7
" Mourning with no end, and a sense that I had lost everything - my child, my mother's love and protection, my father's love and protection, the life I had once imagined for myself - hollowed me out. I floated every day alone and disconnected, and could not find comfort or release. I understood clearly that my history had harmed me, had cut me off from the normal connections between people. Every day for five years I had been afraid of this disconnection, feeling the possibility of perfect detachment within my reach, like a river running alongside, inviting me to step into its current. "
― Meredith Hall , Without a Map
11
" Do I know how to love, how not to harm, how to protect and defend, how to be sanctuary? I have believed from the moment I gave birth to Alex and Benjamin, my kept children, that I know the obligations of a mother’s love. My two young sons are growing up inside their trust in me. I try so hard to be a good mother. I am safety, tenderness, praise. But I am also, always, the child cast out to the world a long time ago. I move between the sorrows of my past and an unrelenting will to love my children well. I am child, and I am mother. "
― Meredith Hall , Without a Map