Caim > Recent Status Updates

“Who doesn’t dream of being rescued? Who doesn’t desire grand gestures?”

“To be taken care of was to not worry about having enough love, not having enough money.”

“Abandonment doesn't have the sharp but dissipating sting of a slap. It's like a punch to the gut, bruising your skin and driving the precious air from your body.”

Wow! Those simple two sentences from Gwendolyn’s daddy felt like a callous slap in the face!

Is Laverne mentally unwell?

“But I lived in a world where you could never want what you wanted out in the open.”

It all seems so performative…

“And this is how it started. Just with coffee and the exchange of their long stories. Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too. Coffee can start a life just as it can start a day…This love just rolled toward my mother as though she were standing at the bottom of a steep hill. Mother had no hand in this, only heart.”

“Some men,” said Willie Mae, “would be back if all they bought you was a Peppermint Pattie. Money is for buying company, and they know it.”

Wow… I am JUDGING Dana’s mama!

⚡️🪄Petunia?!

“No. You’ve got it the wrong way around. Dana, you are the one that’s a secret.” — wow! who tells a child that?! then “rewards” her for her silence?!

🪄⚡️ “She is gifted with language and is able to layer difficult details in such a way that the result is smooth as water. She is a magician who can make the whole world feel like a dizzy illusion. The truth is a coin she pulls from behind your ear.”

What a magical way to describe a liar!

whhhewwww! i’m only a chapter into sugar and my heart… idk if i should read this right after The Girls Who Grew Big

“…it is a radical thing to raise children in a world that often refuses to respect the amount of work, intention, and resource it takes to parent with kindness and love for the little people we get to call ours. I am in awe of you and endlessly grateful for every lesson in not only parenting but girlhood and womanhood and the miracle that comes when we can find refuge in ourselves and each other.”

“Because I was this child's mother, and all of me-sun and moon, sea and sky, body and bone—would forever stand in the wild truth that I could be mother and child and freed, all at once.”

“This is where the child I once thought was a burden to me would be born: into an ocean of possibility, to a mother who had grown to truly, completely want her.”

“Part of me was so angry at Emory for being so selfish and the other part of me was so in awe of her for being so selfish and I think none of us knew what to say, so we all nodded.”

“Sometimes a dream isn’t worth the life you lose on the journey there. Sometimes a dream is not meant for waking hours.”

“Stop running from being alone, Emory. Sometimes alone is the best place to be.”

“Boys only do that when you tempt them.” - Wowwwww. Emory’s grandparents are the actual worse.

“I’d wondered why anyone ever wanted to go this at all.” — this = have kids.

I really want to love this book, but the lyrical prose can be overdone at times…

“What you think a family is? Reciprocity, Adela. I give you what you need and you give me what I need. Keep complaining and youll end up all shriveled up and alone like Simone."

Chris/Tooth is a grade A asshole!

“I assumed he’d be a good dad, and he was, sort of, but it was like he was waiting for me to lead and then he’d follow.”

Emory’s “PawPaw” is something else…

“God, I wished he could be the kind of father I didn't worry about leaving alone with them, and sometimes I told myself he was. When they were fed and happy and the three of them played a game of chase on the beach before Tooth inevitably left to surf, to go where his children couldn't, deep into the water. But that was not how you loved a child. That was how you let a child love you.”

How Emory treats Jaylen is not fair

Whew! The actual drama is starting to pick up!