“The irresponsible mother helped explain bella's maturity. She'd had to grow up early, to become the caretaker. That's why she didn't like being cared for- she felt it was her job.”

“Finally, she'd found a group on Corellia that had helped her deal with her addiction, helped her realize why she felt so empty, so driven. "It took me months of hard digging into myself," she said. "Months to figure out why I wanted to hurt myself. I finally got it through my head that just because my mother hated and despised me for not being what she wanted me to be, I didn't have to hate myself. I didn't have to destroy myself in some twisted attempt to please her.”

“She didn't like being twelve. It felt like someplace between who she'd been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all.”

“Growing up, she felt so unworthy of having her deepest desires satisfied, of being loved absolutely. She didn't feel that way anymore.”

“If she'd spaced her children out and had eleven babies in eleven years, she would have been no better than her own mother and sisters: irresponsible, a welfare cheat, another bit of Sawdust Lane white trash. But as luck would have it, she'd had them all at once, and now she was, overnight, middle-class. And respectable.”

“She'd been criticized for holding the reins of parenthood too tightly, of controlling her children too completely, but she didn't know how to let go. From the moment she'd first decided to become a mother, it had been an epic battle.”