Nicole

“Motherhood makes you stronger even as it makes you weaker. Your new sensitivity is a strength, and you should see it that way.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother

“I stopped trying to rank sorrow, realized that the world has sorrow enough for all of us, and when some of it falls to you the best hope you have is letting yourself suffer through it.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother

“It’s not such a bad thing to always have something to do, someone to meet, work to complete, trains to catch, beers to drink, marathons to run, classes to attend. By the time some women find someone to whom they’d like to commit and who’d like to commit to them, perhaps it’s not such a bad thing that they will have, if they were lucky, soaked in their cities and been wrung dry by them, that those who marry later, after a life lived single, may experience it as the relief of slipping between cool sheets after having been out all night. These same women might have greeted entry into the same institution, had they been pressured to enter it earlier, with the indignation of a child being made to go to bed early as the party raged on downstairs.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“On another note - Sarton writes about "people in their thirties mourning their lost youth because we have given them no ethos that makes maturity appear an asset." I very much feel this to be true. Turning twenty-one is the nadir of American achievement, one can get smashed legally, and as there are no further milestones after that, each succeeding birthday reeks of diminishment. People start to lie about their age, as if maturity is a thing to be ashamed of.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother