Nothing worthwhile is ever easy
Tuesday, March 24, 2009 Guest post by Katherine Center, author of Everyone is Beautiful
A friend of mine owns a restaurant with 30 employees. I visited her there recently, and she gave me the lowdown on the restaurant life.
“It’s just like having 30 kids,” she told me: You constantly have to look after them and steer them in the right direction.
I could see that. That’s a lot like having kids.
But not exactly.
And that’s how we got into a conversation comparing her supervising 30 waitresses, cooks, and dishwashers with my raising two kids from scratch.
Here’s what it came down to: Love. She doesn’t love them. Not in that horrible, beautiful, joyful gut-wrenching way that parents love their kids. She likes them. She cares about them. She’d go out of her way for any of them any day of the week.
But she doesn’t love them—you know—more than she loves herself.
I read somewhere once that having children means making the decision to forever have your heart running around outside your body. And it’s true. It’s true when they’re babies, and it’s true—my mother assures me—even after they grow up. You worry about them. You try to solve their problems. You wake up in the middle of the night wondering if that cough one has is getting worse.
It’s horrible, that kind of love. It’s horrible, and it’s the best thing there is. It’s horrible, and it forces you to be a better person. It forces you to grow up, to practice selflessness, to rise above your limitations.
That’s the big challenge of motherhood: doing a good enough job. You know that what they learn from you is what they’ll take to the next generation. You know that you are defining not only words, but ideas. You are showing them how things work. You are responsible, and you feel that weight against you every day, and you never know the right answer exactly—no matter how hard you think about it.
When my friend tells me about the scrubbing and cleaning and bookkeeping that keeps her busy from the morning hours ‘til late at night, and I tell her about the feeding, reading, rocking, and chasing that does the same to me, we know we are living different lives. But we also know nothing worthwhile is ever easy. Nothing that doesn’t push you past your limits can change your life. It’s true of work, it’s true of parenting, and its true—a hundred times over—of love.
About the author
Katherine Center’s second novel, Everyone Is Beautiful, is featured in the March issue of Redbook. Kirkus Reviews likens it to the 1950s motherhood classic Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, and says, “Center’s breezy style invites the reader to commiserate, laughing all the way.” Booklist calls it “a superbly written novel filled with unique and resonant characters.”Katherine’s first novel, The Bright Side of Disaster, was featured inPeople Magazine,USA Today, Vanity Fair, theHouston Chronicle, and theDallas Morning News, among others.BookPage named Katherine one of seven new writers to watch, and the paperback ofBright Side was a Breakout Title at Target. Katherine recently published an essay inReal Simple Family and has another forthcoming inBecause I Love Her: 34 Women Writers on the Mother-Daughter Bond this April. Shehas just turned in her third novel,Get Lucky, and is starting on a fourth. She lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and two young children. You can visit her website at www.katherinecenter.com.
About the book
Lanie Coates’s life is spinning out of control. She’s piled everything she owns into a U-Haul and driven with her husband, Peter, and their three little boys from their cozy Texas home to a multiflight walkup in the Northeast. She’s left behind family, friends, and a comfortable life–all so her husband can realize his dream of becoming a professional musician. But somewhere in the eye of her personal hurricane, it hits Lanie that she once had dreams too. If only she could remember what they were.
These days, Lanie always seems to rank herself dead last–and when another mom accidentally criticizes her appearance, it’s the final straw. Fifteen years, three babies, and more pounds than she’s willing to count since the day she said “I do,” Lanie longs desperately to feel like her old self again. It’s time to rise up, fish her moxie out of the diaper pail, and find the woman she was before motherhood capsized her entire existence.
Lanie sets change in motion–joining a gym, signing up for photography classes, and finding a new best friend. But she also creates waves that come to threaten her whole life. In the end, Lanie must figure out once and for all how to find herself without losing everything else in the process.
Katherine Center’s Everyone Is Beautiful is a hugely entertaining, poignant, and charming new novel about what happens after happily ever after: how a woman learns to fall in love with her husband–and her entire life–all over again.
- Hardcover: 256 pages
- Publisher: Ballantine Books (February 17, 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1400066433
- ISBN-13: 978-1400066438
Purchase Everyone is Beautiful
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