motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.

...you look at me like an emergency

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.

Since we're not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we're not young.

Even where love has run thin the child's soul musters strength... the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.

But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.

The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from "Transcendental Etude