“… brilliantly and poignantly examines the joys and frustrations, the compromises and insights, the difficult struggles and profound emotional satisfactions she experienced in the course of one twelve-month period – from a winter pregnancy through a spring and summer of new motherhood to a fall return to writing…. Lyrical prose … she turns a poet’s eye to the harmony of growth and change, of beginnings and endings, of love and longing.” (from book jacket)
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jht's comments - This is a book I'll read again and again. It's about mothering - about life - about nature - about trying to figure out priorities and choices. One goodreads reviewer commented that the author dealt with the "slippery, inexplicable moments of grace and agony. .. endlessly rewarding but ceaselessly discouraging world of being a parent." (Megan, December 20, 2008)
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"Growing, bearing, mothering or fathering, supporting and at last letting go of an infant is a powerful and mundane creative act that rapturously sucks up whole chunks of life." (p3)
"Time with children runs through our fingers like water as we lift our hands, try to hold, to capture, to fix moments in a lens, a magic circle of images or words. We snap photos, videotape, memorialize while we experience a fast-forward in which there is no replay of even a single instant." (p4)
“Life seems to flood by, taking our loves quickly in its flow. In the growth of children, in the aging of beloved parents, time’s chart is magnified, shown in its particularity, focused, so that with each celebration of maturity there is also a pang of loss. This is our human problem, one common to parents, sons and daughter, too – how to let go while holding tight, how to simultaneously cherish the closeness and intricacy of the bond while at the same time letting out the raveling string, the red yard that ties our hearts.” (p69)
“Perhaps, if anything, the meaning in this book for others may be this: Here is a job [motherhood]* in which it is not unusual to be, at the same instant, wildly joyous and profoundly stressed.” (p116)
I think the following is a beautiful description of how our relationships shape us - whether as mothers, as disciples of Christ, as people in general - who we are does impact others. “In talking to other women over years, I begin to absorb them somehow, as if we’re all permeable… Mothering is a subtle art whose rhythm we collect and learn, as much from one another as by instinct. Taking shape, we shape each other, with subtle pressures and sudden knocks. The challenges shape us, approvals refine, the wear and tear of small abrasions transform until we’re slowly made up of one another and yet wholly ourselves.” (p161)
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more at goodreads.com
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