“There is a certain comfort that comes with the absence of choice, in knowing where you’ll live and work and who you’ll marry and how many children you’ll have. Yet our parents and grandparents and great grandparents, the ones who had children while still teenagers because it was the only thing to do, have worked tirelessly so that we could choose something else for ourselves. Incidentally, they have also given us the exquisite privilege of regret. . . .”
“And maybe it is better to just dance. Just dance and wear one of the silly hats and have another round and when midnight comes kiss everyone and then slip away to have adventures with a stranger. Only despite the banter and the notes something rings flat so you kindly ask his tongue to stay out of your mouth and you run and put footie pajamas on and pretend you are sleeping. . . .”
“The pictures on the wall are redundant, because the people I love are all here, tangled upon my bed eating my dark chocolate and reading poetry upon my rug and spilling red wine across my vanity. And as our light filters out into the graveyard, I am overcome with a crippling stab of preemptive nostalgia for this night which embeds itself inside me like a wound before it is even finished. . . .”
“So often we dig up dinosaur bones and catch fireflies and then snuggle up and read stories and say prayers and then they drift off to sleep and I drift seamlessly out of their lives. But it is not always so gentle. Nothing has the capacity to break my heart quite like caring for other people’s children. Sometimes I want to scream at parents whose absence hangs thick in the air. Money and love are not equivalent currencies! My affection will never have the same worth as yours! She just wants you to love her enough to say no and mean it! But I am the nanny and I am paid to tend silence and so I cannot. My heart throbs for these children who have everything but nothing. . . .”