Byler Quotes

Jesus first, others next, and yourself last spells J-O-Y.

Sometimes a book about other people’s problems is way better than your own.

It is a generous gift to do something you don’t necessarily want to do, at great expense of time and money, because you know it will make someone else very happy.

Carpe somnum!” calls Daniel. “Seize the naps!

when you take positive steps in your life, the universe rewards you by making your path forward easier.

My house makes it so I never, ever have any extra money. If my house starts to notice I’ve been squirreling away a hundred dollars here or there to try to get my kids to a national park for a week, the house breaks something. I think it has abandonment issues.

Sometimes a book about other people’s problems is way better than your own. I guess that’s what you’ve been onto with this reading thing all along?

but like in all long-term partnerships, what first drove me wild came to drive me nuts.

But guys who come home and ‘babysit’ their kids once in a while so you can see your friends for the first time in weeks, or expect you to thank them when they do a load of laundry? Nope. They don’t need dadspringas. They need reality checks.

Dad says people walk away from their families when they are trying to escape themselves,” she tells me. “He says we have to have compassion, because they may lose their loved ones, but they’ll never outrun themselves.

You cannot argue with me, because this is a journal, not a text.

God knew, he was the only One who knew. The only One who saw the whole picture, the entire forest, and was untroubled by the few trees she could see.

God knew, he was the only One who knew, The only One who saw the whole picture, the entire forest, and was untroubled by the few trees she could see.

Then she says something about how when you take positive steps in your life, the universe rewards you by making your path forward easier.

the painful realization that your children need other people in their lives besides you, that soon you’ll be relegated to the sidelines of their adult lives and have no idea who you are anymore.

I get this now. I get now that you can love what you have, love your kids and your life and your friends, and still want more. I get that it’s ok to go out and get more—more love, more friendship, more fulfillment—and still be a wonderful mom.

But it’s hard—looking ahead, seeing their mistakes coming, and then, unless they are in actual mortal danger, holding their hands as they make them anyway.

Everyone knows the best medicine is a kiss from your mom.

It means understanding that to care for my children well, I must never again forget to care for myself.

I want to walk up a long, endless avenue and talk and talk and talk until the sun comes up, because this is New York, and I am on vacation, and life is so very, very good.

For elementary school librarians, a picture of yourself with Flat Stanley is about as close as you can get to full-on street cred.

when we are young, it’s hard to choose who to love. When we are older, it becomes an imperative.

So help me god, that will never happen to me. I could never love any baby more than I love being cool.

I like people who are pretty kind deep down. And also who tell the truth. I like people who show up when they say they’re going to. Oh, and people who don’t think they’re better than everyone else.

Daniel leans back in his chair. “Is a crummy husband better than no husband?” he asks me. “No,” I answer in a heartbeat—and the clarity of my answer surprises me. “The last three years have proven that. Life may have been harder without John, but I don’t miss living with someone who was growing unhappier and more anxious by the day. By the end he was one of those dads that makes you feel like you have one more child than you gave birth to.

As we moved I reminded myself of how God had taken care of us when I thought all was lost. Maybe this was like a bird’s life—moving from one tree to the next and always singing their song no matter where they were perched.

What about what you want? Can forgiving him and enjoying time with him now actually make you feel better than holding a grudge against him for the rest of your lives? In other words, is punishing him what’s truly best for you?

And yes, it makes me crazy to think that my kids can go days -- or maybe weeks-- without me. If I'm not needed, if I'm not busy, if I'm not an overstretched, overwhelmed, under-slept, underpaid single mother... What exactly am I?

I don’t want to tour Europe for a week by train, even if I could scrape up the money to do so. I don’t want to spend the time finding my inner watercolorist or potter. Like every mother in America, I’m tired. I could sleep for a couple of those days straight.

Whose boys are those with the holes in their pants?" I cringed. How would my grandpa answer such an embarrassing question? "Those are my daughter's children, my grandchildren," Grandpa spoke as if he'd just been asked who had won first place in a foot race or just been baptized into the church. "Those pants are very well ironed," the stranger said.

Having grown up in Amish country without access to a Home Depot, John was incredibly competent at fixing just about anything with his own two hands. Except, I guess, himself.

We stand there on the sidewalk in a neighborhood we have navigated together since we were teenagers, and yet I’m sure both of us feel a little lost.

I would like, I think, to be kissing a long, unabashed hello to someone.

epistemology. Knowledge about knowledge.

And there it is—the secret superpower of teenage girls. She didn’t mean to, but her words cut to the heart all the same.

This man and I combined our genetics to make something greater than the sum of its parts. We made two children I love more than I have ever loved anything else, and

Do you think forgiveness is a skill learned through practice, like playing chess, or a talent given to you at birth, like singing in tune?

I do what I think all librarians do when any anxiety sets in: I make a list.

It would be hard to beat a man senseless with a plastic Hula-Hoop covered in sparkles, and yet for a long and rather pleasant moment, I consider trying. “Amy?” John asks. “Is that you?

Yes,” says Lena, in her way. “Some people have to practice forgiveness and will never be naturals. They’ll either do the work and get awesome at it but always have to think it over—or never do the work and die with a sack of hurts the size of an elephant. I know, because I’m in danger of being one of those people whenever I stop paying attention.” Then she nods at me. “Some people, like your mother, forgive so naturally they don’t notice it happening. They’ll get hurt twice as often because they are so quick to forgive but feel it half as much because of their ability to let things go.

Do you think forgiveness is a skill learned through practice, like playing chess, or a talent given to you at birth, like singing in tune?” “Yes,” says Lena, in her way. “Some people have to practice forgiveness and will never be naturals. They’ll either do the work and get awesome at it but always have to think it over—or never do the work and die with a sack of hurts the size of an elephant.

Chinese authorities have placed as many as 1.5 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Hui into a system of medium- to maximum-security “reeducation” camps since 2017—making it the largest internment of a religious minority since World War II.

I get what the whole thing was about. How trapped you can feel as an American woman in early motherhood. The cultural systems of maternal support have all been eroded. You’re all alone. I’ve read, like, two books about it, and I see how my friends’ moms seem pissed all the time, like they wish things were different.

Cori makes a teenage mouth noise that has, since the time of cavemen, meant, “Bullshit, you don’t know anything / I’m inventing feelings right now / Get out of my way, old lady.” Sort of the sound you’d get if you tickled her while she sneezed. Thanks to two long and difficult labors, if I make that kind of snort-laugh sound, a little pee leaks out.

Mom, steer with the controller, not your body.” Now, as I sit on the hard wooden bench waiting for the New York express train, I realize I have been driving my life with my body. Trying somehow to carry my worries and sorrows and insecurities on my shoulders, as though I could wad up all the hurt and fear I’ve felt since John moved out, stuff it in a backpack,

With the mistaken premise that my stay-at-home work and his accomplished career required equal emotional energy, I couldn’t understand where he got the vigor to worry about his ego being rejected or his sex drive being ignored. For me, it was all hands on deck, between our kids and our house and our work. Sex, passion, romance, I thought, could certainly wait. And maybe some part of me reasoned that when I had suffered a loss, he had been too busy to support me. So what could he possibly ask of me now? But now, in the fresh mental air of my momspringa, I start to understand the kind of neglect John must have felt when I fell asleep in one of the kids’ beds every night or stopped kissing him hello and instead threw a preschooler into his arms the minute he walked in the door. At the moment I’m walking in his shoes: my children are cared for by someone else, my days are spent in rich mental exercise, I get plenty of sleep, and I go to the gym every day. In other words, I have the emotional energy to think about desire and how good it feels to be wanted. Yes, John had clean pressed shirts without having to ask, and yes, we had family dinners together that looked perfect and tasted as good, and yes, he never had to be on call when Joe started getting bullied for the first time or when Cori’s tampon leaked at a diving tournament. Yet while I was bending over backward to meet his children’s every need, his own were going ignored. And was it the chicken or the egg that started that ball rolling? If he had, only once, driven the carpool in my place, would I have suddenly wanted to greet him at the door in Saran Wrap? Or was I so incredibly consumed with the worry-work of motherhood that no contribution from him would have made me look up from my kids? I don’t know. I only know that in this month, when I have gotten time with friends, time for myself, positive attention from men, and yep, a couple of nice new bras, parts of me that were asleep for far too long are starting to wake up. I am seeing my children with a new, longer lens and seeing how grown up they are, how capable. I am seeing John as the lonely, troubled man he was when he walked out on us and understanding, for the first time, what part I played in that. I am seeing Talia’s lifestyle choices—singlehood, careerism, passionate pursuits—as less outrageous and more reasonable than ever before. And most startling of all, I am seeing myself looking down the barrel of another six years of single parenting, martyrdom, and self-neglect and feeling very, very conflicted.

You cannot rely on anyone but yourself to save your life.

I don’t miss living with someone who was growing unhappier and more anxious by the day.

A lot of bad had to happen for us to have all the good in our lives.

And finally, to my readers. May each of you find the brightness and hope you need in your life. May it come from the Father of lights, and may you find peace within the lines of this story. Thank you, thank you, thank you for reading.

My point is when we are young, it’s hard to choose who to love. When we are older, it becomes an imperative.

I get this now. I get now that you can love what you have, love your kids and your life and your friends, and still want more. I get that it’s ok to go out and get more—more love,

Sexy Jesus Incarnate.

I don’t want to tour Europe for a week by train, even if I could scrape up the money to do so. I don’t want to spend the time finding my inner watercolorist or potter.

the hall. I almost fell over from

In ten minutes they’re going to drop the price ten percent.

I’m afraid he’ll do a job that is not well valued in our society, like social work or public school teaching, and his little spirit will get broken.

He said we had to shape our dreams around the world as it would be, not as it was.

So you’re saying money can’t buy you love?” “Yep. I’m wise enough to take Beatles lyrics as gospel now. God help us if I ever find myself on a submarine.

The world is going to be hard on him.” Daniel chews his scone for a moment and then swallows. “Or he will change the world.

I realize I have been driving my life with my body. Trying somehow to carry my worries and sorrows and insecurities on my shoulders, as though I could wad up all the hurt and fear I’ve felt since John moved out, stuff it in a backpack, and hike through life with it.

We don’t talk about the future, at all. We talk about our lives and everything that makes them full and meaningful, but we behave as though September is never coming and we will be traipsing through hundred-degree subway tunnels for the rest of our days.

Right now, my idiot husband is in the thick of it,” she says. “I told him, you put these babies inside me; now you are going to keep them alive all by yourself while I drink myself silly and dine out on world cuisine and sleep in until nine a.m. every day and watch Golden Girls repeats on the hotel cable.

She had nothing to worry about because God knew her heart and would help her through every situation as life went on.

Does being in love make you happy?

Or Oprah. I would love to run into Oprah. I think she’d be fun to talk books with.

Eleanor & Park.

The day smelled like lemon meringue and tree sap. I breathed it in, wanting the sweetness of it to consume me.

...when you take positive steps in your life, the universe rewards you by making your path forward easier.

A long, leisurely wander through Costco with no list?

I went back to my humdrum days of knowing what was around every corner. It seemed there was little surprise or excitement in my life now.

realize I have been driving my life with my body. Trying somehow to carry my worries and sorrows and insecurities on my shoulders, as though I could wad up all the hurt and fear I’ve felt since John moved out, stuff it in a backpack, and hike through life with it.

contemplating how exactly a person can be switched at birth and yet still look exactly like her mother and father. Who do not watch anything but Fox News, with the volume turned to just above Jackhammer and just below Permanent Brain Damage.

I can’t help but think, This is ok; they’ve got this, even as my mom brain screams, NO! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? DO NOT LEAVE YOUR CHILDREN!

Then there are the people you don’t expect to see. Jamie from Outlander. Despite looking, and hard, I see him exactly never.

New York. The city that never sits.

I’m supposed to read The Book Thief. I read the first chapter, and let me tell you, it sounds GRIM. Pro tip, Mom: It’s not summer reading if the narrator is actual Death Incarnate.

it’s win-win-win! Dad buys our love, I get a vocabulary, team gets a juicer. Except I guess you are the loser. I have to remind you of that, according to every teen movie I have ever watched.

when you take positive steps in your life, the universe rewards you by making your path forward easier

in

of hectic.

She has an amazing talent,” the man commented.

Let’s go get Mamoun’s. Two a.m. falafel fixes everything.” She’s not entirely wrong.

God, this would be so much better if it were just not a book.

This man and I combined our genetics to make something greater than the sum of its parts.

Maybe I would be brave enough to kill myself for the life insurance—oh, that awful panic that made that seem like the best plan—or maybe I would just run away, as far as I could get, and be alone for the rest of my days and never feel true joy again.

that which doesn’t make you kill yourself will probably make you tough as an old grizzly and twice as mean

She nods, and I realize this is not news to her. “Dad says people walk away from their families when they are trying to escape themselves,” she tells me. “He says we have to have compassion, because they may lose their loved ones, but they’ll never outrun themselves.” I nod. “My friend Lena says the same thing,” I tell her. “She would add that those with the humility to come back and try to fix things deserve a chance to do so.” “Yeah,” says Cassie with a one-shoulder shrug. “I know it was the right thing. Mom’s, like, my best friend now. And now that I’m

older”—Daniel raises his eyebrows at this—“I get what the whole thing was about. How trapped you can feel as an American woman in early motherhood. The cultural systems of maternal support have all been eroded. You’re all alone. I’ve read, like, two books about it, and I see how my friends’ moms seem pissed all the time, like they wish things were different.” She fidgets, perhaps realizing now how far she’s stepped out. “And also, like, you. The hashtag-momspringa thing. Like, the feeling that the only way to get your true identity back is to run away from your family.

people walk away from their families when they are trying to escape themselves

Why did he keep his job but not keep us?

I asked him if work was part of the reason he left us. He says he left because he was depressed and anxious and mistakenly believed he could run away from those problems. It sounds like a stock answer, Mom. Like what his media-relations person told him to say. I asked him the same question again. Because he left EVERYTHING in his world behind but work. He must really love his job, right? He said that his identity as a man was all caught up in his work. That’s what he told me this morning. I went to diving practice with that in my head. It wasn’t a good headspace. I kept thinking, his identity as a man. What the hell does that mean? I know a bunch of other dads, and I would say that they all have being a dad at the top of their list of identities.

An internal police report noted that visiting a mosque “more than two hundred times” would result in a Muslim being sent “for education” in the camps. In the mosque featured in the report, this threat—along with a face-scan checkpoint at the entrance of the mosque—had precipitated a 96 percent drop in attendance in a single year.

The system is premised on a rhetoric of a war on Muslim “terrorism” that the Chinese state has imported from the US and its allies post–September 11, 2001. As recently as 2017, Xinjiang authorities hosted British counter-terrorism experts as part of a diplomatic exchange called “Countering the root causes of violent extremism undermining growth and stability in China’s Xinjiang Region by sharing UK best practice.” In the Chinese context, countering violent extremism—something that British experts refer to simply as Prevent—is premised on detaining hundreds of thousands of Muslims deemed “untrustworthy” in camps and prisons, and placing still other Muslim adults in jobs far from their homes.

As I listened to them, I came to the unsettling conclusion that the dehumanization they experienced was created at least in part in computer labs from Seattle to Beijing.

What is happening in Northwest China is connected to camps at the southern border of the United States, digital control in Kashmir, and checkpoints in the West Bank, but its scale and cruelty takes it beyond those other sites of exceptional power over marginalized populations.

Because the authorities have forced all residents of Xinjiang to register for a new state-issued ID card, they have a base library of high-definition images of each person’s face, and in addition, they have collected tens of millions of images of the faces of residents who pass through the checkpoints. The Face++ and similar algorithms such as those from companies like YITU and Sensetime run extremely fast. As the Shawan study notes, in 0.8 seconds it can run a match of a face, and register and record notification alarms related to up to three hundred thousand targeted people.

They built an iron gate, high electric fence, and four watchtowers around the Kazakh school,” he recalled. “If we found anyone suspicious through the ID checks, they would send them to the Kazakh school. They had suddenly turned it into a prison. They forced all of the people who had been visiting mosques, praying, or wearing headscarves to go to that school.

Turkic Muslims understand that in a time of reeducation they are subject to the gaze of the system. Anyone can be an informant; no one is a guaranteed ally; and the algorithms of cameras and scanners are always on. In this context, for ethnoracial minorities, there appears to be no space that is fully outside state power.

Across the entire region, the Civil Affairs Ministry had embarked on a “Zero Illegal Births” campaign. She herself, at age forty-seven, was forced to have regular inspections of a new IUD that state workers had forced her to implant. State documents show that women of childbearing age who did not submit to surgical sterilization or IUD implantation and regular inspections would not be added to the list of “trustworthy” citizens. Illegal pregnancies were to be “disposed of early”—a reference to forced abortions.