The Seven Day Switch

by Kelly Harms

Haven’t we all had those moments where the “road diverged” and both roads ahead are equally fascinating and equally cool? But you take one or the other and your life happens after that.

I thought I would avoid this by not naming her Mercedes or Kennedy, but it turns out girls named Sarah or Catherine or even Delores will also be tweens someday.

As the lawyer mom helpfully reminded me a few days ago, we are not living in a community property state, so it’s best to “keep up with your waxing and keep things interesting.”

my mom always said people can’t hate you if you apologize for their problems.

She often told me a quick surrender will take all the wind out of an angry person’s sails and make them notice how rude they are being.

I don’t quite understand what that has to do with my love of desserts. Oh! Wait! I get it: He’s sweet to love me even though I’m curvy, I suppose. I guess only the nicest sort of fellow could bear to look at this body unclothed.

She can’t be thinking I’m crying all the time if I’m supposed to be inspiring her as a successful working mother so that someday she can be a successful-er working mother.

Sometimes what looks powerful on a man looks rigid on a woman at first glance. The trick is to look harder.

“You have no idea how good this bath feels. I’m having a nervous breakdown, and this is literally the only thing that makes any kind of sense.

There is nothing, truly, more stress relieving than deep cleaning. As I learned from my own mother, the act can be a meditation, a devotional, when done in one’s own time.

This is what it is to be a working woman. Take it from me—you can have it all, as long as you don’t ever want time to enjoy having it all.”

In every fundamental love relationship, we ask our partners to be both solid as a rock and thrillingly fun at the same time, and it’s utterly unreasonable when we get annoyed that they can’t do both.

“It’s about confidence. About throwing your shoulders back and putting on something that makes you feel great and saying, This is me, world! ”

you draw lots of conclusions about what’s going on in the outside world that affects your day-to-day income and growth. But those things are outside your control. Why not focus on what’s going on in your inside world and see how that challenges or supports you?”

the secret to not thinking about how awful things are is just staying very, very busy.

It’s not the stuff I do that gives my life meaning. It’s the people I do it for.

“toner cartridges that for some reason can only be changed by people with vaginas.”

I recognize this feeling from every single December 31 I’ve ever had: the idea that if I don’t start doing whatever resolution it is I’ve decided on now, maybe I never will.

Two paths diverged in our woods, and because we are women, and women’s choices change dramatically with every single generation, both paths were less traveled by. And because there is no one way to have a family, no instruction book, and no trustworthy set of rules (and, trust me, I’ve looked), it is likely that both paths are just a little bit wrong and just a little bit right, and which one we take is simply a matter of luck and happenstance.