Mama stared at me not with sadness, but with pleading. She was thinner than I'd ever allowed myself to notice, looking more like a child than a woman. I wanted to believe she knew what was best for me. I wanted to believe she was like every other mot...
Nightmares did come true. Because, after her second night of major loving with the man of her dreams, the absolute last person she ever wanted to see was her mother. Yet there she was, her small, hefty frame trundling up the stairs to Maira’s front...
All writers are insecure, the male ones especially. It's well known. Why else would they spend so much time on make-believe? They're only happy in their imaginary worlds, because that's where they're in charge - where they're God. Did you know that H...
Before we got married we asked our grandfathers, whose own marriages had lasted forty years or more, "What is the secret to a happy marriage? And they paused, looked down at their chicken salad, and said, 'You really have to like each other. After th...
Your mother said that Fraser sent her back to me, knowing that I would protect her--and you. ... And like him, perhaps I send you back, knowing---as he knew of me--that he will protect you with his life. I love you forever, Brianna. I know whose chil...
Damn, but it was a night, Ned! Now, not to be outdone, it appears our reverend mother Hayes is inspired by Captain Cook's latest voyage to the South Pacific." "I give the woman credit for creativity." Ned laughed. "Have you read John Hawkesworth's ac...
The artist and the mother are vehicles, not originators. They don't create the new life, they only bear it. This is why birth is such a humbling experience. The new mom weeps in awe at the little miracle in her arms. She knows it came out of her but ...
Someone could cut through the mess in our house and look at it like one might look at rings on a tree or layers of sediment. They'd find the black-and-white hairs of a dog we had when I was six, the acid-washed jeans my mother once wore, the seven bl...
I remember thinking about how mothers were prepared to run into burning buildings to save their children's lives. I thought I should be able to go through a bit more suffering, a bit more inconvenience to give my children life. It made me feel noble....
When I was three years old and in my mother's arms, she looked down at me and said, "Son, the way I'm taking care of you now, when you get old, always have a woman to take care of you like this." Dig this! All I'm goin' do is rest and dress, buy gaso...
Being a mother is like trying to hold a wolf by the ears,” Gram said. “If you have three or four –or more – chickabiddies, you’re dancing on a hot griddle all the time. You don’t have time to think about anything else. And if you’ve onl...
I gazed up as if I hadn't heard, but what I was thinking was, tell me more about the pretty girls. I was embarrassed for wanting it, it was base, what did pretty matter? I had thought that so many times with my mother. A person didn't need to be beau...
By the time we were knit in our mothers' wombs, our lives were like open books before Him--every sentence read, every paragraph indented, every chapter titled, every page numbered. He knew it all in advance--all the sin, all the selfishness, every we...
She leans over Roop the way Sardarji leaned over Satya the years she cried for children, brushing tears from Roop's heavy lashes with her lips. She strokes her head as a mother would, says. "Slpee little one, we are together now." And Roop sleeps, ov...
Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I'd see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I'd realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I would be grateful and that in fact I was...
The books my mother read and reread provided a broader, more adventurous world, and escape from the confines of her chronic illness. Her interior life was enriched even as her physical life contracted. If she couldn't change the reality of her situat...
When they are away, you will often look for the baby doll, but it is not always there, where it is supposed to be, where you left it. Sometimes The Baby moves it, or she takes it with her, and you have to settle for some other toy. You bring it into ...
One day, back when I working at a video store, a woman accompanied by her two small sons walked up the counter with a tape box displaying a man slicing off someone’s head with a chainsaw. “Does this have any sex in it?” she asked. In my mind, i...
As a mother you have thoughts. You get interrupted. You forget. You are distracted. Your thoughts and ideas become fragmented, diluted, or simply evaporate. You must have faith that you will again have a thought. Creativity is the string upon which y...
He lived with his mother, father and sister; had a room of his own, with the fourth-floor windows staring on seas of rooftops and the glitter of winter nights when home lights brownly wave beneath the heater whiter blaze of stars--those stars that in...
Those treasures were stolen from the village they destroyed. The man pulled out a carved wooden horse and the two boys grabbed it at the same time. They pulled at it, fighting for possession. Zane’s carving. He shook his head and looked away, fight...
