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Then I remembered what Dr. Bob said about anxiety reducing our effectiveness in the world. Wasn’t living a fearful life also self-indulgent? I wasn’t fully contributing to the world if I was pulling back from it all the time. Not only that,
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“I stopped trying to tank 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. I suffered through it. I suffer through it.”
― Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother
― Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother
“Motherhood makes you stronger even as it makes you weaker. Your new sensitivity is a strength, and you should see it that way.”
― Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother
― Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother
“Here is the nexus of where work, gender, marriage, and money collide: Dependency.”
― All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation
― All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation
“Do you remember in How the Grinch Stole Christmas! when the Grinch is alone on the mountain after plundering the Christmas of the Whos down below, and his heart swells to three times its normal size? That's the other thing that happens when you become a mom. You feel more deeply. You become capable of a raw, scary fullness of emotion that tenderizes the hardened muscle of the heart. And it endangers you. Because you feel for other people's suffering more than you used to, especially for the suffering of children, as if the love you bear for your child is so outsized that it can't be contained but splashes out into the world, your salty tears brimming the salty oceans.”
― Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother
― Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother
“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.”
― Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother
― Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother
Nicole’s 2025 Year in Books
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