Kris

“Is it really possible that my trip to buy Nom-Noms is part of a meaningful narrative, a hero’s journey? In trying to process it, I wonder why I’ve felt such inner resistance to accepting that anything I do as a mother might actually be a page in a book. And really, it doesn’t take long to connect that feeling to the fact that in popular culture, at least in America for the past forever years, what mothers do is seen as so unremarkable it’s not just an unimportant story but not even a story at all.”
― Jessi Klein, I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

“A community’s first responsibility is to protect its children—the ones we have now and the ones we will have.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“he truth is that motherhood is a hero’s journey. For most of us it’s not a journey outward, to the most fantastic and farthest-flung places, but inward, downward, to the deepest parts of your strength, to the innermost buried core of everything you are made of but didn’t know was there. And what I’ve learned is that there’s a reason motherhood as a story is so infrequently told.

It’s because, for so many people, our safest, sweetest, earliest memories are of nestling in our mother’s lap, in her rocking warmth, hearing her sing as we get milk-drunk and sleepy and burrow, heavy-eyed, into the crook of her soft arm. And if you knew that your mother’s journey was, intrinsically, a hero’s journey — if that was in any way an established narrative in our culture — you’d have to accept that this memory of womb-like safety, this foundation upon which so much of our identity is built, was often just an illusion. You’d have to realize that while you were blissed out on your mother’s lap, one of those epic battles, the kind that envelops heroes as they fight their way out of a ring of fire, was raging just above your head. No one wants to believe that in the moments you felt the most peaceful, the woman cradling you so softly was shielding you from a sword that she herself was holding.

Every mother you know is in this fight with herself. The sword that hangs over her is a sword of exhaustion, of frustration, of patience run dry, a sword of indignation at how little she feels like a human when she so often has to look and behave like an animal. Mostly, it is the sword of rage: the rage and shock of how completely she must annihilate herself to keep her child alive.”
― Jessi Klein, I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

“if we only talk about things that make us comfortable, we can never grow.”
― Amanda Jones, That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America