Breastfeeding is an unsentimental metaphor for how love works, in a way. You don’t decide how much and how deeply to love - you respond to the beloved, and give with joy exactly as much as they want.

Breastfeeding is an unsentimental metaphor for how love works, in a way. You don’t decide how much and how deeply to love - you respond to the beloved, and give with joy exactly as much as they want.

At a certain point, the soul exits from a cherished photograph, because we have come to the end of our loving projection into that moment.

Addiction might be redefined not as a character flaw but as a "biochemical deficit management." Our emotional habits will become an accepted factor of good health, along with slogans like "Heartache can be harmful to your unborn children."

This is a truism of child-raising, of course - whatever you give special time and attention to cooking, your children will despise and reject, with annoying gagging sounds.

Housework hassles go on, are never resolved, and will probably extend into the afterlife ('Why am I the one who takes the clouds to the dry cleaners?').

There seems to be a hole in the culture where mothers went. Then, when their kids went off to school or stopped having ear infections every three weeks, they emerged from the mother zone, and like everyone else, they forgot where they'd been. Amnesia surrounding motherhood is the rule, not the exception.