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"Loving our children does not mean keeping them happy all the time and avoiding power struggles. Often it is doing what feels hardest for us to do: saying 'no' and meaning it.

"When boundaries work, children don't need to test them as often. They trust their parents and caregivers, therefore their world. They feel freer and calmer and can focus on the important things: play, learning, socializing, and being happy-go-lucky kids" (viii).

I fall asleep and dream of Daisy knocking a plant off a windowsill with her hips. "Oops." She giggles. "Don't tell Mom." The plant doesn't make a sound when it lands in the grass.I look out the window and my body is spilled out on the lawn, arms and legs twisted in improbable directions. Out of my cracked skull sprouts a thickened root, a bursting spiral of leaves.

Plus, we were on the same antidepressants in high school so I know our brain chemistry is somewhat compatible.

"This was the strangeness of becoming famous online. I had a million followers, I could access more people in a single moment than any European king of the last thousand years, and then someone could effortlessly wipe my entire kingdom away with a single sentence: I don't have Instagram.

I'm aware this isn't the kind of thing you're meant to feel about your own daughter. But motherhood is its own kind of curation. Which is to say: every woman I know lied to me about what it would be like, before I became one myself.

Weeks pass of empty scalp, but in my dreams the lice squirm in an infinity loop, a disorganized school of fish, multiplying exponentially, becoming more and more covered until they are a solid block of pulsing black which follows me wherever I go because it all come down to blood: being made from it, being thirsty for it.

I asked Dr. Hasadsri, a clinical molecular geneticist at Mayo Clinic, whether it would someday be possible to develop a NIPT-style blood test that screened for BWS and related conditions early in pregnancy... I thought about the expectant parents who might jump, scared, at an early chance to prevent kids like my son. All their private, data-informed decisions, adding up to the total elimination of his genetic code.

It was, I agreed, insane. I had been so excited for [my baby] to be discharged from the NICU, then released from his infernal oxygen tank. Now the baby-monitor industry was recruiting peppy moms to sell a vision of the perma-hospital, restyled as comfy and chic.

"It is quite true that I might be a wiser person, Celia, and that I might have done something better, if I had been better. But this is what I am going to do. I have promised to marry Mr. Ladislaw; and I am going to marry him."

But still -- it could not be fairly called wooing a woman to tell her that he would never woo her. It must be admitted to be a ghostly kind of wooing.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

More than food they are tribute, piled up outside your altar, a compost pile of what good mothers do. An incantation, a prayer, a pleading: "Look what I made you." Sitting there like a dummy, all mother-shaped and rotting.

"We should not grieve, should we, baby?" said Celia confidentially to that unconscious centre and poise of the world, who had the most remarkable fists all complete even to the nails, and hair enough, really, when you took his cap off, to make -- you didn't know what: -- in short, he was Bouddha in a Western form.

It is undeniable that but for the desire to be where Dorothea was, and perhaps the want of knowing what else to do, Will would not at this time have been meditating on the needs of the English people or criticizing English statesmanship... Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettantism and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference.

Every time I remember that my son is saddled elsewhere in someone else's arms, not mine, milk seeps from my bbreath, an ancient ache, a second set is tear ducts. By midday, all my shirts have hardened circles, stiff ghost areolas, despite the absorbent pads, my body manages to scrawl a message: please, it begs, please, just let me hold him.

And in small ways we do eat our young, feed off their stores, metabolize their still dewy flesh, swallow little rations of hope by watching them filter sand through their fingers for the first time, be first touched by a wave, feast on their look of conquest when they scale the wall of their crib... and you have already blown into a child's sweaty hair as they slept on your chest, how dare you ask for more?

The copy in this case bore more of outside resemblance to the mother, in whose sex frog-features, accompanied with fresh-coloured cheeks and a well-rounded figure, are compatible with much charm for a certain order of admirers. The result is sometimes a frog-faced male, desirable, surely, to no order of intelligent beings.

There is the simple cost benefit analysis, daycare and diapers, yes, but it doesn't consider the intangibles, the dearest currency of all: the cheek brushed against yours, the soft body wanting to be in your orbit and you wanting so badly to be in theirs, and how the gravity between those celestial bodies is what keeps us all from spinning out of control.

Rosamond, examining some muslin-work, listened in silence, and at the end gave a certain turn of her graceful neck, of which only long experience could teach you that it meant perfect obstinancy.

People were so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fools' caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's were transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone were rosy.

"Mr Ned Plymdale is a nice young man... Not that marrying is everything. I would have you seek first the kingdom of God. But a girl should keep her heart within her own power."

"I should never give my heart to Mr Ned Plymdale, if it were. I have already refused him. If I loved, I should love at once and without change," said Rosamond, with a great sense of being a romantic heroine, and playing the part prettily.

They were obliged to look at each other in speaking, and somehow the looking could not be carried through as the matter of course which it really was. Lydgate began to feel this sort of consciousness unpleasant, and one day looked down, or anywhere, like an ill-worked puppet. But this turned out badly: the next day, Rosamond looked down, and when their eyes met again, both were more conscious than before.

Sharks are messy eaters so little bits of the mother octopuses' bodies fall like slow-motion snow. A meal for whatever is waiting with an open mouth. Often, the mothers are dead before their eggs hatch, but sometimes the barely visible newborns glide past their mother's body shrapnel, baby and mother the same size now, identical to the naked eye, but for the way they are moving in opposite directions.

"And Catherine, try to be glad, without being absurd! The whole household need not witness the sight of your welcoming a runaway servant as a brother." 👀

I'm told I must draw a line, but I can't figure out where I end and my children begin -- like the mint in the garden that jams its appendages in the ground, travels sideways, sprouts up feet away, clear across the lawn.

I have cried so many times while reading this book. I love it. It makes me feel so incredibly seen.

One PDF featured a series of impenetrable bar graphs charting my pregnancy's risks. At the time I received it, it had felt so reassuring, so precious in my inbox. I did not consider that it only ran the odds on a small band of conditions and that it had nothing to say about an obscure genetic disorder with a name I had already forgotten how to spell.

When Will turned his head quickly his hair seemed to shake out light, and some persons thought they saw decided genius in this coruscation. Mr Casaubon, on the contrary, stood rayless.

Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness, Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter's, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets in the mosaics above, and the red drapery spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.