Jennifer Senior said this quote

“ But the truth is, there's little even the most organized people can do to prepare themselves for having children. They can buy all the books, observe friends and relations, review their own memories of childhood. But the distance between those proxy experiences and the real thing, ultimately, can be measured in light-years. ”

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The author observes the shift now that children are not a source of labor for the family, that they have gone from employees of the parents to the bosses of the parents.

~ Jennifer Senior

More than almost anything else, the experience of parenthood exposes the gulf between our experiencing and remembering selves. Our experiencing selves tell researchers that we prefer doing the dishes -- or napping, or shopping, or answering emails -- to spending time with our kids. (I am very specifically referring here to Kahneman's study of 909 Texas women.) But our remembering selves tell researchers that no one -- and nothing -- provides us with so much joy as our children. It may not be the happiness we live day to day, but it's the happiness we think about, the happiness we summon and remember, the stuff that makes up our life-tales.

~ Jennifer Senior

Even when our children are still young and defenseless, we feel intimations of their departure. We find ourselves staring at them with nostalgia, wistful for the person they're about to no longer be.

~ Jennifer Senior

We enshrine things to memory very differently than we experience them in real time. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman has coined a couple of terms to make the distinction. He talks about the experiencing self versus the remembering self.

~ Jennifer Senior