6 Quotes by Wednesday Martin

You don't get your prebaby body back, ever, because you cannot go back to being a person who hasn't had a baby. Because you had a baby.

By chasing Birkins we’re not just making ourselves into chasers of Birkin bags. “These women are reminding men, society, and themselves that they inhabit a privileged, identificatory relationship to those bags.

Access to your husband’s money might feel good. But the comparative study of human society and our primate relatives shows that such access can’t buy you the power you get by being the one who earns it. And knowing this, or even having an inkling of it, just sensing the disequilibrium, the abyss that separates your version of power from your man’s, could keep a thinking woman up at night.

Relations among women on the Upper East Side are charged as they are perhaps nowhere else in the country or the world, and handbags, like cars, just might serve a lot of different functions all at once. A communication about where one stands in the inevitable hierarchy of Manhattan, a barometer of your wealth and connectedness and clout in a city where money and connections and clout are everything. A fashion statement. A security blanket, a way of self-soothing in a uniquely stressful town.

You don’t get your prebaby body back, ever, because you cannot go back to being a person who hasn’t had a baby. Because you had a baby.

Stepmothering arises from, and cannot be disentangled from, loss. In all senses – etymological, historical, and social – the stepfamily experience is sutured to, inextricable from, the experience of mourning.