Kelly Corrigan Quotes

Appreciation is the purest,strongest form of love. It is the outward-bound kind of love that asks for nothing and gives everything.

Learn to say no. And when you do, don’t complain and don’t explain. Every excuse you make is like an invitation to ask you again in a different way.

If John Lennon was right that life is what happens when you're making other plans, parenthood is what happens when everything is flipped over and spilling everywhere and you can't find a towel or a sponge or your "inside" voice.

That's how it works: someone important believes in us, loudly and with conviction and against all substantiation, and over time, we begin to believe, too - not in our shot at perfection, mind you, but in the good enough version of us that they have reflected.

And it occurs to me that maybe the reason my mother was so exhausted all the time wasn’t because she was doing so much but because she was feeling so much.

Even when all the paperwork-a marriage license, a notarized deed, two birth certificates, and seven years of tax returns-clearly indicates you're an adult, but all the same, there you are, clutching the phone and thanking God that you're still somebody's daughter.

Accepting things as they are is difficult. A lot of people go to war with reality.

The mother is the most essential piece on the board, the one you must protect. Only she has the range. Only she can move in multiple directions. Once she's gone, it's a whole different game.

Your father's the glitter but I'm the glue.

Being in our lives *as they are* is probably one of the most common struggles people have.

We're never ready for the things that happen. When the big stuff happens, we're always looking in the other direction.

Like the padre said, life is a mystery to be lived. Live your mystery.

I love you. The first time the words pass between two people: electrifying. Ten thousand times later: cause for marvel. The last time: the dream you revisit over and over and over again.

But the truth is that I’m always teetering between a mature acceptance of life’s immutables and a childish railing against the very same.

But now I see there's no such thing as "a" woman, "one" woman. There are dozens inside every one of them. I probably should have figured this out sooner, but what child can see the women inside her mom, what with all the Motherness blocking out everything else?

Minds don't rest; they reel and wander and fixate and roll back and reconsider because it's like this, having a mind. Hearts don't idle; they swell and constrict and break and forgive and behold because it's like this, having a heart. Lives don't last; they thrill and confound and circle and overflow and disappear because it's like this, having a life.

There’s no greater gift than to help a child see their enoughness, their might.

One friend told me her one big takeaway from three years and $11,000 of therapy was Learn to say no. And when you do, don't complain and don't explain. Every excuse you make is like an invitation to ask you again in a different way.

I had thought a good mother would not elicit such comments, but now I see that a good mother is required to somehow absorb all this ugliness and find a way to fall back in love with her child the next day.

Raising people is not some lark. It's serious work with serious repercussions. It's air-traffic control. You can't step out for a minute; you can barely pause to scratch your ankle.

He defined me first, as parents do. Those early characterizations can become the shimmering self-image we embrace or the limited, stifling perception we rail against for a lifetime.

Turbulence is the only way to get altitude – to get lift. Without turbulence the sky is just a big blue hole. Without turbulence, you sink.

I try to be one of the exceptional people who can live with the complexity of things, who are at peace with the unknown and the unknowable, who leave all the cages open. I tell myself: There's so much that you don't know, you can't know, you aren't ever going to know.

The skin hungers for touch, from cradle to grave.

When you are in pain, and you see someone else in pain, there is really nothing as satisfying as giving them comfort in the night.

Pulling at the hem of my emotion was the creeping sense that it might well take until 2036 for this child in my arms to feel a fraction of what I already felt for her.

The thing about mothers, I want to say, is that once the containment ends and one becomes two, you don't always fit together so nicely... The living mother-daughter relationship, you learn over and over again, is a constant choice between adaptation and acceptance.

You can't be really loved if you can't bear to be really known.

I envy my dad and his faith. I envy all people who have someone to beseech, who know where they're going, who sleep under the fluffy white comforter of belief.

How seriously can I take myself? I'm just one of six billion people, right?

I don't know what to saw about a man who calls a perfectly adorable three-year old a fucker, but "my hero" comes to mind.

I've come to feel downright uneasy with people who can't say no. What if they yes you to death and then secretly hate you for it? If they never say no, how can you trust their yes? Besides, no makes room for yes, and who doesn't want more room for that?

This tug-of-war often obscures what's also happening between us. I am your mother, the first mile of your road. Me and all my obvious and hidden limitations. That means that in addition to possibly wrecking you, I have the chance to give to you what was given to me: a decent childhood, more good memories than bad, some values, a sense of tribe, a run at happiness. You can't imagine how seriously I take that - even as I fail you. Mothering you is the first thing of consequence that I have ever done.

The only mothers who never embarrass, harass, dismiss, discount, deceive, distort, neglect, baffle, appall, inhibit, incite, insult, or age poorly are dead mothers, perfectly contained in photographs, pressed into two dimensions like a golden autumn leaf.

We'll bury our mothers and fathers - shuttling our children off for sleepovers, jumping on red-eyes, telling eachother stories that hurt to hear, about gasping, agonal breaths, hospice nurses, scars and bruises and scabs, and how skin papers shortly after a person passes. We will nod in agreement that it is as much an honor to witness a person leave this world as it is to watch a person come into it.

Why we don't value intellectual honesty beyond easy answers is beyond me.

There's no expectation of some linear progression from agony to okayness. It goes in circles. It's sloppy.

Resistance is suffering on permanent repeat.

I've had cancer twice and if I had to pick one fate for you, cancer or fertility problems-I'd pick cancer.

The other problem with language is that arranging words into sentences requires we flip on our thinking machine, which necessarily claims some of our focus, so that as soon as we start deciding how to explain a feeling, we're not entirely feeling the feeling anymore, and some feelings want to be felt at full capacity.

What is it about a living mother that makes her so hard to see, to feel, to want, to love, to like? What a colossal waste that we can only fully appreciate certain riches--clean clothes, hot showers, good health, mothers--in their absence.

There's hardly a positive intention associated with no. Except self-preservation.

Reality always comes dressed in a point of view, try as we might to lay it bare.

Makes you wonder what else people might tell you if you just keep asking questions.

Is there a broth more restoring than company?

He loved me the way only a nineteen-year old can- suddenly and deliriously.

It may be that loving children, radically and beyond reason, expands our capacity to love others, particularly our own mothers.

On the matter of God, I've stood in every square on the board: obedient believer, secretly hopeful, open-but-dubious. I've walked away from the board entirely, only to circle back. Today, all I can say is: I don't know what I think about God...I do know that I love many believers and pulse with gratitude that wants a locus and I wonder about the wonders I see around me and feel inside me. But I'm not sure of anything.

Maybe being wrong is not the same as being bad, I thought, not a sign your insides were rotten. Maybe you can still be a decent-ish person, a person with a personal mission statement, a person who aspires to be someone habitually good and highly effective, and fuck up.

It is one thing to be a man's wife - quite another to be the mother of his children. In fact, once you become a mother, being a wife seems like a game you once played or a self-help book you were overly impressed with as a teenager that on second reading is puffy with common ideas. This was one of the many things I had learned since crossing over into the middle place - that sliver of time when childhood and parenthood overlap.

Despair defies description.

As in most situations, it’s not important why someone hurts, only that they do.

Those early characterizations (Our parents give us) can become the shimmering self-image we embrace or the limited, stifling perception we rail against for a lifetime

I realized that making people feel irreplaceable was his gift.

It's easy to love kids who make you feel competent.

I snap and storm around and then spend long nights thinking of the most damaged adults I know and wondering if my particular brand of maternal fuckups are how they ended up like that.

named his recollections of Ántonia “My Ántonia” not to show romantic possession, but because he understood that his Ántonia was only one version of her and, at least partially, his creation.

Liberated by the simple act of saying no—which I submit is impressive for any woman, and downright radical for one raised in the Nice’n Easy generation—my mom had always been able to find outs where others could not. Looking back, I think it came down to her impressive willingness to be disliked and her utterly unromantic position that people should take serious—if not total—responsibility for their own happiness.

According to my mother, the cornerstone of a proper apology is taking responsibility, and the capstone is naming the transgression. Contrition must be felt and conveyed. Finally, apologies are better served plain, hold the rationalizations. In other words, I'm sorry should be followed by a pause or period, not by but and never by you.

Here I thought I was a special person with Special People Problems that would take a long time to diagnose and maybe even require new forms of treatment, or at least a bit of original advice. But I was everybody; a pocket truism that's been circulating for thousands of years would suffice.

That to fly requires chaotic, sometimes even violent passages--becomes a metaphor for all of life's most meaningful endeavors.

Learn to say no. And when you do, don't complain and don't explain. Every excuse you make is like a invitation to ask you again in a different way.

To love someone is to love the people they love, or at least, try.

At first parenthood was as I had expected, exhausting, sometimes heinous, and occasionally divine. I held my children close enough to feel them breathe, laugh, swallow.

But given everything I do know, no matter how hard it is, how lonely or stressful, still, I would not want to leave this earth without being a mother.

Do your work, I tell myself. And after? Find a patch of lawn and sit down and hug your knees to your chest and let everything you’ve ever been told and everything you’ve ever seen mingle together in a show just for you, your own eye-popping pageant of existence, your own twelve-thousand-line epic poem. The tickle of the grass on your thighs, the sky moving over you, sunless or blue, echoes from a homily or a wedding toast or a letter your grandmother sent. Remember something good, a sunburn you liked the feeling of, a plate of homemade pasta. Do your work, Kelly. Then lean back. Rest from the striving to reduce. Like the padre said, life is a mystery to be lived. Live your mystery.

Rather than trying to make me happy, as cheap songs and misguided greeting cards suggest is the promise of true love, Edward was doing the one thing that would keep us together: taking care of himself. As with my parents, sometimes the art of relationship is declaring your limits, protecting your boundaries, saying no.

My default answer to everything is no. As soon as I hear the inflection of inquiry in your voice, the word no forms in my mind, sometimes accompanies by a reason, often not. Can I open the mail? No. Can I wear your necklace? No. When is dinner? No. What you probably wouldn't believe is how much I want to say yes. Yes, you can take two dozen books home from the library. Yes, you can eat the whole roll of SweeTarts. Yes, you can camp out on the deck. But the books will get lost, and SweeTarts will eventually make your tongue bleed, and if you sleep on the deck, the neighborhood racoons will nibble on you. I often wish I could come back to life as your uncle, so I could give you more. But, when you're the mom, your whole life is holding the rope against those wily secret agents who never, ever stop trying to get you to drop your end.

This forgetting, this slide into smallness, this irritability and shame, this disorienting grief: It’s like this. Minds don’t rest; they reel and wander and fixate and roll back and reconsider because it’s like this, having a mind. Hearts don’t idle; they swell and constrict and break and forgive and behold because it’s like this, having a heart. Lives don’t last; they thrill and confound and circle and overflow and disappear because it’s like this, having a life.

Do you know that I love you enough to take in the full reality of your lives? That I can understand the things you think I can't and I can see and know and embrace every bit of you, full frame, no cropping?

In addition to helping the girls parse the world, and all its awful truths - time only goes one way, things end, affections wax and wane - I was the sole distributor of the strongest currency they would ever know: maternal love.

Mothering you is the first thing of consequence I have ever done.

Do your work, Kelly. Then lean back. Rest from the striving to reduce. Like the padre said, life is a mystery to be lived. Live your mystery.

As Voltaire said: “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Immediate, often unsolicited, sometimes undeserved forgiveness—that is what turns the wheel of family life.

They said, Thank you for the food before us, the people around us, and the love between us.

She was, as all mothers are, my first everything. First refuge, first rival.

It's like a good book: You don't have to be able to decode every passage to want to hug it when you finish.

I shift my position on the sofa, so my head is on a big, lumpy pillow in Greenie's lap and Georgia is leanign back against my middle and Claire is just about asleep on the floor. Allison and I catch eyes, and she tilts her head and smiles, and when I smile back, we both well up with tears, I think beause we both recognize that whatever else may be unfolding, this is happiness.

Or maybe, knowing that intercourse involved certain unsavory sights, smells, and sounds, God deliberately left the ingredients for alcohol lying around where man would undoubtedly find them.

He defined me first, as parents do. Those early characterizations can become the shimmering self-image we embrace or the limited, stifling perception we rail against for a lifetime. In my case, he sees me as I would like to be seen. In fact, I’m not even sure what’s true about me, since I have always chosen to believe his version.

I have to pick up my kids. I have to register them for school. I have to pack their lunches and get their Hep B shots and wash their hands. They must be spotted on the stairs and potty trained and broken of the binkie. And if that relentless work runs right alongside gauging the risks of bladder surgery on a seventy-four-year-old, well, what did you think was gonna happen? What did you think being an adult was?

I am your mother. The first mile of your road. Me, and all of my obvious and hidden limitations. That means that in addition to possibly wrecking you, I have the chance to give you what was given to me. A decent childhood. More good memories than bad. Some values. A sense of tribe. A run at happiness.

The idea is that readers don't come blank to books. Consciously and not, we bring all the biases that come with our nationality, gender, race, class, age. They you layer onto that the status of our health, employment, relationships, not to mention our particular relationship to each book--who gave it to us, where we read it, what books we've already read--and as my professor put it, 'That massive array of spices has as much to do with the flavor of the soup as whatever the cook intended

I live within my means and worship my girlfriends, especially the ones who play cards and rag me about keeping the thermostat set too low. I don’t long for other mothers anymore; I don’t even wonder about them. I was meant to be her daughter, and I consider it a damn good thing that she, of all people, was the principal agent in my development.

We all kind of hate each other in this minute, me most of all because I taught them the word bitch and I yell so they yell and Edward missed another brawl so they'll like him more today and he's better anyway and whatever lust for combat my daughters have comes straight from me and I thought I was going to be a good mom like Michelle Constable or Tammy Stedman and I'm not and according to a parenting blog I saw, yelling is as bad as corporal punishment and particularly destructive to self-esteem so oh my God, what am I doing?

Any certainty I pretend is a performance to keep the troops calm and in line. Alone in the campaign tent, with maps spread out on the folding table, I work in pencil with shaky hands.

Old people and their hyper-calibrated radar. They can't hear a word, and they can barely get out of their chairs, but they've got six or seven other senses, scanning, collecting, decoding.

If my mom died and I couldn’t call her up inside myself, I’d pull on a pair of elastic-waistband pants, pour a touch of Smirnoff over ice, and phone a girlfriend to play cards. If that didn’t work, I’d try reading a library book on a beach chair, and if that didn’t work, I’d take her rosary beads and shake them like a shaman until she came back to me, until I could see her and hear her and feel her again.

They get on with it. Even after imagining all this fineness—the girls (check), Edward (check)—I bawled, stuck on the awful thought that the reason I’d ended up in Ellen Tanner’s house, the reason no one had hired me as a waitress or bartender, the reason I’d been fired by Eugenia Brown and answered an ad from a widower, was so I could see how a family goes on, so I could witness their suffering, their slow but indisputable survival.

But now I see there's no such thing as a woman. one woman. There are dozens inside every one of them. I probably should've figured this out sooner, but what child can see the women inside her mom, what with all that Motherness blocking out everything else?

That’s how it works: someone important believes in us, loudly and with conviction and against all substantiation, and over time, we begin to believe, too—not in our shot at perfection, mind you, but in the good enough version of us that they have reflected.

I have to come clean here: something terrible happens to me when my girls cry, more so now than when they were infants and I was able to remind myself that crying was their only method of communication. I didn’t like it back then, who does?, but, aided by what Edward dubbed a Red Lobster pour of icy cold sauvignon blanc each evening at five, I managed. Now? Crying that indicates existential pain? The possible onslaught of unhappiness? Isolation, despair? That kind of crying is more threatening to me than a lump in my breast. It’s like being skinned alive.

It’s a lonely business, and then sometimes strangely claustrophobic, but this is it. This is what I wanted and what Liz was pulled away from, against her every fiber. This abstract performance art called Family Life is our one run at the ultimate improv. Our chance to be great for someone, to give another person enough of what they need to be happy. Ours to overlook or lose track of or bemoan, ours to recommit to, to apologize for, to try again for. Ours to watch disappear into their next self—toddler to tyke, tween to teen—ours to drop off somewhere and miss forever. It’s happening right now, whether we attend to it or not.

In the morning while we were eating breakfast, Edward gave a speech to the kids about how you should only ever fry bacon in a cast-iron pan and I rolled my eyes and Andy joked, “Embrace the idiosyncrasies.” Edward snapped at me later that day for changing the afternoon plan too many times and Andy put his hands on the kitchen counter to calm himself and said, “Seriously, guys, embrace the idiosyncrasies.” He hasn’t whitewashed your marriage; he remembers the conflict, the push-pull. He says the struggle is what made your marriage your marriage. He can have his way on everything now but about half the time, he does it your way anyway.

Minds don’t rest; they reel and wander and fixate and roll back and reconsider because it’s like this, having a mind. Hearts don’t idle; they swell and constrict and break and forgive and behold because it’s like this, having a heart. Lives don’t last; they thrill and confound and circle and overflow and disappear because it’s like this, having a life.

Georgia once asked me if we really needed to talk so much on the ride home from school. She was happy to see me but wondered if she could be excused from showing it. She had talked all day, answered every adult’s every question and found a clever response to every dumb boy’s taunt and quip. By 3:45, she was ready to stare out the window and say nothing.

Today, all I can say is: I don’t know what I think about God, either the one who was presented to me from behind the marble altar during my childhood or the many God-like ideas that have been offered to me since. I do know that I love many believers and I pulse with gratitude that wants a locus and I wonder about the wonders I see around me and feel inside me. But I’m not sure of anything.

It’s a lonely business, and then sometimes strangely claustrophobic, but this is it. This is what I wanted and what Liz was pulled away from, against her every fiber. This abstract performance art called Family Life is our one run at the ultimate improv. Our chance to be great for someone, to give another person enough of what they need to be happy. Ours to overlook or lose track of or bemoan, ours to recommit to, to apologize for, to try again for. Ours to watch disappear into their next self—toddler to tyke, tween to teen—ours to drop off somewhere and miss forever. It’s happening right now, whether we attend to it or not. Like after preparing a nutritious meal that no one really liked and a lot of blame-gaming over who forgot to take out the compost, your peevish, greasy “young adult” tramps off to take the shower she should have taken two days ago and the evening is shot to shit and not one minute of it looked like the thing you prayed for so long ago, but then you hear something. You head up the stairs, hover outside the bathroom door. “All the single ladies, all the single ladies…” — The kid is singing in the shower. Your profoundly ordinary kid is singing in the shower and you get to be here to hear it.

Before dinner on the last night, while the guys were on the deck drinking whiskey and talking about Elon Musk, Liz and I went on a walk and she told me about a dream she’d been fixating on, a dream about what happens after mothers die. “We are all in this place. All the mothers who had to leave early.” (I would repeat her unforgettable phrasing—had to leave early—to Edward as we went to sleep that night.) “It’s huge, big as an airplane hangar, and there are all these seats, rows and rows, set up on a glass floor, so all the moms can look down and watch their kids live out their futures.” How dominant the ache to know what becomes of our children. “There’s one rule: you can watch as much and as long as you want, but you can only intervene once.” I nodded, tears forming. “So I sat down. And I watched. I watched them out back by the pool, swimming with Andy, napping on a towel. I watched them on the jungle gym, walking Lambchop, reading their Lemony Snicket books. I watched Margo taking a wrong turn or forgetting her homework. I watched Dru ignoring his coach. I watched Gwennie logging her feelings in a journal. And every time I went to intervene, to warn one of the kids about something or just pick them up to hold them, a more experienced mother leaned across and stopped me. Not now. He’ll figure it out. She’ll come around. And it went on and on like that and in the end,” she said, smiling with wet eyes, “I never needed to use my interventions.” Her dream was that she had, in her too-short lifetime, endowed her children with everything they’d require to negotiate the successive obstacle courses of adolescence, young adulthood, and grown-up life. “I mean, they had heartaches and regret and fights and broken bones,” she said, stopping to rest. “They made tons of mistakes, but they didn’t need me. I never had to say anything or stop anything. I never said one word.” She put her arm through mine and we started moving again, back toward the house, touching from our shoulders to our elbows, crunching the gravel with our steps, the mingled voices of our children coming from the door we left open.