Chelsey Cosh’s Reviews > Yesteryear > Status Update

"This was the moment I realized my husband was an actual, honest-to-God idiot: when he suggested with all the sincerity in the world that I might like to bring our two-week-old newborn with me on a jog.(...) On one of our early dates, he had said he wasn't 'book smart,' but that wasn't the full truth, was it? The full truth was that he wasn't anything smart. He was a dumb rich kid. And what did that make me? A fool."

"In every single waking second of his life, he had the opportunity to say, simply, I don't want to do that. Imagine if I said that. Imagine if Clementine started crying and I rolled over in bed and said, I don't want to do that. Breastfeeding: I don't want to do that."

"Middle of the night. Wake up. (...) Practice saying, I just like starting my day with a little bit of me time. Swallow the rising misery in throat. Swallow the fury. Swallow the anxiety. Swallow the desire to light the house on fire and walk out the front door while husband, baby, and in-laws burn to death. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Kill yourself. No--conjure the audience. Conjure Jesus. Conjure mother."

"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 -- meaning: if you are lucky, you will find out your husband is preternaturally into vintage children's train sets,(...) not find out that your husband pays high school cheerleaders for sex."

"Natalie's like a border collie, my mother used to say to the other women at church. She needs a project, otherwise she starts chewing on the cabinet corners.

Are you saying my son is a project?

No, I imagined my mother replying. I'm saying he's the cabinet corner."

"The truth is that whoring yourself out can take you pretty far, if you do it with intention. Look at Mary Magdalene. Now there is a woman who understood the assignment."

I love the comparison here with The Bachelor cast.

"It was too much, it was a shameful display of wealth, I should give it back and demand we find something smaller, and also: I'd launch a holy war before I parted with it."

"That was the way women operated in my community: if you wanted to be a wealthy Christian woman and maintain good standing, you needed to publicly disavow your luxuries in order to maintain possession of them."