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Both phases of parenthood – the newborn years and the almost-adult ones – are bookended by sleep deprivation, though for different reasons.
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She’d thought motherhood was so boring at the time, so unrewarding, the hours and hours dedicated to the same tasks in a variety of orders. But it wasn’t, she now knows; to say so is like saying breathing is boring.
She always found motherhood so hard. It had been such a shock. Such a vast reduction in the time available to her. She did nothing well, not work nor parenting. She put out fires in both for what felt like a decade straight, has only recently emerged. But maybe the damage is already done.
the bootstrap paradox: going back in time to observe an event which, it turns out, you caused. Jen writes this down.
And, just like that, a friendship was born, out of tragedy and humor, as they often are.
They are here, tonight, together, even if they might part again tomorrow, like two passengers on two trains going in opposite directions.
If Jen and Kelly had had a daughter, they would have called her Kacie.
but she still misses him in the way that children will always miss their parents’ guiding hands, the way they can hold your problems away from you, if only temporarily.
How sinister it is to relive your life backward. To see things you hadn’t at the time. To realize the horrible significance of events you had no idea were playing out around you.
“Thank you,” Ryan says thickly. “I mean . . . in some ways, Kelly taught me a lot. I guess the best criminals do.”
The maternal habit of a lifetime, feeling guilty no matter which she chose.
“Sometimes,” he says gently, when she’s finished, “the emotions of living something the first time prevent us from seeing the true picture, don’t they?” He rubs at his beard. “If I could go back – the things in my life that I would just stand and truly, fully witness, if I knew how they were going to turn out
Banter can hide the worst sins. Some people laugh to hide their shame, they laugh instead of saying I feel embarrassed and small.
“I’d always answer to my brother’s name,”
AHHH WTF THE TWIST THE TWIST THE TWIST
We only think of the bad things that happen, rather than those that, through fortune, pass us by.
