Clarice: [getting cold feet] There's still time! Toni: We can just call everyone and say we're terribly sorry but something came up and we have to le… - Alison Bechdel

Sparrow: Listen, Mo. I have been doing crisis intervention with battered, homeless women and kids all week long. Tonight, I am going to vegetate in front of the TV. If you're so worried about Bosnia, go join the Red Cross.

Your anxiety attach in the church sounds like a compromise formation.

A what?

Your unconscious wants to express the pain you feel about your own lost innocense. But your ego wants to keep it repressed. So the compromise is anxiety.

I'm sure these things are true. But the way she says them feels like an implied criticism. As if she's comparing her own selflessness to my self-absorption. But of course that's just evidence of my self-absorption. My mother is probably not thinking anything like this. In fact, my desire to think that she's thinking of me at all is a bit pathetic.