The New House

by Tess Stimson

We’ll lie and cheat to get what we want, but we don’t make moral choices; we make pragmatic ones. Usually we’re not out to get you. We’re like water: we’ll always find the quickest and easiest route to where we want to be, and if you get in our way, you’ll be washed away.

We figure out how to conceal our behaviour, and censor what we really think. At least the smart ones among us do. We hide in plain sight, though we never truly make friends. We endure relationships with people who don’t really know us. We get jobs at places where we’re tolerated, but never understood.

there’s no pockets in shrouds.

some people are born psychopaths, and some have psychopathy thrust upon them.

their relationship is codependent. What that means, he told them, is that one partner, the codependent one, feels worthless unless they’re needed by – and making extreme sacrifices for – the other partner, the enabler, who’s only too glad to receive their sacrifices.

the worst of us survived: the selfish, the violent, the brutal, the cruel. The best all died.’

‘Sometimes it’s hard to love things the right way,’ I say. ‘They don’t always want to be loved the way we want to love them.’

good people sometimes do bad things for the right reasons. That doesn’t make them bad people.

Motherhood means living simultaneously in joy and desperation.

There’s a story in Native American culture that describes the battle between two wolves that live inside us all: one wolf is evil – it is anger, violence, resentment, darkness, despair. The other wolf is good – it’s love, hope, light. Which wolf wins? The one you feed.

Grief isn’t something that abates. You simply learn to live with it, in the spaces around it. A scar forms: to the outside world, it looks as if you’ve healed. But the pain never goes away.

Grief shapes you in unexpected ways: you are never the person you once were, but you figure out a way to move through the world.