A good home must be made, not bought.

It's sad but true that if you focus your attention on housework and meal preparation and diapers, raising children does start to look like drudgery pretty quickly. On the other hand, if you see yourself as nothing less than your child's nurturer, role model, teacher, spiritual guide, and mentor, your days take on a very different cast.

Not only did I avoid speaking of Salinger; I resisted thinking about him. I did not reread his letters to me. The experience had been too painful.

A good home must be made, not bought. In the end, it's not track lighting or a sun room that brings light into a kitchen.

[On home births:] In a house where there had been three people, there were now four, although no one had come in the door.

Although Salinger had long since cut me out of his life completely and made it plain that he had nothing but contempt for me, the thought of becoming the object of his wrath was more than I felt ready to take on.

Growing up in the fifties and sixties, I can only remember knowing one child, ever, whose parents got a divorce, and hardly any whose mother "worked" at anything besides raising her children.