indie’s Reviews > The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood > Status Update

"We were teasing out and unspooling each thread of my story, and she promised me that eventually I’d be able to weave it back together into something more useful."

"And I’m not crying because I hate my life. I’m crying because motherhood is like having no skin."

"I looked at him, amazed at the level of idiocy from a man who was otherwise so brilliant and forward-thinking, an iconoclast who supposedly loved me. The man who took my tampon out with his teeth."

"No one held me in my nineteenth-century home against my will, forbidding me from having a career while some mad woman clanked around my attic. And yet I felt gaslit and broken, as if some phantom presence were controlling the manse."

"I thought of the character Jane in Penelope Mortimer’s 1958 novel Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting: “What happened to her during the six hours of labour nobody ever knew. Something snapped or something fell into place or her brain, under pressure, tossed about like the coloured pieces in a kaleidoscope, settling in an entirely different pattern.” Was I Jane?'

"Just as I was considering which juvenile insult to hurl at my mother, which verbal slamming of my childhood bedroom door, Tom returned, smelling like French fries, and I did not know my heart was capable of such derision and hate."

"I saw her fear, and I think I feared the same anaphylaxis. I would get married and have a baby, and I would be lost, lost, lost, buried under the goo-goo-gah-gah of it all, the carpooling and the poopy diapers and the deranged spatchcocking. If I became a mother, it meant my mother would die, a generational patchwork of anguish like a quilt my grandmother’s mother had made in some Indiana backwater town."

"And I know that, most likely, I will be sprinting, breathless, oxygen deprived and burning, chasing that type of love for the rest of my life, trying to soothe my sore, exhausted heart with the promise of that connection."

"In fact, for years, I lumped therapy with learning about periods and semen: something shameful that made boys smirk."

"[I] roamed farmers markets for fresh berries and watermelon, which I craved madly, eating pints of blueberries by the fistful and crunching through fleshy chunks of red melon."