We are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.

“We are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows” is a statement of identity as something still being made: the past matters, but it does not have the final word. Its significance sharpens beside the story of a daughter who inherits the consequences of her mother’s addiction and later faces upheaval in her own life. The expression offers neither erasure nor a guarantee of happiness; it insists that what comes next also belongs to who a person is.

The Past and the Self

The passage begins by questioning the claim that personality is simply the sum of experience. If the past alone defined a person, the narration observes, people would never be able to put up with themselves. The expression turns from this limit toward possibility: a person can understand themselves as more than yesterday’s mistakes, because choices yet to be made and tomorrows yet to arrive also form part of a life.

That argument carries particular weight in the account of the girl and her mother. After the funeral, the daughter cleans the house and finds empty gin bottles in hiding places. She had known about them but had never told her mother; the imagined concealment had been something her mother could cling to. The daughter’s thought that chaos cannot be buried, only handed down, gives the expression’s claim a difficult counterweight: the past is transmitted, but transmission is not the same as destiny.

A Daughter’s Inherited Story

The mother had once insisted that personality was the sum of experience and predicted that her daughter, as a child from a broken home, would not believe in lasting love. The daughter’s response, spoken after her mother fell asleep on the sofa, was that her mother was wrong. Her later conviction that no one robs a bank for their children’s sake unless they are a romantic connects that disagreement to the Bank robber’s own choices as a parent. Her life does not escape the past she inherited, but it cannot be reduced to it either.

The expression therefore does not claim that people can simply choose away pain or its consequences. Instead, it makes a distinction between having a history and being nothing but that history. The daughter’s tenderness toward her mother remains beside her recognition of the damage: she covers her with a blanket, wipes up the spilled gin, and cannot bring herself to feel anger. Compassion and clear sight coexist, just as the past and the possibility of another choice coexist in the expression.

Tomorrow as Part of Identity

The Bank robber’s later life complicates any easy account of renewal. She grows up and has daughters of her own, trying to be a good mother, wife, employee, and person without an instruction manual. She is afraid of failing and believes, for a time, that things are going fairly well. Then infidelity and divorce knock her flat. The passage places that reversal within an ordinary human vulnerability rather than treating it as proof that her efforts were false.

The expression’s emphasis on next choices and tomorrows is also echoed by the daughters’ gesture on the bridge. The monkey and the frog attach a padlock to the railing because they have seen people do so elsewhere and believe it will lock love in forever. Their childlike promise of permanence contrasts with the expression’s more open horizon: love and identity are not secured once and for all, but lived forward through what people do next. In the surrounding narrative, the phrase becomes a compact answer to inherited damage and later failure alike: neither cancels the possibility of another tomorrow.