Meredith > Recent Status Updates

On this re-read, I am struck by the fact that the contains two children who are "displaced persons," one from Eastern Europe and one from Asia.

Shulevitz: Equality was a big virtue in the communist Soviet Union, provided you overlooked that some were more equal than others.

Carvell Wallace: Parenting, like life, is heartbreak followed by reality, followed by love, followed by loneliness, followed by despair, followed by jokes, followed by exhaustion.

Garbes: in my youth, my view of the world wasn’t so nuanced that I could see how life in the city and life in the woods weren’t opposites.

Garbes: No woman, regardless of race or class, is safe from the expectation of reproductive labor. Even for the richest woman who are able to outsource all the work -- when the support support system they have built and hired vanishes amid a devastating years-long global health crisis -- the work still falls to them.

Garbes: Mothering is hard work. It’s mentally, physically, and emotionally exhausting. For millions of Americans, the home is where the real work — the work that never changes, never stops, never goes away — gets fine. Weekends aren’t time off for parents; they are two long days of caregiving.

Narrator: As it says in a poem, days come, days go, and then we die. Only in our case, things aren’t so dramatic.

Narrator: Life is full of questions, but not answers.

Narrator: When we reach our 40s, the past even becomes one of the more obtrusive parts of our lives.