I’m Sorry You Feel That Way

by Rebecca Wait

Perhaps this, she thinks at last, is why people really have children: not a biological urge after all, but because children provide a necessary weight, like an anchor, so that you might at last stop wondering what you are missing, so that you might at last feel you belong in your own life.

Imagine not having to take your mother’s every remark and hold it up to the light to detect the sharp edge.

‘Do you think he didn’t love us at all?’ she says to Hanna. ‘I don’t know,’ Hanna says. She has been unusually quiet since they learned about the will. ‘I think he probably did. But it’s sort of irrelevant what you feel if you don’t act on it, isn’t it?’ She is frowning, looking away from Alice. ‘His kind of love wasn’t worth much in the end.’