Isabella Kulstad’s Reviews > Yesteryear > Status Update

Not only do i think that Natalie is #bonkers, but I'm fascinated with how much her life mirrors the one she pictured for Reena. The cheating husband, the artificial impregnation, the dismissal by men in power, all of it. It makes her righteousness feel so out of place - she's still constrained by the patriarchal expectations of womanhood, just in a different shade.

My husband wanted too little from his life. And me? I wanted too much.
Suddenly it was so obvious: Caleb should’ve been born a woman, and I
should’ve been born a man. A sad sickness turned my stomach. We were
equally broken in that way.

There comes a point in every marriage when a woman realizes that the man she married is a freak. This is inevitable. It cannot be avoided. The
only real question in the matter is what type of freak your husband will be. That is the best we homemakers can hope for in this life: a man whose freakishness is not unspeakably violent or technically illegal, and therefore is something we are able to bear.
All men are weird

The new crowd of young women know the world that
claims to love them so much actually wants nothing more than to bloodlet
them slowly over time. To devour them alive.

Standing there that day, she looked so miserable at the prospect of her
own empowered future that I nearly laughed out loud.

"is it a really a choice if there's only one option?"

They were insistent on snipping every last one of
their tethers to the mortal universe. It was unfathomable to me: the idea of
floating forward through the world, held up by absolutely nothing. What
kept you from plummeting?

But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.
Don’t look back, don’t look back. What happened to the women in the Bible who looked forward, though? What about them?

As my body slowly halved open like a peach, I realized it was me who was losing my life; me who would vanish from the world to make room for this new child.
I will never be Natalie again. I will only ever be Mama