In a recent Elle, there’s a review/opinion piece by Miranda Purves titled, “The Awful Truth.” And it’s a nice enough article, but I want to keep this quote from her quoting Rachel Cusk’s memoir A Life’s Work:

“The crying has stopped,” Cusk writes of her daughter’s colic. “She has survived the first pain of existence and out of it wrought herself. And she has wrought me, too, because, although I have not helped or understood, I have been there all along and this, I suddenly and certainly know, is motherhood; this mere sufficiency, this presence. With every cry she has tutored me, in what is plain and hard: that my affection, my silly entertainments, my doting hours, this particular self I tried to bring to my care of her, have been as superfluous as my fury and despair. All that is required is for me to be there; an ‘all’ that is of course everything, because being there involves not being anywhere else…. Being myself is no compensation for not being there.”

An all that is of course everything, because being there involves not being anywhere else.

And with a nod to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, also not-being anywhere else. Or so it frequently feels when I have time to feel.

But I still want to be both places at once — here, and anywhere else. With those habits :).