For Mom(s)

Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. ~Elizabeth Stone

You don't really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around - and why his parents will always wave back. ~William D. Tammeus

My mom is a neverending song in my heart of comfort, happiness, and being. I may sometimes forget the words but I always remember the tune. ~Graycie Harmon

A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie. ~Tenneva Jordan

like their mothers.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.

The Importance of Being Earnest
Oscar Wilde

what I am feeling

I never know what I am feeling until it’s too late.

Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides

the joy of your approach

There is something
something urgent
I have to say to you
and you alone
but it must wait
while I drink in
the joy of your approach,
perhaps for the last time.

Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, Book I [excerpt]
William Carlos Williams

Borrowed from "the Book of Dreams"...

I dream of when I met my wife, fifty years ago, and it’s exactly as it happened. I dream of our marriage, and I can even see my father’s tears of pride. It’s all there, just as it was. But then I dream of my own death, which I have heard is impossible to do, but you must believe me. I dream of my wife telling me on my deathbed that she loves me, and even though she thinks I can’t hear her, I can, and she says she wouldn’t have changed anything. It feels like a moment I’ve lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the ways we have, fail in the ways we have, all exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, as they have and will a thousand times, I awake.

Everything Is Illuminated
Jonathan Safran Foer

Sex Without Love

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

Sex Without Love
Sharon Olds

I Am Not Yours

I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

I Am Not Yours [excerpt]
Sarah Teasdale

Cake

i wanted one life
you wanted another
we couldn't have our cake
so we ate eachother.

Cake
Roger McGough

Pettiness is the first casualty...

Hospitals strip a lot from you - your independence, your confidence, sometimes your will to live. But pettiness too. Pettiness is the first casualty of the ICU waiting room. No one has the energy for it.

Would you like this magazine? I'm done with it.
Oh, let me remove my coat. Take the seat. Take the seat, take it.
I'm going to get a soda. Would you like one?
Is this okay, or should I keep flipping?

Even the employees in the gift shop and the cafeteria and the food court and at the coffee carts, are to a person, respectful and courteous. Never solicitous, but kind. Because they don't know if your son just died, your wife just received chemo, you've been told you won't see June.

There is a basic human concern in hospitals.

ICU [excerpt from Coronado]
Dennis Lehane

Where the Sidewalk Ends

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.

Where the Sidewalk Ends
Shel Silverstein