Quotes from Meghan Daum

For a kid, self-esteem can be as close at hand as a sports victory or a sense of belonging in a peer group. It's a much more complicated and elusive proposition for adults, subject to the responsibilities and vicissitudes of grown-up life.

To me, having 'material' for an essay means not only having something to write about but also having something interesting and original to say about whatever that might be.

Just as I never liked bumper stickers - even though I do brake for animals, and if I had a kid, she would definitely be an honor student - I don't like the idea of expressing my views through social-media-controlled rainbow-or-anything-else-ification.

It was a challenge for me to do a plot because I'd been an essayist and a journalist. I had to be vigilant about moving things along and being entertaining.

It may take a village to raise a child, but not every villager needs to be a mom or dad. Some of us just need to be who we are.

Obviously, nobody chooses not to have kids because they'd rather sleep in late. It's a very visceral decision, and it's a complicated decision.

But it's the temptation of so many suburban-raised children to invent tales of adversity, to create hardscrabble mythologies out of life histories marked by little more than field hockey games and orthodontist appointments.

My childhood was so inconsistent that I never expected normalcy, and it's enough for me to be able to have time and space to be good to myself and the people around me. Children are nice, but I decided to save myself instead.

If you called for nuance, you were part of the problem.

Nothing ever begins when you think it does. You think you can trace something back to its roots but roots by definition never end. There's always something that came before: soil and water and seeds that were born of trees that were born of yet more seeds.

I was never particularly opposed to the idea of having kids—let no one say that I don't love kids! It always seemed like an interesting future possibility, the same way that joining the Peace Corps someday seemed like an interesting future possibility.

It terrifies me to admit to a firsthand understanding of the way the heart and the ego are entwined. Like diseased trees that have folded in on one another, our need to worship fuses with our need to be worshipped.

You can't fight tribalism with a tribe. All you can do is read and think and listen. And if you're lucky, eventually will come that rousing, fleeting moment when you hear someone say the thing that makes you feel less alone.

Even with men doing more parenting than before, the majority of women are still left facing the well-rehearsed motherhood-versus-career dichotomy. But it's not a dichotomy; its a socially organized choice masquerading as a natural one.

Anthropologie is not butch, phantom or otherwise. It is Disney with a slightly more sophisticated but no less carefully engineered aesthetic. It is to adult women what princesses are to little girls. It is a twirling motion in the form of an international brand.

your ability to see is sometimes only as good as your willingness to go unseen.

Evan Handler is not only a fine actor, he's a damn good writer. It's Only Temporary is wise and funny and as righteously indignant as it is endearingly self-effacing. In what may be a literary first, the book actually left me wanting more.

moving, like chocolate and sunshine, stirs up many of the same chemicals you ostensibly produce when you're in love.

Even if we manage to get rid of Trump [...] the political left still needs a course correction. We need to stop devouring our own and canceling ourselves. We need fewer sensitivity readers and more empathy as a matter of course. We need to recognize that to deny people their complications and contradictions is to deny them their humanity.

If the desire to have children is just a way to build some noisy tribe of distraction around oneself, then I'd rather be alone.

She didn't really want to have a baby; she wanted to want to have a baby.

I accept that people with children are having a deeper, more complex experience of being alive than I am, and this is fine with me. Raising children is one of many life experiences I'm happy to die without having had, like giving birth, going to war, spending a night in jail, or seeing Forrest Gump. If I could get through life without experiencing death, I would gladly do that, too.

Parents need to somehow justify the lives of sputum, tuition, and sarcastic abuse to which they've condemned themselves, and so make their own grandiose claims about parenthood's ineffable fulfillments and beneficent effects—that one cannot possibly know what real love is unless you've had children, that it is life's ultimate purpose, et cetera.

For my mother's entire life, her mother was less a mother than splintered bits of shrapnel she carried around in her body, sharp, rusty debris that threatened to puncture an organ if she turned a certain way.