Quotes from Meghan Daum

No one ever talked about such bonds before the rise of industrialization, when wage labor first became an option for women. Note that the bonding story got revved up again in the early 1970s, as women were moving into the labor market (screwing up traditional conceptions about the natural female role)

while remaining fundamentally—and sometimes maddeningly—who we are.

Novelty has a way of intensifying memory. The less often you do something, the deeper the memory burrows in.

There's more than one way to be a person. Actually, there are more than two or three ways. You'd think that was obvious, but I find that often it is not. The world is essentially a collection of teams. Life is a process of deciding which ones we're going to join.

I rode in my own backseat as we headed northwest toward Hollywood on the 101 freeway and then exited onto the dark, scabrous streets of the then still-a-little-funky, still-gentrifying neighborhood where we both lived because we were single and "creative" and this was where single, creative people lived if they wanted to surround themselves with—and potentially date and possibly marry—like-minded folk.

Children can be wicked, insane, insufferable little shits. And yet I love them. I love them—especially the small ones—because of the way their emotions dance and glow on the surface for all to see. They have neither the guile nor the wile to hide how they feel. Very quickly, you know who they really are. (Rosemary Mahoney)

At some point in my early forties I realized that my primary goal in just about any verbal exchange is to lighten the mood.

Every now and then I'd squint my eyes to visualize a time when I'd start feeling the craving myself: when I was thirty, it would be at thirty-two; at thirty-two, I'd be ready by thirty-six; and on it went.

if it's so far been our biological situation that we're the ones stuck bearing the children, then there should be a lot more social recompense and reparations for this inequity than there are. The reason these have been slow in coming? Because women keep forgetting to demand them

wrestling with a curiosity about country living that seemed strangely akin to a homophobic person "struggling with same-sex attraction." As much as I wanted to be a creature of the city, as much as I'd organized my entire life around the overpriced, undersized vagaries of Manhattan living, I sometimes found myself wanting desperately to live on a farm, or at least near one.

But in the outside world, in places (on the rare occasions I visited them) where the vast blankness of the land and sky made even the enormous supermarkets seem tiny, where, to many, words like "Vassar" were just a random sequence of letters, where weather mattered more than most anything else, I often felt lost, irrelevant, fatuous. I

This was a time in my life when I was so filled with longing for so many things that were so far out of reach that at least once a day I thought my heart would implode from the sheer force of unrequited desire. By desire I am not referring to apartments I wanted to occupy or furniture I wanted to buy or even people I was attracted to (well, I'm referring to those things a little) but, rather, a sensation I can only describe as the ache of not being there yet.

A nagging thought: What did I have to show for all that free time the mothers didn't have?

when women acquire critical skills and start weighing their options, they soon wise up to the fact that they're not getting enough recompense for their labors.

or furniture I wanted to buy or even people I was attracted to (well, I'm referring to those things a little) but, rather, a sensation I can only describe as the ache of not being there

When I pointed out to her that he'd like the wedding to include his sister's small children, she told me he had to realize he couldn't always get what he wanted.

They protect us from disaster by playing out the disaster ahead of time. They're the reason the plane doesn't crash and the bomb doesn't drop. They're the reason we will almost certainly not die in childbirth.

People need to feel that they have been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted;

Is there any other situation in life where people feel so free to tell you what to do, short of checking you in to rehab?

My not being a father had kept me young, had kept my curiosity awake.

I'd get it wrong anyway; everyone who hasn't lived there thirty years or more gets accused of getting it wrong)

these are the regions where populations of artists and radicals in the 1930s and 1940s morphed into heavily Latino populations in the 1950s and 1960s.

I decided to take the love I'd have for a child and give it to myself instead.

I craved . . . an ineffable state of being I can only describe as domestic integrity. This integrity has something to do with being able to not feel like an imposter in your home and, therefore, in your life.