A mother’s heroic journey is not about how she leaves, but about how she stays.

not to generalize, but all men just assume things will stay alive with help from others.

Once seen, there’s no way it wouldn’t haunt you, if not your waking life, then your dreams. There was something disconcertingly gothic about an inanimate toy with a moving mouth and eyes, telling a story as if it were alive. Or at least this is what I thought before I became a mother.

Being a parent is a lot like having a dream. Some of it isn’t very nice. Most of it, even when it’s ugly, is beautiful.

Asher, now five, came up to me and said, “I’m worried.” Me: About what? Him: About what’s going to happen. Me: (panicking) With what? Him: I don’t know, just what’s going to happen! No one knows! I had never seen this in him before, this kind of generalized anxiety about the future. He was becoming more and more like me.

It was as if we were in a terrible one-act play, with him perfectly cast as a three-year-old refusing to use the toilet and me horribly miscast as a mother.

When I was making my initial rough crossing into motherhood, I didn’t want a wizard or a magic person or some elf queen, I just desperately needed help from women who knew exactly what the fuck they were doing, because I definitely did not.

I was already really fucking old, which meant my parents were even older than that.

The impossible delight of having your seventeen-month-old child, out of nowhere, in the middle of an absolutely average day filled with building blocks, in which you are slowly evaporating inside from boredom, say to you for the first time, “I’m happy.” And you cry, because this is why you chose his name: Asher, Hebrew for “happy,” the emotion