Kelly Corrigan Quotes

I have to pick up my kids. I have to register them for school. I have to pack their lunches and get their Hep B shots and wash their hands. They must be spotted on the stairs and potty trained and broken of the binkie. And if that relentless work runs right alongside gauging the risks of bladder surgery on a seventy-four-year-old, well, what did you think was gonna happen? What did you think being an adult was?

He loved me the way only a nineteen-year old can- suddenly and deliriously.

I am an average mother in almost every way, so yes, much to my regret, I do yell at my children.

I try to be one of the exceptional people who can live with the complexity of things, who are at peace with the unknown and the unknowable, who leave all the cages open. I tell myself: There's so much that you don't know, you can't know, you aren't ever going to know.

If John Lennon was right that life is what happens when you're making other plans, parenthood is what happens when everything is flipped over and spilling everywhere and you can't find a towel or a sponge or your "inside" voice.

I realized that making people feel irreplaceable was his gift.

Learn to say no. And when you do, don't complain and don't explain. Every excuse you make is like a invitation to ask you again in a different way.

Minds don't rest; they reel and wander and fixate and roll back and reconsider because it's like this, having a mind. Hearts don't idle; they swell and constrict and break and forgive and behold because it's like this, having a heart. Lives don't last; they thrill and confound and circle and overflow and disappear because it's like this, having a life.

Or maybe, knowing that intercourse involved certain unsavory sights, smells, and sounds, God deliberately left the ingredients for alcohol lying around where man would undoubtedly find them.

I snap and storm around and then spend long nights thinking of the most damaged adults I know and wondering if my particular brand of maternal fuckups are how they ended up like that.

I envy my dad and his faith. I envy all people who have someone to beseech, who know where they're going, who sleep under the fluffy white comforter of belief.

I've come to feel downright uneasy with people who can't say no. What if they yes you to death and then secretly hate you for it? If they never say no, how can you trust their yes? Besides, no makes room for yes, and who doesn't want more room for that?

It is one thing to be a man's wife - quite another to be the mother of his children. In fact, once you become a mother, being a wife seems like a game you once played or a self-help book you were overly impressed with as a teenager that on second reading is puffy with common ideas. This was one of the many things I had learned since crossing over into the middle place - that sliver of time when childhood and parenthood overlap.

But given everything I do know, no matter how hard it is, how lonely or stressful, still, I would not want to leave this earth without being a mother.

Accepting things as they are is difficult. A lot of people go to war with reality.

Pulling at the hem of my emotion was the creeping sense that it might well take until 2036 for this child in my arms to feel a fraction of what I already felt for her.

But now I see there's no such thing as "a" woman, "one" woman. There are dozens inside every one of them. I probably should have figured this out sooner, but what child can see the women inside her mom, what with all the Motherness blocking out everything else?

The idea is that readers don't come blank to books. Consciously and not, we bring all the biases that come with our nationality, gender, race, class, age. They you layer onto that the status of our health, employment, relationships, not to mention our particular relationship to each book--who gave it to us, where we read it, what books we've already read--and as my professor put it, 'That massive array of spices has as much to do with the flavor of the soup as whatever the cook intended

I moved from Philadelphia to California when I was 25, after traveling abroad for a year. I thought I'd come home eventually and settle down, but I didn't.

Shortly before I turned 37 and my older daughter turned 3, I was diagnosed with breast cancer: stage III of IV.

It's clear to you immediately that you can have anything you want when you have cancer.

Here I thought I was a special person with Special People Problems that would take a long time to diagnose and maybe even require new forms of treatment, or at least a bit of original advice. But I was everybody; a pocket truism that's been circulating for thousands of years would suffice.

What is it about a living mother that makes her so hard to see, to feel, to want, to love, to like? What a colossal waste that we can only fully appreciate certain riches--clean clothes, hot showers, good health, mothers--in their absence.

Your father's the glitter but I'm the glue.

It's funny, I'd rather be known as a writer who crafted a really nice piece about women's friendships over time. But that doesn't roll off the tongue like 'YouTube sensation.'

And to Edward Lichty...for letting me be a real bitch sometimes and flat-out dumb other times and holding my hand anyway.

Pel-i-cans, their beaks hold more than their bellies can.

Old people and their hyper-calibrated radar. They can't hear a word, and they can barely get out of their chairs, but they've got six or seven other senses, scanning, collecting, decoding.

You fly from thermal to thermal looking for lift.

It's easy to love kids who make you feel competent.

Resistance is suffering on permanent repeat.

How seriously can I take myself? I'm just one of six billion people, right?

Rather than trying to make me happy, as cheap songs and misguided greeting cards suggest is the promise of true love, Edward was doing the one thing that would keep us together: taking care of himself. As with my parents, sometimes the art of relationship is declaring your limits, protecting your boundaries, saying no.

Like the padre said, life is a mystery to be lived. Live your mystery.

Knowing people takes time, which we all swear we don't have, or some mitigating circumstance like being caught in an elevator, or war.

Turbulence is the only way to get altitude – to get lift. Without turbulence the sky is just a big blue hole. Without turbulence, you sink.

My dad did a load a day, folding it in front of whatever Eagles, Flyers, or 76ers game was on TV.

Why we don't value intellectual honesty beyond easy answers is beyond me.

Growing up, I saw my mother cry exactly once. The morning of her brother's funeral. One long tear ran down her cheek through her make up until she caught it near her mouth and patted it dry with a tissue she pulled from inside her sleeve.

My default answer to everything is no. As soon as I hear the inflection of inquiry in your voice, the word no forms in my mind, sometimes accompanies by a reason, often not. Can I open the mail? No. Can I wear your necklace? No. When is dinner? No. What you probably wouldn't believe is how much I want to say yes. Yes, you can take two dozen books home from the library. Yes, you can eat the whole roll of SweeTarts. Yes, you can camp out on the deck. But the books will get lost, and SweeTarts will eventually make your tongue bleed, and if you sleep on the deck, the neighborhood racoons will nibble on you. I often wish I could come back to life as your uncle, so I could give you more. But, when you're the mom, your whole life is holding the rope against those wily secret agents who never, ever stop trying to get you to drop your end.

Raising people is not some lark. It's serious work with serious repercussions. It's air-traffic control. You can't step out for a minute; you can barely pause to scratch your ankle.

The only mothers who never embarrass, harass, dismiss, discount, deceive, distort, neglect, baffle, appall, inhibit, incite, insult, or age poorly are dead mothers, perfectly contained in photographs, pressed into two dimensions like a golden autumn leaf.

I shift my position on the sofa, so my head is on a big, lumpy pillow in Greenie's lap and Georgia is leanign back against my middle and Claire is just about asleep on the floor. Allison and I catch eyes, and she tilts her head and smiles, and when I smile back, we both well up with tears, I think beause we both recognize that whatever else may be unfolding, this is happiness.

I love you.
The first time the words pass between two people: electrifying.
Ten thousand times later: cause for marvel.
The last time: the dream you revisit over and over and over again.

But the smell of the hospital, the sting of those overhead lights in the night, the snippets of conversations I had overheard, stayed with me and marked the beginning of how I came to know what a bold and dangerous thing parenthood is. Risk was not an event we had survived, but the place where we now lived.

You have to speak your dream out loud.

I had thought a good mother would not elicit such comments, but now I see that a good mother is required to somehow absorb all this ugliness and find a way to fall back in love with her child the next day.

I am your mother. The first mile of your road. Me, and all of my obvious and hidden limitations. That means that in addition to possibly wrecking you, I have the chance to give you what was given to me. A decent childhood. More good memories than bad. Some values. A sense of tribe. A run at happiness.

And it occurs to me that maybe the reason my mother was so exhausted all the time wasn't because she was doing so much but because she was feeling so much.

Even when all the paperwork-a marriage license, a notarized deed, two birth certificates, and seven years of tax returns-clearly indicates you're an adult, but all the same, there you are, clutching the phone and thanking God that you're still somebody's daughter.

Do you know that I love you enough to take in the full reality of your lives? That I can understand the things you think I can't and I can see and know and embrace every bit of you, full frame, no cropping?

To love someone is to love the people they love, or at least, try.

In addition to helping the girls parse the world, and all its awful truths - time only goes one way, things end, affections wax and wane - I was the sole distributor of the strongest currency they would ever know: maternal love.

I remember a lecture from one of my lit classes about a theory called "Reader Response", which basically says: More often than not, it's the readers --- not the writers --- who determine what a book means.