"She wasn't picking a fight. She just really wanted to know."

Remember when the madre told me to put down the crap and pick up a quality book? And remember how the quality book in question was Laura Moriarty's While I'm Falling?

The madre had just finished reading it and pretty much forced my in to literary compliance.

And she was right. She was so right.

Now, people read different books for all sorts of different reasons. Sometimes we read books to escape. We read to feel part of something. We read to gain historical knowledge. We read to laugh and be amused. We read to articulate something we feel.

And sometimes, there comes a book that articulates how we feel right at this very moment. It is literary kismet.

Reading While I'm Falling depicted so many inner conflicts within myself. On the one hand, all of the characters are flawed. Their flaws make them real. No one is perfect. These characters get it wrong. They feel bad and make up for it. Their flaws within the unconditional love of a family unit makes my own foibles seem ok.

My favorite part deals with the mother daughter relationship. I won't give it all away (unlike usual), but a main concern in the novel centers around stay at home moms.

We know that my mom stayed home with us, and it is a fact I am fiercely proud and protective of. The mom in the story finds herself divorced after 20 odd years of devoting herself to her family. The kids are out of the house and she is left with no 'marketable skills'. At a very tense point in the novel (pre-divorce), she asks her husband if he finds her interesting. Does he think of her as her own person or simply in relation to himself.

Isn't that what we modern women fear? Being defined by others?

OK, I can't help it *SPOILER ALERT

So when one of the daughters (who ironically always related more to the dad) gets pregnant and plans on leaving lawyering to be a stay at home mom, the mom is heavily against the idea. The daughter's response? You were an amazing mother to us. I appreciated having you be there for us day after day. How could I not want that for my own children?

I won't tell you how the book ends, but I will put out a quandary. How does one be a stay at home mom but still maintain her autonomy. I'm unsure if it can be done. And perhaps it isn't supposed to. I think to do one well you might need to knowingly give up the other. For love. And for family.

"For some time, maybe minutes, maybe hours, I lay awake, eyes open, staring up into the darkness. Just two nights earlier, I'd ignored her calls. I was aware of everything shifting, new regret a sharp pain in my throat. The hurt felt real, and truly physical, and also, strangely, like something necessary and right. When I was young, lying in bed at night, the backs of my calves would hurt so much that I would sometimes cry out. Growing pains, my parents said. They were a myth, the doctor countered. But night after night, my legs hurt; until one night, they stopped hurting, and I was taller."
Laura Moriarty