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Quote by Mwanandeke Kindembo

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Mwanandeke Kindembo

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“One of the most astonishing and precious things about motherhood," writes Kathleen Norris, "is the brave way in which women consent to give birth to creatures who will one day die." I am not so brave. Far more frightening to me than the threat of interrupted plans or endless to-do lists is the thread of loving someone as intensely as a mother loves her child. To invite in to the universe a new life, knowing full well that no one can protect thatl ife from the currents of evil that pulse through our world and through our very bloodstreams, seems a grave and awesome task that is at once unspeakably selfish and miraculously good. I am frightened enough by how fervently I love Dan, by my absolute revolt against the possibility -- no, the inevitable reality -- that he will get hurt, that he will experience loss, and that one day he will die. I'm not sure my heart is big enough to wrap itself around another breakable soul. I was once waiting in an airport next to a woman whose six-year-old daughter suffered from a rare heart defect that could take her life at any moment. In spite of mounting medical bills and the pressures of raising both a child with special needs and another younger daughter, the woman said she and her husband planned to adopt a boy from Ethiopia later that year. "What made you want to grow your family in the midst of all this turmoil?" I asked. "Why did the Jews have children after the Holocaust?" she asked back. "Why do women keep trying after multiple miscarraiges? It's our way of shaking our fists at the future and saying, you know what?--we will be hopeful; things will get better; you can't scare us after all. Having children is, ultimately, an act of faith.”

“There is a bonus in tragedies of such magnitude. You realize that there is no further to go down, and that you have two choices. You can stay at the bottom and get used to the agonizing paralysis of those depths, and use any means–drugs, alcohol–to dull the lucid pain for which you are unable to find any relief within yourself. Or you can decide to rise to the surface again, and begin living once more. This last decision requires a conscious effort, for it is the active choice, and it can only succeed if you truly face your problems directly. It needs perseverance and action to follow it up, and it means change. Once you return to the surface you are as new, you have grown and have left down there your old self like a discarded and useless cocoon; and you have discovered that you can fly. In Ema’s death I had found the key to solve the riddle. Only in changing my attitude to it, and in giving my life a new purpose, could I balance the waste and make sense.”

“Where does someone’s energy go when their body is cracked open? Does it end up in the corners of all the bedrooms they visited, nestled in the hearts of everyone they knew? Do they have their own secret portals through which they come in and out of the world, where we can sometimes feel them? And if they’re an artist, does their influence go even deeper, into places inside people that they didn’t even know they had?”