This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something--Anything--Like Your Life Depends On It

by Tabitha Carvan

That’s the joke of motherhood: you don’t get to have children and be yourself. When you eat pizza, you eat pizza as a mother. Every day—hundreds of times a day, every day—you give up what you want and how you want it in so many tiny little ways, that whatever squeezed-out orange-half remains of you, that’s who you are now. It’s fine, really.

I hated that his sense of self didn’t appear to be in any way affected by parenthood, while I was experiencing a cosmic disturbance of such magnitude that I did not know who I was anymore. I mean, who was I?

We’re conditioned to believe women don’t know how to have fun, Wambach says, which is not true; it’s just that most women “never have been given the chance or taken the opportunity to have fun.”