9 Quotes by Nina Renata Aron

But then one day I hear him doing the dishes, and here's what I do not think: Yes! No, there is no yes at all. I think: He is running the water too long. He'll damage my nice pan. He doesn't know where anything goes. I am so accustomed to thinking of him as unwilling and unable - useless - that I find it is very hard to stop...I have to fight the impulse to go into the kitchen and take over, or oversee. The impulse is not an abstraction. It feels like an itch inside my fingers.

Thinking about adults putting on a happy face for children, or worse, being unable to put on the happy face, is devastating. That we maintain this dishonesty with them, that we must. I have a longing to protect the kids from coming into some consciousness of the fact that taking care of them is difficult. I always imagined that keeping that fact from them was an essential part of good mothering.

I grew up in love with women's stories, with the ways their labor made itself visible everywhere, even when men would prefer to pretend that it wasn't the scaffolding of their very existence.

I was mad that I was so sensitive in the first place, trained in an empathy so granular and heartbreaking and Jewish, that my view on the family was so robust that I couldn't just be plain angry like a regular teenager. So inclined was I toward empathy and understanding that I didn't even know how I really felt about anything, whatever that even meant. I saw everything from everyone else's perspective and I felt bad and sad for us all.

I want him to see how hard my life is, how much easier he could make it, how unjust it is that he won't. I have this idea that he is a bad man who is stealing my time and energy - that is meant to be a feminist reading of what's happening, but the truth is I don't conceptualize my time as mine in the first place. He can't steal something that I don't consider my own.

There are so many possible lives, I thought. This one is mine. If a satellite zoomed down to snap a photograph, these windows, saffron-yellow-lit at night, in this building on this street in this city, were the ones behind which my pinprick of an existence was tormentedly ticking away.

For a long time, I believed that if I took care of myself, I would necessarily, organically move farther away from others. In the binary logic of individualism, you fortify the self at the expense of the other. But in filling the empty space of me, I have found that actually the complete opposite is true. The more I love myself, the more my heart opens, the more present and sensitive I become, so much so it hurts.

I thought the shame of self-hatred, or hopeless aspiration, should be concealed. Even more crass than wanting something so badly was acknowledging it out loud.

I can't live like this forever, I thought. But as the days wore on, a more frightening realization dawned: that I could. I absolutely could.