Lift

Lift by Kelly Corrigan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's rare that you read a book that gives voice to your own thoughts and feelings in such a way that you feel like your own heart might burst from the truth being shared, but that's what Kelly Corrigan's Lift was like for me. I laid in bed early this morning, head tilted towards the direction of my baby's room just in case he made a sound, and devoured every word in this short book. Corrigan's attempt to "put down on paper how it started with" her girls was profoundly relatable to how I feel about being a mom. I know this is a very short book, but somehow that made it even better. Every detail Corrigan included was so purposefully chosen.

Read it, or, at least, read anything written by Kelly Corrigan. I love her. Happy reading and happy mothering-

Can't help but include some of the quotes I loved. So many good ones--
*You’ll remember middle school and high school, but you’ll have changed by then. You changing will make me change. That means you won’t ever know me as I am right now—the mother I am tonight and tomorrow, the mother I’ve been for the last eight years, every bath and book and birthday party, gone. It won’t hit you that you’re missing this chapter of our story until you see me push your child on a swing or untangle his jump rope or wave a bee away from his head and think, Is this what she was like with me?

*I want to put down on paper how things started with us.

*I whittled down all my requests to one: children. You.
[This is exactly how I feel. I have wanted to be a wife and mother all my life. It is and was the greatest wish of my heart.]

*“That’s all I want, Kath. Right there. Funny kids who like each other.”

*People rarely rave about their childhoods and it’s no wonder. So many mistakes are made.

*I have the chance to give to you what was given to me.

*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.

*You are sacred to me too.

*She told me later, she wanted to memorize him.

*I want to keep you in the world where I can find you.

*I meet people at cocktail parties all the time, women who are moody or mean-spirited, and then their charming husband comes up with a nice, fresh drink for them and I always think, what does she have that Meg doesn’t? Why does this woman get someone to sleep next to, someone to call when the dryer breaks, someone to bitch about to her friends? Meg is so much better. I’d marry her in a second.

*I want her to have this thing I have that’s so ordinary and tedious and aggravating, and then, so divine.

*“I think,” she said through tears, “I could be a really good mom.”

*I think about your futures a lot. I often want to whisper to you, when we’re tangled up together or I’m pinning your poetry to the bulletin board or repositioning the pillow under your head so you don’t get a crick, Remember this. This is what love feels like. Don’t take less. But what I end up saying is, “This was my dream. You were my dream.”

*So girls, will you please believe me when I tell you 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?

(Book 7 - 2019)