[...] it seemed to some as if I were getting away with something, as if I were not paying the usual price, and if the usual price was take-out Thai food and a video with your husband on a Saturday night then I was not, in fact, paying that price. [...] And I imagine if you are feeling restless or thwarted in your marriage, if you have created an orderly warm home for your child at a certain slight cost to your own freedom or momentum, you might look at me, or someone else like me, an think that I am not making the usual sacrifices. [...]

[...] The secret suspicion that you might be a hack, a glorified hack, making a rather nice living doing something fun but not truly living out your fantasy of creating art the way you honestly thought you would be in college, well, the check you make out to that fancy, creative, open place you are sending your child to is eloquently arguing otherwise.

[...] Before going to bed he howls like a wolf, then says, "I am a wolf," then says, "Where is my bottle? Where is my mango? Where is my ketchup?" then very deliberately climbs out of his bed and walks through the dark halls saying, "I am lost, Mama, I am lost." [...]

[...] Part of what seems threatening or unsettling about the single mother's household is precisely the sense that the mother may be glimpsed as more of a person, that these children are witnessing a struggle they should not be seeing, that their mother is very early on a regular, complicated person, rather than simply an adult who is part of the opaque, semi-separate adult culture of the house.