“This preoccupation with surpassing the mother is apparent in women whose development hesitates or altogether ceases as they become obsessed with food. For who can bear this vision of the mother’s life, impoverished, sacrificed, depleted?”~Kim Chernin.

Re-reading this book which I first devoured between the stacks on the library floor at college. Then, as now it stirs an argument in me on every page. Or at the very least, a question. Is that true? Contradictions. Blind spots, mirrors reflecting all that is seen and unseen.

The timing of life is magic whether or not you like whatever gets pulled out of the hat.

I was painting my nails while my mother, over the course of nearly two hours, asked and then, through a series of stories she told in between consoling her Beagles (one old and wounded, the other young and unaware), she answered her own question: ‘Why are you so…’ Because she’s taught CCD for over forty years and why doesn’t anyone volunteer anymore and Nana had to make head cheese in the basement of the house in Fall River when she only ten years old because her father died and she was brutal because life had been brutal and I am woman hear me roar! You know how we used to sing that song; sing that song! Helen Reddy! and it’s noble to be poor while striving to achieve our greatest potential because anything else is an insult to the gift of life given to us by God, she said.

It’s never enough.