Maybe time is only something you notice when you get old and have less of it at your disposal.
One centimeter was an opening the size of a fingertip. Two and a half centimeters were the second and third fingers, slipped into an opening the size of the neck of a bottle of nail polish remover. Four centimeters of dilation were those same fingers, spread in the neck of a forty-ounce bottle of Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce. Five centimeters.
Yet there have been too many times in the past year when I’ve wondered if that might just be an excuse for not having to be held responsible when something goes terribly wrong.
A dutiful mother is someone who follows every step her child makes,” I said. “And a good mother?” I lifted my gaze to Charlotte’s. “Is someone whose child wants to follow her.
But poaching was no longer a trickle; it had become a flood.
For Nina and Nathaniel, it’s all about the end product – pouring it on pancakes and waffles. But to Caleb, the beauty is in the way you get there. The blood of a tree, a spout, and a bucket. Steam rising, the scent filling every corner of the house. There is nothing quite like it: knowing every breath you take is bound to be sweet.
She locks her eyes on mine – hers are so dark that you can barely see the edge between iris and pupil. But they’re steady, and she doesn’t let go of me, and slowly, slowly, I let myself breathe.
It’s true that when it’s time to go, someone will be waiting for you. It might be a relative or a loved one, but not always. It could be a dog, hanging out with a tennis ball and ready to play again. Sometimes, when children die, they don’t know any of their relatives who are on the other side, so they’ll have an angel or even maybe a cartoon character or Santa Claus waiting to pull them across that bridge. It’s just a manifestation of energy saying, “Come on, baby, it’s okay.
What kind of life had he suffered, to have to craft memories from his imagination?
What love looked like was this: fledgling and unsteady, fierce and soft-shelled at the same time.
Don’t think I’m a bad mother. I’m just a realistic one. I knew that Jacob was handsome, funny, and so smart it sometimes left me reeling. It was hard though for others to see him in that light. To them, he just seemed odd.
I have become one of those brittle, busy people who emerge from suffering like a tornado, turning so fast that we do not even realize how much self-destruction we’re causing. The.
When I took their picture on the front lawn, Jacob even looked at the camera. It remains, to this day, the only photo I have of him where he’s doing that.
Years later, I read that someone had found genetic components to good motherhood. The Mest and the Peg3 genes occur on chromosome 19, and, ironically, they only work if they’re inherited from the father. Imprinting like this usually occurs in evolution because of a genetic battle of the sexes; it’s in the best interests of the female to have more litters, but it’s in the best interests of the male to protect the child that’s already been born. The jury is still out on these.
1. People who are.
The living room is exactly what you’d be expecting. Couches with crackly leather and stacks of paper everywhere, so many dusty books that even though I don’t have asthma I feel it coming on.
Love was supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it fell apart at the details.
But kids don’t stay where they’re supposed to. You turn around and find her not in the bedroom but hiding in a closet; you turn around and see she’s not three but thirteen. Parenting is really just a matter of tracking, of hoping your kids do not get so far ahead you can no longer see their next moves.
I tell them this: the part of the brain, physiologically, that allows us to blame everything on people we do not really know is the same part of the brain.
Even if you placed moral value on that fetus, you couldn’t give it rights unless they were stripped away from the woman carrying it. Perhaps the question wasn’t When does a fetus become a person? but When does a woman stop being one?