Quotes for the day

I didn't like Anne Enright's novel The Gathering. But after reading her motherhood memoir, I feel like I have to read it again. Because she is obviously a genius.

***

"She is only two.
Though sometimes, I am two too.
And when she has done every single, possible thing to provoke, thwart, whine, refuse, baulk, delay, complicate and annoy, I wonder how the human race survived.
'I'll swing for you,' I heard myself saying once. Which is Irish for 'I will kill you and take the consequences.'
She is two. She is only two."

***

"The middle-class pregnant live on filtered water and grilled wild salmon and too much chocolate ice cream. And still, there is an overwhelming sense that no matter how properly we reproduce, we are all DOING SOMETHING WRONG! and no one knows what it is. All babies are perfect. They are given to us so that we can wreck them in some tiny but catastrophic way."

***

"None of this is true for the second baby, by the way. You put a second baby into the cot and the second baby turns on to its side and goes to sleep. Then you go to sleep. It is just as you suspected--it was all your fault in the first place."

***

"Sometimes, it is a lonely business. No, always. It is always a lonely business."

***

Forgetting
"The baby is crawling and I have forgotten the girl who could not crawl. She keeps replacing herself."


From Making Babies by Anne Enright