one you love, you will become someone else, something else. You will transform. The only real magic is the things we’ll do for the ones we love.
‘We can be heroes,’ ” Patrice said. “But heroes like us don’t get to make mistakes.”
“People share everything now,” Jorgen said in a marveled hush. “They share which playgrounds they visit with their children and at what times. They share when they’ve hired a babysitter. They share photos of the schools their children attend. They’re so proud of their children. They can’t help themselves. They want to share it all. But who are they sharing it with? Do they really know what they’ve invited into their homes? I promise they don’t.”
“And you, I know you. One of these special new fathers. You’re going to document every moment, every breath of your child’s life. You take videos of them while they’re sleeping and slap them on the computer before the baby wakes up. You think you’re being so loving. You’ll be a better father than the one who raised you! Or the one who was never there at all. But let me tell you what I see instead. The neediness of it. The begging to be applauded. As if the praise of a thousand strangers would ever make up for the fact that you didn’t feel loved enough as a child. Oh, you poor thing. You were
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But reconciliation never came easy, not with the things that mattered.
“Sleep is the cousin of death.”
The world is full of glamour, especially when it obscures the suffering of the weak.
What lengths will people stretch to believe they’re still good?
He felt as if he was finally burying what had been haunting him since he was a child. A funeral not for his father but his fatherlessness. Let that monster rest.
they lived happily today.” “Is that enough?” he asked, looking at Brian, looking at her. “That’s everything, my love.”
