Excerpt from It. Goes. So. Fast. by Mary Louise Kelly, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I would not have believed it at the time, but these are the easy calls. Your phone delivers a panicked summons; your heart thrums with love for your child; you stand up and you run. I was a journalist before I was a parent. It is in my bones. But while there are many people who can report the news, there is only one person on this planet who can be mother to my children. It has taken me a long time to understand that the hard calls, the ones that may come back to haunt you, are the ones that accumulate in the vast gray space between the drama of a nurse tracking you down in Iraq and ... the routine Thursday afternoon unfolding of a high school soccer game. I don't stand up and sprint from the studio for the latter because there are so many of them. Were so many of them.

I'm aware that I'm lucky to have a choice in how I spend my time. And I don't presume to judge others who've chosen differently, or who seem at peace with their choices. Hats off. (Only could you please write the next book and clue the rest of us in on how it's done?) I also know that not everyone reading this is a mother. Not everyone reading this is a parent. This is my story. Yours will be different. What we have in common is the knowledge that there will never be enough hours in the day or enough years on this earth to do everything we came here to do.

This is the last year, ever, that my firstborn is guaranteed to live under the same roof as me. It's also the year I lost my dad, and the year I turned fifty, and the year we all began to emerge from a pandemic that rendered our lives unrecognizable. If all that's not a ripe opportunity for reflection, I don't know what is.

So: this is a book about what happens when the things we love—the things that define and sustain us—come into conflict. It's a book about the unsettling but exhilarating feeling of glimpsing that life as we know it is about to swerve. I have no idea what the transition to an empty nest will look like. As a professional interviewer, I've learned that one of the worst questions you can ask someone is "What's your prediction for what's going to happen in the future?" The only remotely honest answer the poor soul can give is, "Who the hell knows?"

I do know that an interesting exercise is to think of your life as a play. On what scene would you sweep open the curtain? How big is the cast? How many acts would you require? In mine, Act I was my youth. The action here starts slow and builds to school and first love and college and grad school and first job and getting married and buying a car and buying a house and a bunch of other so-called grown-up milestones. That's all Act I.

Why? Because in terms of completely upending your life, all that pales in comparison to having kids. Kids are Act II. You don't get much sleep in Act II. Multiple scenes climax with an exhausted voice offstage muttering, "Because I said so, that's why." The costume budget, at least in our house, is consumed by diapers and then by sports uniforms. But my God, the unscripted moments. The ad-libs of silliness and simple wonder. In Act II, you laugh. A lot.

Act III is the one I'm staring down now. I confess to a quiet fear that it will prove anticlimactic. How to top Acts I and II? When I stalk the stage slower and grayer every year? When surely all the juicy plot twists are behind me? And yet, friends, there's this: The stage at last is ours. The script all ours to write. We do actually, kinda know what we're doing by Act III. Better, we may still have the energy to get up there and do it. Then there's the fact that we don't have much choice about the matter. Act III is the one where it dawns on us that there may not be an infinite number of acts, that we'd best get on with making the most of this one.

Which prompts a delightful, nerve-racking question or two:

What now? What next?

Excerpted from It. Goes. So. Fast. by Mary Louise Kelly. Published by Henry Holt & Company. Copyright © 2023 by Mary Louise Kelly. All rights reserved.