Nina Riggs Quotes

I am still trying to know myself. I want a better sense of what kind of mother the kids will remember me to be. It's hard: I am not done becoming me. I am still in the works. I still aim to be softer in some places, firmer in others.

We're making our way like this, though: We are breathless, but we love the days. They are promises. They are the only way to walk from one night to the other.

Everything is strange -- so unlike anything we have done before -- and everything, too, is exactly as we imagined.

We contain things and give shape to things in order to be less afraid of them. Yes. The crafted idea does this. It's why I write. The metaphor does this. The intact body does it, too. Sometimes I worry I do this instead of allowing myself to feel things. . . . Reveal the pain, but hide the wreckage. I can hear Montaigne hollering: break it open, look inside, feel it, write it down.

The drenched backyard full of runoff, and tiny, slimy, uncertain yard critters who had expected to remain buried in months of hard mud, peeking their heads out into the balmy New Year's air, asking, Wait, what?

I think of this feeling sometimes -- and I can imagine that sort of letting go: warm, dangerous, seductive. What if this is what death is: The engine beneath you steady; those that hold you strong; the sun warm?

I think maybe it wouldn't be so bad to fall into that, to loosen the grip at the waist, let gravity and fate take over -- like a thought so good you can't stop having it.

Sometimes I'm sad about everything; the way my grilled cheese sandwich tastes, how nice my socks feel, a song John is playing in the kitchen. One time he puts on this goofy Loudon Wainwright song that was on a mix tape I used to listen to during my commute from the boys' school in Bethesda back into the District when we were newly married and everything was about to begin and it makes me burst into tears about the shortness of everything.

These are the things we all say at the end of book club now: I love you. Of course we do. Why haven't we been saying that all along?

Here we are closer to something I am trying to understand: that openness to fear. We are hearts and stingers. We ride the tide. We believe in resistance; we are made both of fight and float.

Also there was this - something we came to understand together much later: her desperately needing to still be my mom, my desperately needing to prove to her how much I didn't need a mom.