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I love my three children with a fierceness I can’t describe, but raising them has been demanding, exhausting, thankless, and draining. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone who wasn’t all-in.

My children need me to reach for the moon. They’ll never know how to do it themselves if they don’t see me try.

Like her own mother, Sara chose her career over endless hours of diapers, games of peekaboo, and mindless chores. Janet, was an exuberant stay-at-home mom, the kind of woman Sara was raised to scorn. 

Lydia was intent on conjuring another child; I was terrified I’d lose the one I had.

Life is often a messy escapade, and we rarely have the luxury of dealing with one gut punch before the next one is there to knock us on our keisters again. Which just makes the title of the memoir, Knocked Down, all the more apt.

Though it is clear the book is set in a kind of vaguely dystopian world, with surveillance and expectations on steroids, it feels like a place we are doomed to end up if we don’t start dialing down the expectations forced upon  mothers.

It’s heartbreak and fear in the face of possible joy. For anyone who is facing fertility challenges, Blevins’s attempts to communicate these feelings is a gift. 

I was good at listening to my kids—at really hearing what they were saying and what they were not saying. This helped me to honor who they were at any given moment (kids change so fast!), and I prided myself on that aspect of my parenting. That same skill is at the heart of book coaching.

I find hope in the books I read which . . . often are hopeful in the face of terrible odds.

I have to believe that I am telling my son that I embrace all the parts of myself, all of my flaws and mistakes, and I am not ashamed to tell the truth.

What if love could be measured? What if maternal instincts could literally be measured? Those questions really lodged in my subconscious.