The Hand That First Held Mine | Maggie O'Farrell

1- Through it, he sees something incredible. .. She looks, Ted sees, like she used to. ..
He loves that look. He's missed it.  It was what made him realise what had to happen, what he must do. After a while, he began to see Elina reminded him of nothing so much as one of those balloons children have -- the bright ones, filled with helium, that bob and tug at the end of their string.  One moment of inattention and off they go, skywards, away, never to be seen again.  He saw that Elina had lived everywhere, all over the world, that she arrived and left and moved on.  That secret thing she had, what she did up there in the attic when no one was looking, with her paints and her turpentine and her canvases -- she only needed that, she didn't lack anything else, any anchor, any gravity.  And he saw that if he didn't take hold of her, if he didn't tether her down, if he didn't bind her to him, she would be off again.  And so he did it.  He laid hold of her and he held on tight, he sometimes pictures this as him tying the string of a balloon to his writs and getting on with his life while it floats there, just above his head. He has been holding on tight ever since.  (130)

2- When she leaves the house on these mornings, she senses a thread that runs between her and her son, and as she walks away through the streets she is aware of it unspooling, bit by bit.  By the end of the day, she feels utterly unravelled, almost mad with desire to be back with him, and she urges the Tube train to rattle faster through the tunnels, to speed over the rails, to get her back to her child as quickly as possible.  It takes her a while, once she's there again with him, to wind herself back to rightness, to get the thread back to where it ought to be-- a length of no more than a couple of feet or so feels best.  (237)

3- The women we become after children

We change shape, we buy low-heeled shoes, we cut off our long hair.  We begin to carry in our bags half-eaten rusks, a small tractor, a shred of beloved fabric, a plastic doll.  We lose muscle tone, sleep, reason, perspective.  Our hearts begin to live outside our bodies.  They breathe, they tat, they crawl and -- look! -- they walk, they begin to speak to us.  We learn that we must sometimes walk an inch at a time, to stop and examine every stick, every stone, every squashed tin along the way. We get used to not getting where we were going.  We learn to darn, perhaps to cook, to patch the knees of dungarees.  We get used to living with a love that suffuses us, suffocates us, blinds us, controls us.  We live.  We contemplate our bodies, our stretched skin, those threads of silver around our brows, our strangely enlarged feet.  We learn to look less in the mirror.  We put our dry-clean-only clothes in the back of the wardrobe.  Eventually, we throw them away.  We school ourselves to stop saying "shit" and "damn" and learn to say 'my goodness' and 'heavens above'.  We give up smoking, we colour our hair, we search the vistas of parks, swimming pools, libraries, cafes for others of our kind.  We know each other by our pushchairs, our sleepless gazes, the beakers we carry.  We learn how to cool a fever, ease a cough, the four indicators of meningitis, that one must sometimes push a swing for two hours.  We buy biscuit cutters, washable paints, aprons, plastic bowls.  We no longer tolerate delayed buses, fighting in the street, smoking in restaurants, sex after midnight, inconsistency, laziness, being cold.  We contemplate younger women as they pass us in the street, with their cigarettes, their makeup, their tight-seamed dresses, their tiny handbags, their smooth, washed hair, and we turn away, we put down our heads, we keep on pushing the pram up the hill.  (241)

4- So here he was, on his hands and knees, saving her studio from being engulfed by the garden.  He wants to give her a surprise. He wants her to be happy. He wants the baby to sleep for more than three hours at a stretch.  He wants to have if not his old life then some kind of life, not this constant lurching from one day to the next.  He wants Elina not to have huge dark circles under here eyes all the time, for her not to have that tense, bitten-lip look she's developed recently.  He wants the house to stop smelling of sh*t.  He wants there to be a time when he washing-machine isn't on.  He wants her to stop getting upset with him when it slips his mind to take the laundry out of the machine, to hang the laundry, to fold the laundry, to buy more nappies, to make the dinner, to clear away the dinner.  (244)

5- The shock of motherhood, for Lexie, is not the sleeplessness, the troughs of exhaustion, the shrinkage of life, how your existence becomes limited to the streets around where you live, but the onslaught of domestic tasks: the washing and the drying.  Performing these makes her almost weep with furious boredom and she more than once hurls an armful of laundry at the wall.  She eyes other mothers on the street and they look so poised, so together, with their handbags hooked over the pram handles and their neatly embroidered sheets tucked in around their babies with hospital corners.  But what about the washing, she wants to say, don't you loath the drying and the folding? (236)

___

3/5 Maggie O'Farrell takes my breath away with her painting of these strong female protagonists.  It is masterful how she weaves the stories of each character together, and her descriptions almost transport you right to the very street or very moment she's describing in such an artful way. This one was a bit of a slower start for me, but I couldn't put it down during the second half of the book. I felt seen in motherhood. I did predict the ending, but it made the unraveling no less fun!

Fresh Water for Flowers | Valérie Perrin

“I prefer youngsters to be full of life, annoying, noisy, drunk, stupid, rather than in coffins, followed by people bowed with grief.” (77)

“We push open the door. In the window there are funerary plaques and bouquets of artificial flowers. I loathe artificial flowers. A plastic or polyester rose is like a bedside lamp trying to imitate the sun.” (135)

“The darkness has to intensify for the first star to appear.” (208)

“I had my first garden at nine years old. One square meter of flowers. It was my mother who taught me how to sow, water, harvest. I sensed that it would be my thing. She always said to me, ‘Don’t judge each day by what you can pick, but by the seeds you sow.’ .. this garden is seven hundred square meters.. of joy, love, sweat, endeavor, determination, and patience.” (231)

“I was impatient to return to life after [their passing]. With the main one extinguished, the volcano was extinct. But I sensed branches, offshoots growing inside me. Whatever I sowed, I could feel it. I was sowing myself. And yet, the arid soul that was me was much poorer than that of the cemetery vegetable garden. A soil full of gravel. But a blade of grass can grow anywhere, and that anywhere was me. Yes, a root can take hold in tar. All that’s needed is the tiniest crack for life to penetrate the impossible. A little rain, some sun, and then shoots from who knows where, from the wind perhaps, appear.” (248)


***

3/5. Some beautiful passages, a moving story overall. I cried. But the "love" in this book was just "lust" and that was a huge chunk of the novel.. I couldn't get past all those affairs. If you can look past that part, then, this book is beautiful. 

Hamnet | Maggie O'Farrell

    She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange.  She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married. She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be. 
    There is just enough of this recollection alive, she hopes, to enable her to recognize it if she meets it again.  And if she does, she won't hesitate. She will seize it with both hands, as a means of escape, a means of survival. She won't listen to the protestations of others, their objections, their reasoning.  This will be her chance, her way through the narrow hole at the heart of the stone, and nothing will stand in her way. (49-50)

Over the next while, she observes him carefully, in the manner of a doctor watching a patient.  She sees how he cannot sleep at night but then cannot rouse himself in the morning. How he rises at midday, groggy, whey-faced, his mood flat and grey.  The smell of him is worse then, the sour, rank scent soaked into his clothing, his hair.  His father comes to the door, shouting and bawling, telling him to stir himself, to put in a day's work.  She sees how she, Agnes, must remain calm, steady, must make herself bigger, in a way, to keep the house on an even keel, not to allow it to be taken over by this darkness, to square up to it, to shield Susanna from it, to seal off her own cracks, not to let it in. (158)

Agnes lifts her chin a little higher. There is no disgrace, says the straightness of her back.  There is no problem in our marriage, says the proud, outward curve of her middle.  There is no failing in the business, say her husband's shining boots. (176)

She presses the muscle, presses and presses, as if she might draw juice from it.  She senses mostly noise, at first: numerous voices, calling in loud and soft and threatening and entreating tones.  His mind is crammed with a cacophony, with strife, with overlapping speech and cries and yells and yelps and whispers, and she doesn't know how he stands it, and there are the other women, she can feel them, their loosened hair, their sweat-marked handprints, and it sickens her but she keeps holding on, despite wanting to let go, to push him away, and there is also fear, a great deal of fear, of a journey, something about water, perhaps a sea, a desire to seek a faraway horizon, to stretch his eyes to it, and beneath all this, behind it all, she finds something, a gap, a vacancy, an abyss, which is dark and whistling with emptiness, and at the bottom of it she finds something she has never felt before: his heart, that great, scarlet muscle, banging away, frantic and urgent in its constancy, inside his chest.  It feels so close, so present, it's almost as if she could reach out and touch it.
He is still looking at her when she releases her grip. Her hand nestles, inactive, inside his.
"What did you find?" he says to her. 
"Nothing," she replies. "Your heart."
"That's nothing?" He says, pretending to be outraged.  "Nothing? How could you say such a thing?"
She smiles at him, a faint smile, but he snatches her hand to his chest.

"And it's your heart," he says, " not mine."
(265)

I am dead:

Thou livest;

... draw thy breath in pan,

To tell my story

--Hamlet, Act V, scene ii

(215)

***

5/5. I'm in awe that anyone could write something so stunning and tragic. One of my top 5 favorite books. I promised no spoilers on this blog, so I won't say more. But WOW, wow wow.

If you've read this book-- did you feel the same? Let's chat!

The Birthday Book | Ann Druit, Christine Fynes-Cliton, & Marjie Rowling

 ✨”What comes through in this volume, above and beyond the wealth of down-to-earth ideas and suggestions, is a sense of the real meaning of birthdays: how they are milestones on a journey in which each of us, with our precious and different gifts, increasingly gets to grips with life and hopefully- unfolds our full potential.” (vii)

✨”It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts.” Adlai Stevenson (viii)

✨”You have no birthday because you have always lived; you were never born and never will you die. You are not the child of the people you call mother and father, but their fellow-adventurer on a bright journey to understand the things that are.” Richard Bach (1)

✨”I woke that day feeling unusually terrible, not just plain terrible but fancy terrible, terrible with raisins in it. Oh yes, it was my birthday.” Dorothy Parker (13)

✨”There will come a time, perhaps sooner, perhaps later, when such a celebration will change, will be moulded by the passing of years, and will eventually need to be relinquished to take its place in the many-coloured patchwork of family memories.” (44)

***

5/5. A Fabulous resource for birthdays. Magical and simple and sweet.

Early Riser Companion | Elizabeth Antonia

Note, these are additional quotes I found inspiring. The original five can be found on my instagram page, @yourstrulykait !

This is the season of childhood

And as swiftly as Spring turns into Summer

Summer to Autumn, Autumn to Winter,

the season of childhood will end. 

But for now

WE ARE HERE.

Wake up and greet the day.

Ready or not, there is a little one

waiting for you.

Good Morning,

Early Riser. 

(11)

This, for me, is the great juxtaposition of motherhood: the pure love, the expansion of the heart; and the simultaneous longing for freedom, for sleep, for time, for whatever else feels sacrificed on the altar of raising small humans. 

(109)

We need symbols of light during these dark days.  Fill your home with light. Fill your heart with light.  When faced with obstacles, keep going.  If something is making you feel bad, change it.  Each little light that shines against the darkness helps someone get through. 

(121)

For the record, around these parts the tooth fairy brings two silver dollar coins and a crystal. 
(39).

We are growing alongside our little ones.  We have the honor to witness the littlest and biggest facets of their lives unfold... In creating a sanctuary of home, an intentional place nurtured in private for each family member, our children experience respite and stability.  A place to pause and dream.  This held space will be felt by them on a cellular level, and they will carry it out into the world when they are ready.
(13)

(On Chores)...Rushing through them says to them, "I am doing the dishes. I am sweeping the floor. I am folding the laundry. This is MY chore to do, not yours.  Do not interrupt my important work." And in a couple of years, they begin to believe it. "This is your chore Mom, not mine." 
Can you involve your child in one new thing today and explroe how it makes them feel? Make a list of things you need to do around the home, and designate a day for each (rather than tackling all at once). 

(44-45). 

Together, we created a short book with our bedtime routine detailed and would read this on the couch before we began our evening rituals.. Our children love stories that clearly relate to life. 

(158)

***

5/5. Elizabeth Antonia has written and compiled a masterpiece. I now want to slow down, raise my kids with intention, and create a beautiful life with them.