Katie Hafner Quotes

“I usually enjoy setting up a new kitchen, but this has become a joyless and highly charged task. My mother and I each have our own set of kitchen boxes, which means that if there are two cheese graters between us, only one will make it into a cupboard. The other will be put back in a box or given to Goodwill. Each such little decision has the weight of a Middle East negotiation. While her kitchenware is serviceable, I’m a sucker for the high end: All-Clad saucepans and Emile Henry pie dishes. Before long, I’m shaking my head at pretty much everything my mother removes from her San Diego boxes. She takes each rejected item as a personal slight – which in fact it is. I begrudge her even her lightweight bowls, which she can lift easily with her injured hand. Here she is, a fragile old woman barely able to bend down as she peers into a low cupboard, looking for a place where she can share life with her grown daughter. At such a sight my heart should be big, but it’s small, so small that when I see her start stuffing her serving spoons into the same drawer as my own sturdy pieces, lovingly accumulated over the years, it makes me crazy. Suddenly I’m acting out decades of unvoiced anger about my mother’s parenting, which seems to be materializing in the form of her makeshift collection of kitchenware being unpacked into my drawers. When I became a mother myself, I developed a self-righteous sense of superiority to my mother: I was better than my mother, for having successfully picked myself up and dusted myself off, for never having lain in bed for days on end, too blotto to get my child off to school or even to know if it was a school day. By sheer force of will and strength of character, I believed, I had risen above all that she succumbed to and skirted all that I might have inherited. This, of course, is too obnoxiously smug to say in words. So I say it with flatware.”

“She closed her eyes, trying to remember the photos that had hung on the walls. She had passed these pictures every day, but now she only remembered them vaguely--her parents on their wedding day, her mother in a garden, her family at Knott's Berry Farm. How had she not memorized them? Or maybe she had once but she was beginning to forget. Did the house smell different because her mother's scent was gone? Or had she just forgotten how her mother smelled?”

“If I were hanged on the highest hill Mother o' mine O mother o' mine! I know whose love would follow me still Mother o' mine O mother o' mine!”

“Why should she dress in a cap and gown and sweat in the sun, when her mother was not there to pose in pictures with her and cheer when her name was called? In her mind, she only saw pictures they would never take, arms around each other, her mother gaining little wrinkles around her eyes from smiling so much.”

“A mother's lap is the strongest hub and school of each religion. In other words, the mother breezes and waves the religion since the mother is a religion.”

“I never knew what Mother knowed,Like how a thread and needle sewed,And how a kiss healed boo-boos fast.Why family knots were made to last.I never knew how Mother sawA caring man in angry pa,A smile beneath the teary gloom,A game inside a messy room.I never knowed what Mother knew,Like how to smile when days were blue,And how to laugh for laughter’s sake,While giving up her slice of cake.I never saw what Mother see’dLike honor pulling garden weeds,Or deep confessions in a look,And hope alive in storybooks.I never knew how Mother knowedTo hand out carrots when it snowed,And why hot cocoa liked the rain,While naptime kept a person sane.For mother knowed and see’d it all.A winner in a strike-out ball.A 'yes, please' in a shoulder shrug.A 'love you mostest' in a hug.Perhaps, someday, I’ll come to knowWhat Mother saw and knowed as so.Like how 'I’m right' can be all wrong,And why the night requires a song.But of the things I learned and knewI never doubted one thing true.My mother made it crystal clear,she knowed and loved me ever dear.”

“I want to mother the world, I thought. I have so much love.Then—I have no business being a mother. I am a selfish woman.Then—I can do this. Millions of women have been mothers.Then—I feel very alone. I do not know what I'm capable of.”

“My mother does not own my hands, though she works hard to train them. My mother does not own my eyes, though she frequently directs their focus. My mother does not own my mind, though she yields great influence upon it. My heart, however, she owns completely, for it was hers the day I was born.”

“Let us also acknowledge that the hearts which suffer the most from our wars are those of mothers. Their vital voices have been left out of the political equation for too long. An Iraqi or American mother cries the same as an Israeli or Afghan mother. The eyes of a mother who has suffered the loss of a child can destroy the soul of anyone who gazes upon them. More souls become casualties of war than physical bodies. War is a soul-shattering experience for the innocent.”

“A mother is a mother still The holiest thing alive.”