She laughed now, and the sound of it – clear as a bell, dirty as a rugby match – turned heads all along their row.
The software program for motherhood is impossible to fully download into the male brain. You give them two tasks and they’re like, ‘I have to change the baby and get the dry cleaning?’
When you’re young your mother shields you from the world because she thinks you’re too young to understand, and when she’s old you shield her because she’s too old to understand – or to have any more understanding inflicted upon her. The curve of life goes: want to know, know, don’t want to know.
My mother was a stay-at-home mom until I was about 11, when she got a job – and it was like a light came on inside her. It’s not wrong to be passionate about your career. When you love what you do, you bring that stimulation back to your family.
My ideals told me that men and women could both go out to work and be truly equal. My children told me something more complicated, something I really didn’t want to hear. Their need for me was like the need for water or light: it had a devastating simplicity to it.
The times you don’t make it are the ones children remember, not the times you do.
My husband is old-fashioned and kind, he does the greatest Sinatra impression, and I’d never have written anything if he hadn’t read all those bedtime stories and unloaded the dishwasher while I slaved over chapters.
Women run the small country called Home, millions of us do it in our spare time, and no one who doesn’t run that small country really knows what it feels like in the dead of night when task lists jitter like tickertape through your seething brain.
For centuries, the question of men needing to comprehend women simply didn’t arise. Men were valued according to how they measured up to the manly virtues.
My child was one of Nature’s Tories pitted against a mother who was one of nurture’s Lefties: it was no contest.
I don’t believe for a minute that women really want to be understood by men.
Men worry about childcare with their wallets, women feel it in their wombs.
The quickest way to stop noticing something may be to buy it, just as the quickest way to stop appreciating a person may be to marry them.
No man would ever use both hands to hold a cup of tea, unless he was one day’s march from the South Pole, with one chum dead in the snow, dogs all eaten and six fingers about to drop off. And even then he would look around the empty tent to check, in case anybody thought it was girly.
Oh, where is the Fairy Godmother of explanations when you need her?
People say that time is a great healer. Which people? What are they talking about? I think some feelings you experience in your life are written in indelible ink and the best you can hope for is that they fade a little over the years.
The great thing about unrequited love is it’s the only kind that lasts.
I forget the derivation of Boxing Day, but the feeling of wanting to invite your loved ones outside one at a time and punch them in the face, does that come into it somewhere?
Sweet peas were the kind of flowers fairies slept in.
Not unhappy is not the same thing as happy.
There are some men who will always prefer to deal with another man, any man, rather than a woman... I can see him struggling to place me: I’m not married to him, clearly I’m not his mother, I didn’t go to school with his sister and I’m sure as hell not going to go to bed with him. So what, he must be asking himself as he chews on his pigeon, is this girl doing here? What is she for?