What a delightful book.  At 89 pages, it’s a quick read–funny and wise and so true.

Corrigan wrote Lift as a love letter to her two girls, Georgia and Claire.  She opens her “letter” on the night before they both start middle school, bemoaning the fact that everything will change and they won’t recognize this moment for how it is now.

“I heard once that the average person barely knows ten stories from childhood and those are based more on photographs and retellings than memory.  So even with all the videos we take, the two boxes of snapshots under my desk, and the 1,276 photos in folders on the computer, you’ll be lucky to end up with a dozen stories.  You won’t remember how it started with us, the things that I know about you that you don’t even know about yourselves.  We won’t come back here.

“You’ll remember middle school and high school, but you’ll have changed by then.  You changing will make me change.  That means you won’t ever know me as I am right now–the mother I am tonight and tomorrow, the mother I’ve been for the last eight years, every bath and book and birthday party, gone.  It won’t hit you that you’re missing this chapter of our story until you see me push your child on a swing or untangle his jump rope or wave a bee away from his head and think, Is this what she was like with me?”

As I was flipping the pages, I kept thinking, What a great idea.  I must do this for Liliana some day.  Tell her the story of how she came to us…and then describe the hilarity and wonder she brings to our lives.

Ah yes.  It would be the best gift ever–to do this for a child.

Which reminds me.  Mom, I want to talk more about all those stories you used to tell about your childhood.  They meant the world to me growing up, and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think of them.

This is love.  To know that you’re not alone.  To know that someone went before you.  To know that someone has your back.

That’s all there is–this nitty, gritty love.

[Post image: Partial of audiobook cover: Lift by Kelly Corrigan]