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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.
She is just Jen’s sort of person: jaded, sweary, not a natural mother, the kind of person who implicitly gives Jen permission to mess up. Jen has always been drawn to these types of people. All of her friends are unpretentious, unafraid to do and say what they think.
“Don’t worry. It’s – it’s nothing, probably,” she adds, wondering why she has always felt the need to do that. To be easygoing, not to worry people, to be good.
She swallows as she thinks this horrible, catastrophic thought. Oh, to have a brain that does not torture itself.
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.
But knowing the future is worse than not knowing. Isn’t it?
But all kids rebel, even the good ones: they just rebel differently.
“Another person just sort of makes life feel official, doesn’t it? Even if we just have beans on toast.”
most people who have betrayed or have been betrayed are irrational.
Banter can hide the worst sins. Some people laugh to hide their shame, they laugh instead of saying I feel embarrassed and small.
This banter of theirs . . . perhaps it does more than it purports to. Perhaps it evades the deeper issues, somehow. Jen thinks sometimes that Kelly is so busy laughing that he never does anything else. Like show how he feels. What’s the bedrock, underneath the banter? Their family has always been so full of charm, exactly what she wanted after her repressed upbringing. But isn’t humor a different kind of repression?
Avoiding pain is priceless to some.
We only think of the bad things that happen, rather than those that, through fortune, pass us by.
