My 5-year-old, A.J., said to me:

“Mom, your butt is like a big knocking ball on a crane.”

And as if that’s not bad enough, he added:

“Boom! Boom! Boom! Knocking into buildings!”

And he had no idea why that bothered me. Trust me, he knows now!
 

It never quite leaves you.

Many years ago, a friend confided that she had had an abortion. She was a close friend and, yet – somehow – her confession colored my view of her. It separated us, since I knew her choice was not the one I would have made. When she told me that, in fact, she had made that same choice on yet another occasion, I consoled her even as I quietly judged her inadequacy.

She wasn’t the person I felt I was – a person who would preserve the life of a child at all costs. Sure, she was my friend – that only took sharing the occasional bottle of wine and complaining about the shortcomings of our husbands. But I knew that, somehow, I now resided on a plane of living just a tier above hers. Two, even.

Life has a tangled way of confronting us with our own delusions of supremacy.