QUOTES

2 " Ma'am is yet another horrible-sounding word in the lexicon of words that women are stuck with to describe various aspects of their body/life/mental state/hair. Vagina. Moist. Fallopian tubes. Yeast infection. Clitoris. Frizz. These are all terrible words, and yet they are our assigned descriptors. Who made up these words? Women certainly didn't. If, at the beginning of time, right after making vaginas, God had asked me, 'What would you like your most intimate and enjoyable part of yourself to be called?',' I most certainly wouldn't have said, 'Vagina.' No woman would, because vagina sounds like a First World War term that was invented to describe a trench that has been mostly blown apart but is still in use. Even off the very top of my head I feel like I could have come up with something better, like for instance the word papoose, which actually as I'm typing it feels like an incredibly brilliant word for vagina. "

― , You'll Grow Out of It

4 " Imagine that every time you want to leave the house you have to get into a bar fight with someone. A sloppy, exhausted, poorly choreographed display of slapping and kicking. You are in a bar fight because they don't want to be strapped, Hannibal Lecter style, into the back of your car. Fair. Even thought you are technically big enough to always win the fight, you still have to buckle a small but shockingly heavy person at a 45 degree angle - possibly in the burning sun or freezing cold or driving rain - into a chair. All the while vaguely recalling the warning that if the buckles are not in the exact right place then the whole point of putting them in the seat is moot and you've ruined everything. If the straps are not tight enough, or if they are too tight, you might as well just throw your kid on the roof of the car untethered to anything and drive off at a million miles per hour because it's all basically the same effect. "

― , I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

6 " At the same time you're also aware that upon attempting to re-enter normal life from "mom land" or "middle aged" land, or both - you'll be seen as a "weirdo" or "cranky" or "stubborn," or all of the above. Doesn't it make sense you'd think about just not going back? The end of the heroes journey is like the path of a rocket re-entering Earth's atmosphere. It must burn. Pieces blister and break off. You're not the same splashing down into the ocean as when you left. When you took off your boosters were ablaze, fueling the epic push of new life out of yourself and into Earth's orbit. Everyone at Mission Control stood and applauded. But the return is more like free-fall. The rocket that lands in the ocean doesn't look like the one that departed. It's a little pod-like thing, a charred husk of what took off. Instead of wings spreading, a parachute awkwardly collapses into the water. A butterfly in reverse. What's left is this metal shell, just a nub of what was there before. And yet, it's a nub that's been to space for f---'s sake. Just surviving is the success. So much of who I was - my daily habits, my identifying clothing - had to get thrown away in making room to become a mother. What's left of me is now sharing space with a little boy. And as a result, my mental capacity has been reduced from a decent three bed two bath apartment to at best a little tenement studio. While the tight space creates some cons, the pro is that what can come in and what cannot is pretty clear. "

― , I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

8 " ...at this moment in time my son was just a little over two and we were in the midst of the most animal-like fights over eating, sleeping, and in general: how to be a person. He wanted to be more like a raccoon and I wanted him to be more like a human. And in trying to cajole and beg him to do that I turned into a raccoon myself. A large, female one who didn't sleep or eat enough, and was cranky all the time because of it. So essentially in trying to teach him how to be more like me, I became him. "

― , I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

10 " Lingerie is really never worth the agita. "

― , You'll Grow Out of It

12 " I do not remotely look like Audrey Hepburn. Nobody does. That's the whole point of Audrey Hepburn. "

― , You'll Grow Out of It

14 " I was a woman sobbing in a hotel corridor, which is kind of incredible, because when I was little I thought I was going to be a senator. "

― , You'll Grow Out of It

16 " I wanted to structure a day where a hypothetical random snapshot of me looked like Carrie Bradshaw in her kimono, totally relaxed, not Brittany Murphy in Girl, Interrupted, diddling an old chicken under her bed. The "

― , You'll Grow Out of It

18 " This is the lament of older women, and ultimately of all old people—that you become invisible. It is especially hard for women, though, whose entire lives have been spent spinning around the idea that if no one is staring at you, you’ve somehow failed. "

― , You'll Grow Out of It

20 " I was worried that I was already a failure. At which point my friend said, “What are you trying to win?” What was I trying to win? I thought about it and realized—nothing. There’s nothing to win. There is so much pressure on women around birth and labor and mothering to do it one way or another. It’s so easy to believe the notion that having a baby demands complete and total sacrifice, and anything short of that is not enough. That if you’re not in pain, you’re selfish. "

― , You'll Grow Out of It