This week I've been reading
Harvesting the Heart
by Jodi Picoult. For once I couldn't actually make sense of the title in relation to the book, but nevertheless I enjoyed it. It is one of her older books (it's from 1993), and I do think it's quite clear that she's come a way and her writing style has matured a fair bit over the years.
Harvesting the Heart is about Paige, a young woman who was left by her mother when she was five, and now that she has a young son of her own, she fears that she is too much like her. Her husband is an ambitious, talented young doctor, but he has little to no understanding of the demands motherhood has on his wife. Paige struggles with her self-worth, identity and whether she has what it takes to be a mum.
It was a fairly fast read, enjoyable, and as always thought-provoking.
Quotes:
""This isn't about you," I pleaded. "You've got to know that it isn't about you."
"It is, Paige. Or you wouldn't ever ha' thought to leave."
No,
I wanted to tell him, that can't be true. That can't be true, because all these years, you've been saying it wasn't my fault that
she left. That can't be true, because you are the one thing I hated leaving behind.
The words lodged in my throat, stuck somewhere behind the tears that started running down my face. I wiped my nose on my sleeve. "Maybe I will come home someday," I said."
"There were several people inside, but nobody I recognized. I slipped into a stall and sat on the edge of the toilet. I balled up some tissue in my palm, expecting tears, but they didn't come. I wondered what the hell had convinced me to live at the end of someone else's life rather than live my own, and then I realized I was going to throw up."
"I didn't know how to tell that that I was not worried, just scared. I was scared about not knowing how to hold an infant. I was scared that I might not love my own child. More than anything, I was scared that I was doomed before I began, that the cycle my mother had started was hereditary and that one day I would just pack up and disappear off the face of the earth."
"If Nicholas had been frightened by her actions before, he was shocked by what he saw in Paige's eyes. He had seen it once before, when he was fifteen, the one and only time he had gone hunting with his father. They had walked in the mist of a Vermont morning, stalking deer, and Nicholas had spotted a buck. He had tapped his father's shoulder, as he'd been taught to do, and watched Robert raise the barrel of his Weatherby. The buck had been a distance away, but Nicholas could clearly see the tremble of its rack, the rigidity of its stance, the way the life had gone out of its gaze.
Nicholas took a step back into the safety of his living room. His wife was framed by fire; her eyes were those of an animal trapped."
"I thought of all the magazine articles I'd read on mothers who worked and constantly felt guilty about leaving their children with someone else. I had trained myself to read pieces like that and silently say to myself, See how lucky you are?
But it had been gnawing at me inside, that part that didn't quite fit, that I never let myself even think
about. After all, wasn't it a worse kind of guilt to be with
your child and to know that you wanted to be anywhere but there?"
by Desmond Tutu, and is is one of the most amazing books I have read in a very long time. I greatly recommend it, whatever your religious beliefs. Desmond Tutu, arch-bishop of the Anglican Church in South Africa has won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, fought against the apartheid, and is incredibly out-spoken concerning issues of tolerance, oppression, civil and human rights. I want to quote ever single page, but I'm trying to limit myself. Today I'll be sharing my favourite quotes from the chapter, Our Salvation Is of the Jews:
