The daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself. There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have had with your children as they grow older, in which you confess to failings, real anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, your negotiations and running jokes. but above all, there is intimacy in your contact with their bodies, with their shit and piss, sweat and vomit, with their stubbed kneecaps and dimpled knuckles, with their rips in the underpants as you fold them, with their hair against your lips as you kiss the top off their heads, with the bones of their shoulders and with the horror of their breath in the morning as the pursue the ancient art of forgetting to brush. Lucky me that I should be permitted the luxury of choosing to find the intimacy inherent in this work that is thrust upon so many women. Lucky me.
Michael Chabon
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