Anders Munk-Nielsen

“So many nights, exhausted or just impatient, I have been eager for my children’s bedtime. One kid’s chatter barely registers in my ear because it’s the same chatter I’ve been hearing all day. The other kid’s chain of requests for a sip of water, to be tucked in (again), for another sip of water, to turn the hallway light on, feels like fingernails on a chalkboard. Minutes later, as I peak into their room and see that they have each fallen into slumber, I see all sweetness and splendor in their faces. I want to lie down and hold them close. I wonder what that last bit of chatter was that I tuned out. Whether it was something important about my child’s world. A tiny voice echoes in my head, “can I please have another sip of water?” And I hear it more clearly now as “It makes me feel secure and cared for when you bring it to me.” Their care and wellbeing matter more to me than anything and I feel at a cellular level the honor and joy of being their mom. Now that they’re asleep.”
― Molly Millwood, To Have and to Hold: Motherhood, Marriage, and the Modern Dilemma

“Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person -- sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty -- and you get to pick three of those things. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It's only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all those things. But this isn't the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which three qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person. That's real life. Don't you see it's a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you'll wind up with nothing.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“Rubin’s conceptualization of fog happiness helps resolve what appear to be contradictory research findings about the happiness of parents. Ask a young mother to pause from playing with her fifteen-month-old at eleven a.m. and indicate her current happiness level, and her answer will be about the same as when she’s vacuuming at four p.m. Ask that same woman when she’s eighty-five years old what her top three sources of happiness were, and “being a mother” or “caring for my children” will surely make the list. Vacuuming, not so much. Immediate joy and fun in parenting are scattered stars in the great black sky of strain, boredom, and unrelenting responsibility in parenting. But when the joy comes, it comes insisting. And when we take the long view and ascribe meaning to our life’s activities, little else competes for first place with raising our very own human beings.”
― Molly Millwood, To Have and to Hold: Motherhood, Marriage, and the Modern Dilemma