We’ve been here dozen of times since we met, but this precious month before the baby is born feels like a last first date. There’s a different kind of romance beginning. We will never again be entirely alone in the world.

Falling deeply in love with a pastry is easy.

I was living “every girl’s” dream. But I had yet to find my own passion, my personal project, the thing that would help make Paris mine.

I’m a perfectionist, which means I am often ungrateful.

Paris presented different questions. If no one asked me for the rest of my life what I did for a living, how much money I made, who I knew, where I went to school – what would I want to do with my time? What if I stopped to ask myself what would make me happy, instead of what would make me successful, respectable, worthy? If that answer had to come from the inside, rather than the outside, what would it be? Afra.

Home can be something as vast as a country, as holy as a temple, or as simple as a cake.

They weren’t tears of sadness or even tears of joy. I was just overflowing. Like so many things since I’d been here, I didn’t yet understand it, but I felt it.

If I can stand the suspense, life never gives me exactly what I want – it gives me something better.

I’ve decided to take the day off. From myself. Today, I will not feel behind. I will not worry about being a better wife, mother, daughter, housekeeper, or writer. I’m not making a fancy dinner. I’ll be having quite an ordinary day, but I’ll be thinking and thanking-instead of fretting and fixing. We all need one day a year when we meet our own expectations and allow the world to be as it is instead of exactly how we would like it to be.

I live three thousand miles away from my mother. But no matter how far away, I’m still hers. I’m brave in the ways she’s made me brave and scared in the ways she’s made me scared. I’ll never belong to anyone the way I belong to her.