“I’ll tell you what it DID do. It made my husband think I had lost my mind when the baby is screaming and instead of being with him, I’m in the kitchen stomping around, gathering potatoes like a farmer and trying to slice them like I’m prepping to scalloped potatoes, like a mad woman, chanting, ‘Potatoes! He needs potatoes!’”
“’I don’t take walking for granted anymore.’ Those are the powerful words he uttered to me. I’d noticed him walking along the sidewalk as we approached the glass doors, but I didn’t expect him to yell for me to wait, to beg me to allow him to hold that door for us.”
“I don’t want to raise my kids to be as spoiled as I was, and he doesn’t want to raise his kids to be as poor as he was. I’m thankful to have married a man who went through the harder side of life, so he could teach a girl from privilege what actually matters in life.”
“I didn’t feel comfortable telling my friends about the weird things I did. I was constantly thinking about how to rid my brain of this mental contamination. I can’t just turn it off like a light switch.”
“I couldn’t even take a breath. The embryologist said, ‘I can’t believe I’m saying this, because I have never seen this happen!’ I still couldn’t breathe. What was he about to say? At this point I’m jumping up and down screaming. I had to ask.”
“Into my life walks a man I knew since he got sober 4 years earlier. He and his girlfriend had recently broken up. I know my kids are watching us. Our children are always watching.”
“As soon as I hung up the phone, I knew. I sat in my car and cried. I cried tears I didn’t know I had. I couldn’t breathe. I had to call my husband to tell him I wasn’t sure I could drive home.”
“I told my grandmother everything I could remember of that night, every detail of what he told me. My whole life changed in an instant; one day I had a family, then my family became smaller. I blamed myself for what had happened. I always thought I was dirty and an awful person because of what happened.”
“‘Do you know who Lisa and Jerry are?’ Again, I nodded yes. I recognized my parents’ names. ‘Do you know who Jamee and Isabella are?’ I couldn’t recall. The names seemed foreign. My own children.”
“I’ll say, ‘don’t do that again.’ He’ll look me square in the eyes, and do it again. And again. And again. I must be royally screwing everything up.”
