“I wonder if other mothers feel a tug at their insides, watching their children grow up into the people they themselves wanted so badly to be.”

“My mother walks forward. She's crying, but there's a smile on her face. For God's sake, is it any wonder I can't ever understand what you people are feeling?”

“Parents aren't the people you come from. They're the people you want to be, when you grow up.”

“My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.”

“I always wondered why God was supposed to be a father," she whispers. Fathers always want you to measure up to something. Mothers are the ones who love you unconditionally, don't you think?”

“I wonder if there's a difference between being a dutiful mother and being a good mother.'There is,' I said, and Charlotte looked up at me, expectant. Even if I couldn't articulate the difference as an adult, as a child I had felt it. I thought for a moment. 'A dutiful mother is someone who follows every step her child makes,' I said. And a good mother?'I lifted my gaze to Charlotte's. 'Is someone whose child wants to follow her.”

“There are legions of us, I realized. The mothers who have broken babies, and spend the rest of our lives wondering if we should have spared them. And the mothers who have let their broken babies go, who look at our children and see instead the faces of the ones they never met.”