Parenting meant that whether or not your children understood you, your obligation was to understand them.
I’ll tell you how sensible Arthur is: he doesn’t even mind being bald.
Arthur shook his head. ‘I’ve always been terrible at colors,’ he said, ‘It comes from having grown up with the single-row box of crayons instead of the big box. If I’d had the big box I would now know taupe and cerise and ecru. Instead, all I know is burnt sienna. And what good does it do me? Never once I have I heard anything described as burnt sienna. Never once have I heard anyone say, “Follow that burnt sienna car.
If I was home alone at night, I cooked myself an entire meal from one of these cookbooks. Then I sat down in front of the television set and ate it. I felt very brave and plucky as I ate my perfect dinner. Okay, I didn’t have a date, but at least I wasn’t one of those lonely women who sat home with a pathetic container of yogurt. Eating an entire meal for four that I had cooked for myself was probably equally pathetic, but that never crossed my mind. I.
You’re talking dream date compared to my horror. I started out fine, she’s a very nice person, and we’re sitting and we’re talking in this Ethiopian restaurant she wanted to go to. I was making jokes, like, “Hey, I didn’t know they had food in Ethiopia. This’ll be a quick meal. I’ll order two empty plates and we can leave.
The internet is the superhighway of grammatically incorrect moral outrage. EPHRON:.
Vera looked at me, and her eyes filled with tears. She does this sometimes, especially when I’m being hateful and difficult; she responds by having all the feelings I’m refusing to have. Now she reached over and took my hand, and we both began to cry.
Once I lived for a year in another city, and almost every waking hour of my life was spent going to stores, buying things, loading them into the car, bringing them home, unloading them, and carrying them into the house. How anyone gets anything done in these places is a mystery to me.
You never know.
Try flying any plane with a baby if you want a sense of what it must have been like to be a leper in the fourteenth century, but try the shuttle for the ultimate in shunning. All those men in suits, looking at you as if your baby is going to throw up over their speech drafts; all those men in suits who used to look at me with respect when I pulled out my American Express gold card, now barely able to conceal their contempt for me and my portable Wet Ones.
But when you’ve had children with someone you’re divorced from, divorce defines everything; it’s the lurking fact, a slice of anger in the pie of your brain.
Craig was a nice guy, don’t get me wrong, but he was so low-key that once I’d gotten to know him, I was almost completely unable to have even imaginary conversations with him while cooking his recipes. Around.
One good thing I’d like to say about divorce is that it sometimes makes it possible for you to be a much better wife to your next husband because you have a place for your anger; it’s not directed at the person you’re currently with.
You always think that a bolt of lightning is going to strike and your parents will magically change into the people you wish they were, or back into the people they used to be. But they’re never going to. And even though you know they’re never going to, you still hope they will.
I wanted more than anything to be something I will never be – feminine, and feminine in the worst way. Submissive. Dependent. Soft spoken. Coquettish. I was no good at all at any of it, no good at being a girl; on the other hand, I am not half bad at being a woman.
Alcoholic parents are so confusing, they’re your parents, so you love them. But they’re drunks, so you hate them. But you love them, but you hate them. They have moments when they’re still the people you grew up idolizing. They have moments when you can’t imagine they were anything but monsters. And then, after a while they’re monsters full time. The people they used to be has enormous power over you. But the people they’ve turned into has no power over you at all.
I mention all this so that you will understand that is part of the process: once you’ve found out he’s cheated on you, you have to keep finding it out, over and over and over again, until you’ve degraded yourself so completely that there’s nothing left to do but walk out.
That’s what a marriage is... Pieces break off, and you glue them back on.
I can’t believe they don’t understand that what I’m doing is Much More Important. I’m reading the most wonderful book.
It occurred to me that if I stayed in bed much longer, I would be forced to watch a soap opera. That seemed redundant, so I got up and went to group.
Try flying any plane with a baby if you want a sense of what it must have been like to be a leper in the fourteenth century.