More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Throughout her entire career she has always looked for the absence of things as well as their presence.
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. To uncover lies told by your husband.
Don’t all familial irritations get subsumed by grief, in the end?
They, mother and son, are a zipper, slowly separating as the years rush by. And
The love, true love, it should have eclipsed the shame, but there is so much judgment involved in parenthood that it never did.
“You’re human.” He says it so simply something deep within Jen’s body seems to turn over, exactly the same way she used to feel when he was yet to be born, her baby, tucked up away in her, rolling like a little barrel, warm and safe and happy.
Everything in parenthood feels so endless until it ceases.
“Like the hindsight paradox,” he continues, when he’s bought the doughnuts. “Everyone thinks they knew what was going to happen. They said, I knew it all along! but, actually, they would say that no matter what the outcome. Because our brains are so good at considering every possibility. We’ve known whenever anything was going to happen.”
She wonders curiously why she remembers that exact phrase so well. Some days, she supposes, are brighter than others, more memorable. Some days, even the great ones, like their wedding, fade away into history.
Kelly says. “What is it they say – toddlers don’t play, they go to work?”
The world doesn’t know how much it’s changing.
