Jaclyn Moriarty

I took deep, shining breaths of it all, and let myself be both sad and glad, the way you’re supposed to, and felt my lost birthdays, all the lost birthdays stacking up behind me, all the anger and the anguish, the terror and the hope, all the harshness and the sweetness, the spoon a silver glint against the white.

See how you even shorten the word ‘babysitter’ like that? The casual, the abbreviated, the breezy: pop it in the freezer! jump in a cab! bang it in the microwave! shoot me an email! throw the kid in the car! Easy, breezy, bung-it-all-in-there, Jamie Oliver-style. As if the words themselves, the quick breeze of them, will do the job for you, will themselves tackle this relentless, this exhausting life.

We shouldn’t have children, it’s impossible, but if you want children, and you can’t have them, then that’s its own impossible. It’s impossible to lose them, but it happens, it happened to my mother, it’s happening all the time.