martha

“Benevolent colonialism is still colonialism.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming

“I want more friends, more casual impromptu hangs, more dropping by with dinner, more walking and talking and advice sessions, more kids underfoot, more asking for and saying what we need, more hands to carry heavy boxes, more laughing and cackling and snorting, more children farting at the dinner table, more of what makes life messy, less painful, more sweet. I want to give and receive, to always be swapping Tupperware and food, all of us crowded together like curvy lumpen mangoes in a baking dish.”
― Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

“With a partner you had the story of how you met, choosing each other out of everyone in the world, and the years together were chaptered with joint decisions - no one could ever say it was all a dream; both parties were accountable. Not so with a child. For the child it WAS a dream. And the unpunctuated days into years moved much more quickly (for the parent), so all one could do was free-fall through the chaos, madly making sandwiches and washing hair and hope that there would be some ritual, some time for reflection, at the end.”
― Miranda July, All Fours

“More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible,” wrote Tillie Olsen in 1968.”
― Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change