Love Works Like This Quotes

“If I could design the perfect pregnancy test, its results would read at once primitive and poetic, an image of a rocking horse for yes, a martini for no. Or this. I have it. The window turns a scalding red. Far away, fires burn in California and whole homes come down. But here in the East, I am building my home, and the perfect test would flare and words would swim up. If it's negative the test reads, "Keep your excellent life". If it's positive the test reads, "Risk everything.”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“Being a mother is a lot like growing up. When, or how, did you become an adult? What was the precise moment you lost your childhood? No one can say. It's all so permeable.”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“Being a mother means knowing the luxuriousness of giving comfort, bringing the slack body up, holding her close; she melts into your form, which is, when all is said and done, still your form.”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“Like so much in life, being a mother is entirely undramatic, filled with small pleasures and multiple inconveniences that only over weeks and months leave marks of any significance. You look back and say, "I know things I did not know before. I love like I did not love before, but how, or when, this happened, is really all a mystery, steps in smoke.”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“Becoming a mother if -- and this is a critical if -- you have enough money for help does not mean stripping the membranes and being born anew; it means a series of tiny innumerable tasks added to your life that in the short run mean little but in the long run amount to something.

It means coming home from work two hours earlier than you did before because that's when the sitter gets off.

It means cooking dinners every night because, after all, you don't have just yourself to feed.

It means learning about couscous, high-iron rice, organic spinach, nontoxic pots, thing you never thought of, little addendums to your brain, insignificant in isolation but, collectively, it takes up space.

Being a mother means going to the pet store for three hours on Sundays so your girl can see the birds.

It means learning and seeing colors anew -- there's purple, there's red, say red, red, red and so you see red as though for the first time, blood in the eye, brightness.

Being a mother means knowing the luxuriousness of giving comfort, bringing the slack body up, holding her close; she melts into your form, which is, when all is said and done, still your form.

Like so much in life, being a mother is entirely undramatic, filled with small pleasures and multiple inconveniences that only over weeks and months leave marks of any significance. You look back and say, "I know things I did not know before. I love like I did not love before, but how, or when, this happened, is really all a mystery, steps in smoke."

Being a mother is a lot like growing up. When, or how, did you become an adult? What was the precise moment you lost your childhood? No one can say. It's all so permeable.”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“Progesterone is not a minimalist hormone. It leans toward excess, toward velvet, toward a thickening of the blood. Under its spell, the womb's endometrial mat goes from a thin brown covering to a thick crimson pile, a wild, expensive carpet, bedding fit for a king. No amount of money could buy a mattress with the thickness, the precision, the pure comfort that progesterone produces; here is where you started your first perfect sleep. Shhh.”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“So," says my sister. "Do you feel like a mother yet?"
I surprise myself by saying yes.
"Cool," says my sister. "When did this happen?"
"I don't know," I say. "Last Tuesday maybe?"
I want to chart love, to code it or encrypt it. Love = proximity + time. Love = oxytocin + night feedings. But in the end, I'm no closer to understanding it, even when I feel it.”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“Suddenly it is not she who needs me, but I who need her. Don't ask me to explain, I can't.
I can. We are creatures who must give comfort. We ache to give comfort, to heal what hurts.
The colic is making me a mother.”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“Motherhood's biggest taboo may be not rage but mildness. Mother love must be intense. I am not intense.
I feel a great guilt.
So far, it is only my guilt that makes me a mother.”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“I don't feel like a mother. [...] I thought I would be smashed flat, or heaved high, mythically altered for this, the most mythic of roles but, shock of all shock, here I am, still me.
And the baby? I have come to like her a little bit. That's it. A little bit.”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“I think I will actually miss it a little, this time of pure potential.”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“I am a child of Western medicine.
I am a cynic, a skeptic, which is the attitude underlying so much of Western medicine.
I don't believe in inherent goodness.
I don't believe that nature will never lead you astray.
I believe there are more than one hundred billion cells in the body and if, at any moment, one of them is not becoming cancerous, it's only your good luck, the whimsy of your god that has spared you.
Natural childbirth proudly announces, "All pain has a purpose," which is a wonderful view, an utterly romantic view, straight out of the mind of Shelley or Byron; those thoughts are not mine. I live in a world of random events, unseen collisions, and sudden swerves.

The beauty, for me, lies not in knowing there is an underlying purposeful pattern but in facing, with some sort of grace, the impenetrable vista.”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“Not once has the instructor talked about parenting after the baby is born. Instead, we fetishize labor. We focus on it to the exclusion of each other, our children, our futures. Is this because it can be taught, and parenting can't? Because, Americans to the bitter end, we love a sport, grow bored by things more subtle?”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“I felt, for sure, a prayer come through my grandmother's hands, a language of pulse and palm lines, and the prayer said this: May you hold her, and in holding her, hold us, forever down the line.”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“I have said the word mother to myself so many times it is starting to lose its shock. [...] Repeat any word enough and it will cease to alarm you. Mother mother mother mother. Slowly, so slowly, I am growing used to its weight on the tip of my tongue, its echo and its shape.”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“The gift of life. What an odd expression, a still odder gift, this box of snakes and daisies.”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“Apparently, this girl is made from me. She comes from me. She has half my genes, half my toxins, half my talents, she is in me. What of me will she shed, what will she find herself tacked to?”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“Having a child does not change you so much as amplify whatever is unresolved.”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“Can you come here?' I say. I want to touch him before the pain is upon me, before the pain seals me into a selfish world where only I exist.
He comes to me, holds my hands. "So this is it," he says. "In a couple of hours we'll be parents.”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“Our children are not ours because we have given them our genes. They are ours because we have had the audacity to envision them.”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“We are here making myths that are, at the same time, absolutely true.”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another