Quotes from Lauren Slater

And I have the same heart in the same socket of chest, and it hammers the way it used to, and I find myself thinking the same words, Safe again, trapped again. My pals sweat on the steering wheel. I remind myself: I am not that girl. I've changed. I've grown. It's a long time ago.

I found some way to recovery. But I know, have always known, that I could go back. Mysterious neurons collide and break. The brain bruises. Memories you thought were buried rise up.

Things are screaming inside me and my eyes feel hot.

I have not healed so much as learned to sit still and wait while pain does its dancing work, trying not to panic or twist in ways that make the blades tear deeper, finally infecting the wounds.

Having a child does not change you so much as amplify whatever is unresolved.

Apparently, this girl is made from me. She comes from me. She has half my genes, half my toxins, half my talents, she is in me. What of me will she shed, what will she find herself tacked to?

The gift of life. What an odd expression, a still odder gift, this box of snakes and daisies.

I have said the word mother to myself so many times it is starting to lose its shock. [...] Repeat any word enough and it will cease to alarm you. Mother mother mother mother . Slowly, so slowly, I am growing used to its weight on the tip of my tongue, its echo and its shape.

When I was a girl I loved fevers and flus and the muzzy feeling of a head cold, all these states carrying with them the special accoutrements of illness, the thermometer with its lovely line of red mercury, the coolness of ice chips pressed to a sweaty forehead, and best of all, a distant mother coming to your bedside with tea.

We are here making myths that are, at the same time, absolutely true.

I felt, for sure, a prayer come through my grandmother's hands, a language of pulse and palm lines, and the prayer said this: May you hold her, and in holding her, hold us, forever down the line.

Not once has the instructor talked about parenting after the baby is born. Instead, we fetishize labor. We focus on it to the exclusion of each other, our children, our futures. Is this because it can be taught, and parenting can't? Because, Americans to the bitter end, we love a sport, grow bored by things more subtle?

In illness, the world went wonderfully warped, high temperatures turning your pillow to a dune of snow and bringing the night sky, with its daisy-sized stars, so close to your bed you could touch it, and taste the moon.

Getting better was a grief. One morning you woke up and your fever had fled. Your throat felt depressingly fine.

Prozac, too made me want to weep. Prozac, too, was grief, because it returned me to the regular world with consequences I never expected.

All the same, all different. What was it?

I think I will actually miss it a little, this time of pure potential.

I don't feel like a mother. [...] I thought I would be smashed flat, or heaved high, mythically altered for this, the most mythic of roles but, shock of all shock, here I am, still me. And the baby? I have come to like her a little bit. That's it. A little bit.

Our children are not ours because we have given them our genes. They are ours because we have had the audacity to envision them.

But what happens if such a patient, say myself, for instance, has rarely if ever experienced a normal state of functioning? What happens if such a patient has spent much of her life in mental hospitals, both pursuing and being pursued by one's illness after another? What happens if "regular life" to such a person has always meant cutting one's arms, or gagging?

Motherhood's biggest taboo may be not rage but mildness. Mother love must be intense. I am not intense. I feel a great guilt. So far, it is only my guilt that makes me a mother.

Can you come here?' I say. I want to touch him before the pain is upon me, before the pain seals me into a selfish world where only I exist. He comes to me, holds my hands. "So this is it," he says. "In a couple of hours we'll be parents.

If this is the case, then the "normal state" Prozac ushers in is an experience in the surreal, Dali's dripping clock, a disorientation so deep and sweet you spin. Thus Prozac, make no mistake about it, blissed me out and freaked me out and later on, when the full force of health hit me, sometimes stunned me with grief.

Suddenly it is not she who needs me, but I who need her. Don't ask me to explain, I can't. I can. We are creatures who must give comfort. We ache to give comfort, to heal what hurts. The colic is making me a mother.