Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love
12 quotes
"My generation was, in effect, the product of a social experiment. If we did not understand marital intimacy, it was because we had not seen it modelled. We lurched from relationship to relationship, dazzled by the newness of meaninglessness, relentless in our search for something even the most perceptive of us could not identify."
Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love
"It is only through my daughter that I have come to realise that a life without femininity – devoid of mystery, emotion, gentleness and the unerring power of a woman’s love – is no life at all."
Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love
"The bar is masculine, and women must adopt traditionally masculine characteristics – cultivated insensitivity, goal-orientated thinking, the prioritising of the material – to compete."
Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love
"Repudiating the vulnerability I felt had wrecked the lives of women around me, I modelled myself on my controlled father. I wanted his freedom and his focus. To him, a family was an aquarium: controlled, contained. To the women I knew, a family was everything."
Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love
"There were times when I would sob until I shook, until my eyelids were so swollen that it pained me to open them, and through hiccoughs, trembling, I would hiss, don’t touch me! as he moved to place a gentle hand on my shoulder. There were times when we seemed locked into our chairs, discrete, the static between us more eloquent than words. But there was never a moment when I doubted Peter’s ability to heal me."
Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love
"In our circle, stress was a valuable status marker: I stress, therefore I am."
Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love
"For years, I worked seven-day weeks, through birthdays and most public holidays, Christmases and New Year’s Eves included. I worked mornings and afternoons, resuming work after dinner. I remember feeling as if life were a protracted exercise in pulling myself out of a well by a rope, and that rope was work."
Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love
"Marriage is never static. There are peaks and troughs, cycles. It is easy to forget that this shifting landscape is really only ever a reflection of the self. Our capacity for attachment determines the kind of mate we attract, and it is through this mate that we are forever transformed – marriage as alchemy, but also as a mirror."
Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love
"Our culture is now one of masculine triumphalism, in which transhistorically feminine expressions – empathy, sweetness, volubility, warmth – are seen as impediments to a woman’s professional trajectory in many sectors."
Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love
"On first hearing that little voice – as fine and friable, I felt, as cotton thread, the impact on my soul was that of the highest magnitude of earthquake, those that occur every hundred years, say, or every thousand. The old shell I called myself cracked and was swallowed by a sudden crevasse, and just as suddenly was lost in the commotion."
Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love
"We watched each other evolve into parents, with all the fear, rage and confusion evolution can involve. Our eight-year-old is the incarnation of our union; we are forever fused by her blood. My old take on romance seemed vaguely ludicrous, as affected as a pair of spats. I no longer saw the point in 'getting back to normal', that pantomime of pretending nothing had changed; I wanted to evolve from sexual posturing into a deeper consciousness, that of love."
Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love
"My handsome husband and I didn’t make love for almost six months. I was enraptured, lost to my old life, and, in this obsession, disregarded author Ayelet Waldman – who famously wrote of her 'smug well-being' and 'always vital, even torrid' sex life in the wake of childbirth: I ignored my husband as a man. Instead, I revelled in him as a different thing altogether, far more seductive and important, and infinitely more resonant. My husband was no longer just a man: he was the father of my child."
Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love