Kelly Corrigan

“It's easy to love kids who make you feel competent.”

“But the smell of the hospital, the sting of those overhead lights in the night, the snippets of conversations I had overheard, stayed with me and marked the beginning of how I came to know what a bold and dangerous thing parenthood is. Risk was not an event we had survived, but the place where we now lived.”

“Cancer is a growth hormone for empathy, and empathy makes us useful to each other in ways we were not, could not have been, before.”

“Shortly before I turned 37 and my older daughter turned 3, I was diagnosed with breast cancer: stage III of IV.”

“At first parenthood was as I had expected, exhausting, sometimes heinous, and occasionally divine. I held my children close enough to feel them breathe, laugh, swallow.”

“It's clear to you immediately that you can have anything you want when you have cancer.”

“I moved from Philadelphia to California when I was 25, after traveling abroad for a year. I thought I'd come home eventually and settle down, but I didn't.”

“I almost threw up the first time I set foot inside the University of California, San Francisco's Comprehensive Care Center and joined the stream of thin, slow-moving, low-voiced, gray-skinned people. I didn't want to be one of the pitied, the struck-down.”

“I had thought a good mother would not elicit such comments, but now I see that a good mother is required to somehow absorb all this ugliness and find a way to fall back in love with her child the next day.”

“Moms in fiction and memoir get a bad rap.”

“I am an average mother in almost every way, so yes, much to my regret, I do yell at my children.”

“Pulling at the hem of my emotion was the creeping sense that it might well take until 2036 for this child in my arms to feel a fraction of what I already felt for her.”

“The truth is, I'd like to be closer to my kids. I'd like to share more with them. But that's not what this time in their lives is about. This is their time to separate, to self-direct, to become independent.”

“Mothering you is the first thing of consequence I have ever done.”

“Growing up, I saw my mother cry exactly once. The morning of her brother's funeral. One long tear ran down her cheek through her make up until she caught it near her mouth and patted it dry with a tissue she pulled from inside her sleeve.”

“It's funny, I'd rather be known as a writer who crafted a really nice piece about women's friendships over time. But that doesn't roll off the tongue like 'YouTube sensation.'”

“I snap and storm around and then spend long nights thinking of the most damaged adults I know and wondering if my particular brand of maternal fuckups are how they ended up like that.”