It’s time for BookBytes and I’m doing something I’ve not done before – sharing two quotes instead of one. In my defence – they share a theme, and the first one reminded me of the second.
The first is from Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, which I read recently. It’s a wonderful book – just the kind I like. It talks of a family, two families actually, and the fascinating ways the characters’ lives intertwine – the way they connect and affect each other. Here’s the quote I picked.
To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all at the same time. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she’d been and the child she’d become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image. It made your head spin.
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
There’s so much love in this quote. How beautifully it depicts what a child means to a parent! It reminded me of another quote from another one of my favourite books – Me Before You by Jojo Moyes. The book will remain with me forever as a bit of heartache.
“It’s just that the thing you never understand about being a mother, until you are one, is that it is not the grown man – the galumphing, unshaven, stinking, opinionated off-spring – you see before you, with his parking tickets and unpolished shoes and complicated love life. You see all the people he has ever been all rolled up into one.
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
I look at him and see the baby I held in my arms, dewing besotted, unable to believe that I’d created another human being. I see the toddler, reaching for my hand, the schoolboy weeping tears of fury after being bullied by some other child. I saw the vulnerabilities, the love, the history.”
This is perhaps why parents find it so hard to separate themselves from their children, why they forgive them so easily, why they’re ready to face the worst odds for them. In their heads they see the baby, the toddler, the teen in a grown man/woman.
Agree?
Picture Credit: Pexels
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