You know all that sympathy that you feel for an abused child who suffers without a good mom or dad to love and care for them? Well, they don't stay children forever. No one magically becomes an adult the day they turn eighteen. Some people grow up sooner, many grow up later. Some never really do. But just remember that some people in this world are older versions of those same kids we cry for.
Parents have this twisted belief that anyone under the age of about twenty simply can’t know what love is, like the age to love is assessed in the same way the law assesses the legal age to drink. They think that the ‘emotional growth’ of a teenager’s mind is too underdeveloped to understand love, to know if it’s ‘real’ or not.That's completely asinine. way.
If you have one parent who loves you, even if they can't buy you clothes, they're so poor and they make all kinds of mistakes and maybe sometimes they even give you awful advice, but never for one moment do you doubt their love for you--if you have this, you have incredibly good fortune.If you have two parents who love you? You have won life's Lotto.If you do not have parents, or if the parents you have are so broken and so, frankly, terrible that they are no improvement over nothing, this is fine.It's not ideal because it's harder without adults who love you more than they love themselves. But harder is just harder, that's all.
It’s a secondhand world we’re born into. What is novel to us is only so because we’re newborn, and what we cannot see, that has come before- what our parents have seen and been and done- are the hand-me-downs we begin to wear as swaddling clothes, even as we ourselves are naked. The flaw runs through us, implicating us in its imperfection even as it separates us, delivers us onto opposite sides of a chasm. It is both terribly beautiful and terribly sad, but it is, finally, the fault in the universe that gives birth to us all.
Of course, everyone's parents are embarrassing. It goes with the territory. The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing, just as it is the nature of children of a certain age to cringe with embarrassment, shame, and mortification should their parents so much as speak to them on the street.
The worst thing in life is having parents that always stand against you and never with you. They discourage you, instill fear in you, hold you back, push you down and never encourage you to fly forward. When I have kids, they'll already be born with propellers with added wings. Even if one tells me they want to go learn how to ride lions in Africa, if their heart is driving that desire, I'd say "DO IT".If we throw blankets over our children's dreams, we darken their world and extinguish their desire to live. I'd rather my kid die with a wild fire in his/her heart than with a malfunctioning or drained out fuse. Always allow your kids to keep humming with dreams and ideas that fuel their passions. Never tell them something is impossible. If you have a really strong determined kid, they'll go out there killing themselves trying to do the unachievable just to prove you wrong. And if you have a weak kid, they'll give up on life and settle for bagging Cokes and potato chips at your local grocery store.
Children are no longer being parented, but are raised. Thats why they don't have morals, ethics,humanity and manners, because their parents neglected them. We now live in a society that doesnt care about right or wrong.
Dads. It’s time to show our sons how to properly treat a woman. It’s time to show our daughters how a girl should expect be treated. It’s time to show forgiveness and compassion. It’s time to show our children empathy. It’s time to break social norms and teach a healthier way of life! It’s time to teach good gender roles and to ditch the unnecessary ones. Does it really matter if your son likes the color pink? Is it going to hurt anybody? Do you not see the damage it inflicts to tell a boy that there is something wrong with him because he likes a certain color? Do we not see the damage we do in labeling our girls “tom boys” or our boys “feminine” just because they have their own likes and opinions on things? Things that really don’t matter?
Dads. Do you not realize that a child is what you tell them they are? That people almost always become what they are labeled? Was whatever your child just did really the “dumbest thing you’ve ever seen somebody do”? Was it really the “most ridiculous thing they ever could have done”? Do you really believe that your child is an idiot? Because she now does. Think about that. Because you said it, she now believes it. Bravo.
Dads. It’s time to tell our kids that we love them. Constantly. It’s time to show our kids that we love them. Constantly. It’s time to take joy in their twenty-thousand daily questions and their inability to do things as quickly as we’d like. It’s time to take joy in their quirks and their ticks. It’s time to take joy in their facial expressions and their mispronounced words. It’s time to take joy in everything that our kids are.
Do you not realize that your kids are going to make mistakes, and a lot of them? Do you not realize the damage you do when you push your son’s nose into his mishaps or make your daughter feel worthless because she bumped or spilled something? Do you have any idea how easy it is to make your child feel abject? It’s as simple as letting out the words, “why would you do that!?” or “how many times have I told you…
None of us has an obligation to accept the definitions of ‘respect’ and ‘gratitude’ our parents espoused, especially when those definitions can be used to guilt-trip us, or when they are being used for the purpose of forcing us to do certain things (as an extortion mechanism).
That’s not our role here, provide our parents with a “success story” to share at gatherings. Our role here is to contribute the best we can to the society. Use our talents and make sure we add the greatest value possible to other people’s lives.
An approach, according to which children should fulfil their parents’ dreams/ do everything in order to make their parents happy/ provide their parents with a peace of mind, or whatever they want for themselves - because they owe it to them for all those years in which their parents took care of them - is utterly selfish.
Parents were good to us, gave us a lot, took care for us when we couldn’t have taken care for ourselves, wanted the best for us, continue to care about us and our future, but none of it is good enough a reason to fulfil their dreams/ do everything in order to make them happy/ provide them with a peace of mind, or whatever they want for themselves.
We grow up in a belief system according to which children should always make their parents proud and happy (instead of making themselves proud and happy) - and that’s unfortunately the belief system in most cultures.
People have a much greater chance of finding something they’ll enjoy doing and making those greatest contributions when they trust themselves and are free to make their own life choices (are not marionettes in the hands of their parents).
It’s a mistake to believe that they (parents) are responsible for their children’s best future. This responsibility is on their children, and that’s the message they should be conveying to their children on a daily basis.
Not a few millions of parents strongly hope that their own children will step in by instantly becoming their own parents’ foster parents, if and when the parents reach their second childhood.
Later, you told me what your mother had said. How your father, the farmer, rose up slowly. You told me how your mother wailed on the other end of the phone, grieving her loss and complaining about the basketball of a goitre perched on her shoulder. She told you, your father walked onto the veranda and saw a chook floating ten feet above the ground. The chook didn’t flap a feather and just sat there brooding, swaying in the breeze.
If we throw blankets over our children's dreams, we darken their world and extinguish their desire to live.
Offering care means being a companion, not a superior. It doesn’t matter whether the person we are caring for is experiencing cancer, the flu, dementia, or grief.If you are a doctor or surgeon, your expertise and knowledge comes from a superior position. But when our role is to be providers of care, we should be there as equals.
Even though people experiencing dementia become unable to recount what has just happened, they still go through the experience—even without recall. The psychological present lasts about three seconds. We experience the present even when we have dementia. The emotional pain caused by callous treatment or unkind talk occurs during that period. The moods and actions of people with dementia are expressions of what they have experienced, whether they can still use language and recall, or not.
As I would soon learn myself, cleaning up what a parent leaves behind stirs up dust, both literal and metaphorical. It dredges up memories. You feel like you’re a kid again, poking around in your parents’ closet, only this time there’s no chance of getting in trouble, so you don’t have to be so sure that everything gets put back exactly where it was before you did your poking around. Still, you hope to find something, or maybe you fear finding something, that will completely change your conception of the parent you thought you knew.
Many a parent, sad to say, has used their child as an opportunity for them, the parent, to do, through their child, something or some of the things that they, the parent, did not do or did not do successfully.
Millions of sane people would each be sexually attracted to their own parent or child if they were not related to them.
Adults who use big words in order to seem intelligent are annoying, especially those who are not intelligent.
One of the main functions of a push-up bra is to lower the number of mothers who seem like mothers.
Being a bad parent is a sign of not having learned from experience.
Parents expect only two things from their children, obedience in their childhood and respect in their adulthood.
Father has a strengthening character like the sun and mother has a soothing temper like the moon.
Some of us can live without a society but not without a family.
In united families, they might sleep with half filled stomach but no one sleeps with empty stomach.
You can take the Indian out of the family, but you cannot take the family out of the Indian.
In your name, the family name is at last because it's the family name that lasts.
I cannot imagine how much I must’ve suffered in my previous lives to be fortunate enough to have parents like you in this life.
Education makes your maths better, not necessarily your manners.
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother with a few light books at her hipstanding at the pillar made of tiny bricks with thewrought-iron gate still open behind her, itssword-tips black in the May air,they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they areinnocent, they would never hurt anybody.I want to go up to them and say Stop,don't do it--she's the wrong woman,he's the wrong man, you are going to do thingsyou cannot imagine you would ever do,you are going to do bad things to children,you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,you are going to want to die. I want to goup to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,her pitiful beautiful untouched body,his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,his pitiful beautiful untouched body,but I don't do it. I want to live. Itake them up like the male and femalepaper dolls and bang them togetherat the hips like chips of flint as if tostrike sparks from them, I sayDo what you are going to do, and I will tell about it
From her thighs, she gives you lifeAnd how you treat she who gives you lifeShows how much you value the life given to you by the Creator.And from seed to dustThere is ONE soul above all others --That you must always show patience, respect, and trustAnd this woman is your mother.And when your soul departs your bodyAnd your deeds are weighed against the featherThere is only one soul who can save yoursAnd this woman is your mother.And when the heart of the universeAsks her hair and mind,Whether you were gentle and kind to herHer heart will be forced to remain silentAnd her hair will speak freely as a separate entity,Very much like the seaweed in the sea --It will reveal all that it has heard and seen.This woman whose heart has seen yours,First before anybody else in the world,And whose womb had opened the doorFor your eyes to experience light and more --Is your very own MOTHER.So, no matter whether your mother has been cruel,Manipulative, abusive, mentally sick, or simply childishHow you treat her is the ultimate test.If she misguides you, forgive her and show her the right wayWith simple wisdom, gentleness, and kindness.And always remember,That the queen in the Creator's kingdom,Who sits on the throne of all existence,Is exactly the same as in yours.And her name is,THE DIVINE MOTHER.
Dad was on the porch, pacing back and forth in that uneven stride he had on account of having a gimp leg. When he saw, he let out a yelp of delight and started hobbling down the steps towards us. Mom came running out of the house. She sank down on her knees, clasped her hands in front of her, and started praying up to the heavens, thanking the Lord for delivering her children from the flood.It was she who had saved us, she declared, by staying up all night praying. "You get down on your knees and thank your guardian angel," she said. "And thank me, too."Helen and Buster got down and started praying with Mom, but I just stood there looking at them. The way I saw it. I was the one who'd saved us all, not Mom and not some guardian angel. No one was up in that cottonwood tree except the three of us. Dad came alongside me and put his arms around my shoulders."There weren't no guardian angel, Dad," I said. I started explaining how I'd gotten us to the cottonwood tree in time, figuring out how to switch places when our arms got tired and keeping Buster and Helen awake through the long night by quizzing them.Dad squeezed my shoulder. "Well, darling," he said, "maybe the angel was you.
The methodical implementation of modern human faculties that allow us human beings to transcend the physical limits of biological evolution is Education. However, today, the term education has become somehow synonymous with economic benefits and due to the primeval craving for security, it has disgracefully lost its very core of transcendence into the unknown. Thus, the very evolutionary seeds that gave birth to the method known as education have gone almost extinct in the modern industrialized system of soulless competition and regurgitation. Hence emerged the reason for me to get to the root of its quite unofficially accepted problems, and to concoct the thought processes that would make necessary amendments to the perceptual errors of what I call the three major nodes of education system, which are the teachers, the students and the parents.
If education were the same as information, the encyclopedias would be the greatest sages in the world.
The system that aims at educating our boys and girls in the same manner as in the circus where the trainer teaches the lion to sit on a stool, has not understood the true meaning of education itself. Instead of being like a circus where the trainer uses his stick to make animals do stunts to serve the interest of the audience, the system of education should be like an Orchestra where the conductor waves his stick to orchestrate the music already within the musicians’ heart in the most beautiful manner. The teacher should be like the conductor in the orchestra, not the trainer in the circus.
The point is, education in its truest form, is the foundation of all human endeavors. It is the most noble of all the civilized elements of human consciousness. Education enables the humans to achieve their fullest mental and physical potential in both personal and social life. The ability of being educated is what distinguishes humans from animals. You can teach a cockatoo to repeat a bunch of vocabularies, but you cannot teach it to construct a space shuttle and go to the moon.
Instead of being like a circus where the trainer uses his stick to make animals do stunts to serve the interest of the audience, the system of education should be like an Orchestra where the conductor waves his stick to orchestrate the music already within the musicians’ heart in the most beautiful manner. The teacher should be like the conductor in the orchestra, not the trainer in the circus.
Education enables the humans to achieve their fullest mental and physical potential in both personal and social life.
We feel stuck in a rut, unable to say ‘no’ to our parents, unable to put an end to their controlling behavior, unable to grab hold of our own lives, simply because we fear that we will hurt, insult, disrespect or disappoint our parents (entire families).
Parents like to think of themselves as Batmans, and of their children as Gotham Cities. Gotham City depends on Batman for its survival, and Batman delivers. This belief prevents parents from letting those young adults actually live their lives.
Education does not exist for the benefit of students or for the benefit of their parents. It's exists for the benefit of social order. You do not need to be a student or have a child who is a student to benefit from education. Every second of every day of your life, you benefit from education.
About my father.....My father was a very simple person. When I was small I never understood why he is so simple actually I disliked it. He use to go to office and return late and have dinner with us. I use to think he never stood for me on anything. But he was the person who uses to take me to the market for Diwali shopping. He uses to give me 20 Rs to eat at school when he had only 30. He tried to fulfill all my wishes in his range. He uses to take me on his bicycle after school tuition and walk while making me sit on bicycle. He uses to scare away lizards for me. He uses to play with me. He was the one who told me to work hard when I failed. He never scolded me for studies but only when I killed an insect intentionally. He was the one who taught me physics and mathematics.Once he found a wounded parrot on the road and he bought him home. He brought medicine for him and applied it on his wounds. Later on a cat took that parrot and he ran after her but the parrot died. He did not had proper food for three four days.He spent each and every penny of his earning for our happiness and never forgot to return any pending amount. He use to talk to us but very less and joke sometimes. His style was very different, we use to tell him to use dye or color on his hairs but he always refused. And when he smiled and laughed he doesn’t stop. For every question he had one answer:-“TRUST GOD HE WILL DO EVERYTHING,HE IS THE ONE WHO DOES EVERYTHING”. He uses to discuss with us lot on Bhagwat Gita. Once he told me:- “ Bade prem se milna jag mae sabse aye insaan na jane kis vesh mae tujse mil jayen bhagwaan(meet each person with full love as you never know in which form god will come in front of you)”.To that I replied:-“ But according to Bhagwat gita this is kalyug and all will deceive you if you do that”. He never drunk alcohol or had non-veg.His habits were like –“If he don’t want to do something he will not do it”. But later on he started consulting me (A foolish person like me).I use to shout at him each time I was leaving home as he use to put my wallet at some secret safe place. And when he had not kept it even I use to say “you must have kept it”. He just kept quiet. But later I came to know about the place and it was always the same and I myself realized that why am I shouting at him. Once he said to me “ bache apne aap he sekhtae hain(Children learn by themselves)”. I daily use to woke up walk up to him and say something and then lie down beside him and sleep again. I had lot of fights with him and he was never angry on me. He was just realizing that I am becoming responsible son and we had lot of dreams together and we use to plan a lot.His smile, his eyes, his habits, his innocence, his politeness , his sense of responsibility , his teachings , his knowledge ,his humble nature, his moral values, his love for humans and animals, being non arrogant , no anger, he was never hungry for money , his voice :-“ hello Sonu beta , theak ho ( My Son – Sonu , are you fine)” , his watch, his mobile case, his phone, his shoes, his specs , his laugh, his jokes and all the qualities that were infinite.
Let them learn at school whatever they learn to pass the examinations, but at home let the education that you provide be the kind that widens their perceptions and takes away the germs of prejudices that infect them while they are out in the world.
My dad had limitations. That's what my good-hearted mom always told us. He had limitations, but he meant no harm. It was kind of her to say, but he did do harm.
If you have people who treat you badly in your life, they will be a human shield against people who will treat you well. If that’s not true then we should apply it to marriage and start saying to woman who are being put down or beaten, “you gotta stay with him because he needs you and he has been your husband for 20 years for heaven sakes. You just have to work to love him more and so on.” This is the advice they gave to woman like 200 fucking years ago and it was abusive advice. I view the parent child relationship (This just not my made up perspective.) it is the least voluntary relationship. At least the woman who got married chose to get married. We don’t choose our parents. The highest standards of behavior are required for parents and no one else. There is no one else whose standards of behavior need be higher than parents and so often parents get away with the lowest possible standards of behavior with regards to their children.
Whether our caretaker was our mom, dad, uncle, aunt, grandparent, foster parent, or sibling, our blueprint of what a relationship is supposed to look like is drafted by what we observed from our caretaker’s relationship. If our caretaker took their significant other back multiple times, made excuses for their actions, helped them battle demons, turned a blind eye to their infidelity, or moved from one relationship to the next, that is what we know. Their behavior becomes our very own model of what a relationship is supposed to look like and determines what we will expect from our own partners.
As I saw it, all my mother's life, my father held her down, like lead strapped to her ankles.She wasbuoyant by nature;she wanted to travel,go to the theater, go to museums.What he wantedwas to lie on the couchwith the Timesover his face,so that death, when it came,wouldn't seem a significant change.
Mom actually said that?" Cassie's face shown with happiness. "She always hated my math!""Nah," Martin said. "She was just being that way for you. She thought it was what you needed to hear. If parents told us what they really think about stuff, we could figure them out like regular people.
Family is all politics. Everyone hates each other’s guts, if they’re honest… Most brothers and sisters try to top each other, given the chance; you always get the worst wars in countries with big families….People have kids because they go soft in the head, tarts especially. They forget what it’s like to be a kid themselves and want to remember through their own. They don’t want us, not real brand-new people who puke and criticise and tell them to bog off: they want their own frigging innocence back. They want to have their own lives back again, with the bad bits taken out. Quite frankly, they’d be better off with a dog.
Let your child see you doing a good deed instead of you telling him or her to do it, and the little child shall one day grow up to become a real kind human being.
My phone buzzed in the center console again."What's happening with this thing?" Dad grabbed it."Dad, really?" I didn't want him to see the texts between Dash and me. Awkward."He says he knew it."The traffic opened up, and I went right on Sunset. "Please don't scroll.""Knew what?""I have no idea, and I'm driving. So forget it for
My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent's rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says 'PRIVATE--GROWNUPS KEEP OUT': a child sprawled on the bed, reading.
Hannah expected this to make her sob even more, but instead she found her tears drying up and her tummy growing warm. How dare they? How dare they do this to little girls? She understood now why her parents go so angry when they saw the result of bombers in the white hot streets of the Middle East, why men and women wailed in anger as well as grief as they lifted the limp bodies of children from the rubble. How dare they? No, she wasn't going to die like this, wrapped up like some helpless baby.
A thousand times today I've started to open my mouth, started to squeak out, "Can you tell me...? But then I'd look into the front seat, at my mother's silent shaking, my father's grim profile, the mournful bags under his eyes, and all the questions I might ask seemed abusive. Assault and battery, a question mark used like a club. My parents are old and fragile. I'd have to heartless to want to hurt them.
Young people today are deeply passionate and crave authentic life based on truth. They're hungry to make a difference. They're willing to take a stand for whatever they believe, even to die for a cause. When they sell out to Jesus, they'll pursue a standard of righteousness that is greater than anything you and I ever saw growing up. Don't water it down. Don't lower the standard. And don't just settle for raising it-raise it higher. Believe in your children. Talk with them. Speak well of them. Encourage them. Pray for them. Celebrate the victories with them. Affirm their growth. We can raise a generation that, although they'll make mistakes, will sell out completely when Jesus grips them. They'll give Him everything. They'll make you proud by being even weirder than you are.
Who are these people sharing the street with me? What is going on in their worlds, inside their heads? Are they in love? If so, is it the kind that Mum and Dad have? Based on having things in common, like raspberry picking and a love of dogs, and Shakespeare, and long country walks? Or is it the knock-you-out, eat-you-up, set-you-on-fire kind of love that I have longed for-and avoided-all my life?
Your mother was a hero. She developed a spell for gnomeatic fever. And she was the youngest headmaster in Watford history.”Baz is looking at Penny like they’ve never met.“And,” Penny goes on, “she defended your father in three duels before he accepted her proposal.”“That sounds barbaric,” I say.“It was traditional,” Baz says.“It was brilliant,” Penny says. “I’ve read the minutes.”“Where?” Baz asks her.“We have them in our library at home,” she says “My dad loves marriage rites. Any sort of family magic, actually. He and my mother are bound together in five dimensions.
There would definitely be way fewer instances of cheating, if the average couple did not have sex only when the woman feels like it.
Most people who are would each not be in love with their partner, if they did not have the kind of genitals they have.
The fact that you have just buried your parent or parents and/or sibling or siblings does not make you less likely to die today.
Taking good care of your husband or wife is the best way to thank their parent or parents for having taken good care of them.
After my parents were dead, I found in a box and in two chests of drawers nothing but hundreds of bright red Alpine caps, I said, nothing but bright red Alpine stockings. Every one of them knitted by my mother. My parents could have gone into the High Alps with these bright red caps and bright red stockings for thousands of years. I burnt every one of those bright red caps and bright red stockings, I said. I put on one of my mother's hundreds of bright red Alpine caps and in this costume burnt all the others, laughing, laughing, continuously laughing, I said.(Goethe Dies, p.65)
It was masturbation, not willpower, that made it possible for gazillions of women to walk down the aisle with their reputation and their hymen still intact.
The primary goal of a righteous parent who has a daughter is to minimize the number of boys and men for whom their daughter will have willingly opened her legs come her wedding day; the closer to zero, the more righteous they will seem.
What is life? Life is living in this moment, experiencing and experimenting but experience isn’t life. Life is reflecting and meditating but reflection isn’t life. Life is helping and guiding but philanthropy isn’t life. Life is eating and drinking but food isn’t life. Life is reading and dancing but art isn’t life. Life is kissing and pleasuring but sex isn’t life. Life is winning and losing but competition isn’t life. Life is loving and caring but love isn’t life. Life is birthing and nurturing but children aren’t life. Life is letting go and surrendering but death isn’t life. Life is all these things but all these things aren’t life. Life is always more.
Tony and Peg have two kids, Terry-Lynn and Harvey, both of whom are enrolled in so many extracurricular and afterschool clubs that they hardly ever see their parents. If Terry-Lynn is in Girl Guides, she doesn’t have to see Peg inviting the Purolator man in for “a cup of coffee”. If Harvey is in the anime drawing club, he doesn’t have to see Peg kissing Mr. Cooper from across the street, even if all the other neighbours secretly know what’s going on. Tony has no idea, all he knows is that Peg isn’t the same Peg he married back in 2003. All he knows is that she’s changed a great deal, and not for the better, like a beautiful butterfly regressing back into a devouring, ugly caterpillar in the span of only a couple of months.
The guilt you felt when you were smiling and others were suffering, the guilt you felt when you were petty with friends and impatient with your parents, when you were rude to your teachers and didn’t stand up for strangers, that guilt is marvellous. It proves that you are human, that you want to be better. Thank this guilt for teaching you, for making you aware. And now endeavour to better yourself. It is a lifelong work to become the person we want to be.
No matter how knowledgeable you are, respect your parents for their experience and your children for their curiosity.
My parents' work ethic amazed me. How could they put in such long hours, day after day?Part of the reason was to keep the family going - to keep me going. I realized that, although we had different values derived from different cultures and wouldn't agree on certain issues, they were good people, incredible people, and I loved and respected them.
People who fell in love at first sight, rushed home to their parents to tell them the good news and subsequently married were, [Patricia Highsmith] thought, retarded. Rather, a more honest appraisal of the nature of love positions it nearer to the horrors of mental illness. How else could you explain the fact that so many people were prepared to sacrifice the safety and cosiness of their lives for the thrill of a new romance?
Feed your child ideas of peace, harmony and compassion but at the same time give them courage to defend their identity and dignity.
I don't want to die. I deserve, certainly, the most extreme punishment society has, and I think society deserves to be protected from me and from others like me. That's the irony. What I'm talking about is going beyond retribution because there is no way in the world that killing me is going to restore those beautiful children to their parents and correct and soothe the pain.
Weeping Widows"There is a river that cuts ThroughThe heart of EveAnd flows throughParadise's back window.It streams into A bottomless wellThat rolls down to hellWith the tears of theWeeping widows.The women stand along the well,And cryWhile singing gray lullabiesAs orphaned childrenLight up candles to put on palm leavesTo push into the streamWith petals of jasmine And pieces of tangerine,Then sit back and wait for their fatherTo show up over the horizon Where his heart still beatsIn their dreams.
This is the terrible thing girls like us have in common" she explained. "Parents, upbringings,lifestyles, that are painfully normal. Middle class."It was almost amoral, being raised this way, she told me fiercely. We'd never really understand pain. And wasn't that the human condition? By shielding us from the real world, pressing their palms over our eyes during all the bad parts. our parents -our parents-were keeping us separate from humanity. We were something else entirely
I was unhappy there and going through a rough transition, so I was desperate for any friend I could find that I could talk to. I thought that's what he was. We had this secret from my mom, who I didn't like much at the time. It was a harmless secret, so I didn't feel bad about it. All we did was go to the movies and hang out doing fun things all day. It wasn't until much later that the warning signs began, but I was still too young and stupid to see them for what they were at the time. Basically, he was patient as he built up the trust between us. He became a close friend and convinced me that he was on my side somehow. He took total advantage of my ignorance and totally betrayed me a few years later, when he slept with me. After my mom found out, she went psychotic and all she gave a fuck about was what had been done to her. She didn't care about anything except for how hurt she was by what had happened. She blamed me and him equally, telling me that sixteen years old was old enough to know better. Even though I never initiated a goddamn thing with him, and never would have. Even though it happened in the apartment she and I had gotten together, that he was not supposed to be staying in.
When we sat down to eat I took inventory of the people in the room, and the remnants of my good mood evaporated when I realized how very little I had in common with them – the career dads, the responsible and diligent moms – and I was soon filled with dread and loneliness. I locked in on the smug feeling of superiority that married couples give off and that permeated the air – the shared assumptions, the sweet and contented apathy, it all lingered everywhere – despite the absence in the room of anyone single at which to aim this.
To the loyal and to the blood-lovers, in the good families and in the fiery dynasties, life is family and family is life. It is the same people who give advice and their vices to live well who turn out to be the ones who give resource and reason to live long.
James, you’d like Lou Reed,” Michael insisted. “He was bisexual.”Their laughter turned to coughs. They were all staring at me when I turned around. I told myself to relax.“Oh, yeah?” I said. “He doesn’t sound bisexual.”Michael just shook his head, but Ronan and Glenn smiled.“They did electroshock therapy on him when he was a teenager,” Michael said.“Electro-what?” said Glenn. “They electrocuted people?”“Kind of. They zapped their brains to alter their personalities. That’s how they tried to make gay people straight back then.”They all looked at me for a response.I shrugged. “So, he was bisexual? It worked halfway?
Some children are threatened with loss of privileges such as money, cell phones, cars or even eviction from home if they do not 'toe-the-line' and 'act straight'. I don't think parents who do such things consider for a moment the kind of emotional damage they are doing to their children - or thinking beyond their own feelings about the situation - which will not change or go away simply because of their denial.
What do you mean? In Old Castle? I still live with my parents in case you haven’t noticed, Jack. Those two strangers – that man and woman sitting on my sofa – are actually my parents. Oh, you mean your place? Yes, let’s evict your parents…let’s place them neatly in a cardboard box and leave it by the rubbish bins!
Moral obligations verses Legal obligations. Legally, you must abide by the laws of the land or face the consequences of being fined, imprisoned or both. Moral obligations tend to lean more towards a spiritual nature of a person. Some people perform immoral acts because legally there are no consequences. Morals birth in the heart of the individual. Moral characteristics are developed at an early age and continue into adulthood. It's a disgrace to neglect having good moral character.
Fathers are ironic, they want democracy in their country but dictatorship in their home.
I couldn't imagine what it would be like to be one of so many, to have not just parents and siblings but cousins and aunts and uncles, an entire tribe to claim as your own. Maybe you would feel lost in the crowd. Or sheltered by it. Whatever the case, one things was for sure: like it or not, you'd never be alone.
They were talking more distantly than if they were strangers who had just met, for if they had been he would have been interested in her just because of that, and curious, but their common past was a wall of indifference between them. Kitty knew too well that she had done nothing to beget her father's affection, he had never counted in the house and had been taken for granted, the bread-winner who was a little despised because he could provide no more luxuriously for his family; but she had taken for granted that he loved her just because he was her father, and it was a shock to discover that his heart was empty of feeling for her. She had known that they were all bored by him, but it had never occurred to her that he was equally bored by them. He was as ever kind and subdued, but the sad perspicacity which she had learnt in suffering suggested to her that, though he probably never acknowledged it to himself and never would, in his heart he disliked her.
They may already know too much about their mother and father--nothing being more factual than divorce, where so much has to be explained and worked through intelligently (though they have tried to stay equable). I've noticed this is often the time when children begin calling their parents by their first names, becoming little ironists after their parents' faults. What could be lonelier for a parent than to be criticized by his child on a first-name basis?
You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one.The family economy evades calculation in the gross planetary product. It's the only deal I know where, when you give more than you get, you aren't bankrupted - but rather, vastly enriched.
They (parents) want life to unfold according to what they believe. Most people want that. The last thing they want and need, is somebody (let alone their own child) telling them that their beliefs about life are bullshit / full of holes/ severely flawed.
There is no better way to crush someone’s self-confidence than to tell this person that her / his choice was wrong, and that she / he should have listened to us (parents). Because, obviously, we know how to make the right choices and she / he does not.
Our parents are not the only people on this planet, and we should not base our life choices on what they want (what will bring them a peace of mind, satisfaction, and give them a reason to brag), but we should make those choices keeping in mind that there are upwards of 7,5 billion people in this world, and that we should use our talents and energy trying to improve the lives of as many of them as possible.
What tethers me to my parents is the unspoken dialogue we share about how much of my character is built on the connection I feel to the world they were raised in but that I've only experienced through photos, visits, food. It's not mine and yet, I get it. First-generation kids, I've always thought, are the personification of déjà vu.
They projected an illusion of warmth with their home-cooking and hand-stitched quilts, yet underneath the facade was an institutional rigidity, as if they were running an orphanage where children would be fed and cared for but never loved. Love was such a key ingredient in molding humans, yet it was inaccessible to kids inside of the system.
When a child reaches adolescence, there is very apt to be a conflict between parents and child, since the latter considers himself to be by now quite capable of managing his own affairs, while the former are filled with parental solicitude, which is often a disguise for love of power. Parents consider, usually, that the various moral problems which arise in adolescence are peculiarly their province. The opinions they express, however, are so dogmatic that the young seldom confide in them, and usually go their own way in secret.
It is not difficult for an unwise mother quite unintentionally to centre the heterosexual feelings of a young son upon herself, and it is true that, if this is done, the evil consequences pointed out by Freud will probably ensue. This is, however, much less likely to occur if the mother's sexual life is satisfying to her, for in that case she will not look to her child for a type of emotional satisfaction which ought to be sought only from adults. The parental impulse in its purity is an impulse to care for the young, not to demand affection from them, and if a woman is happy in her sexual life she will abstain spontaneously from all improper demands for emotional response from her child.
I also believe that parents, if they love you, will hold you up safely, above their swirling waters, and sometimes that means you'll never know what they endured, and you may treat them unkindly, in a way you otherwise wouldn't.But there's a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begins.
Millions of deaths would not have happened if it weren’t for the consumption of alcohol. The same can be said about millions of births.
All our lives my brother and I were caught by the fictions my parents told us—fictions about themselves as well as others. Each wanted us to judge the other in his or her favor. Sometimes I felt cheated, as if they never allowed us to have a story of our own. It is only now that I understand how much their story was also mine.
In some ways, forcing me to leave was the best thing that could have happened to me. In other ways, it was a disaster. I'm still glad they did it though, because I think I might have just died if I had stayed at the coast. Although I ended up there a couple years later, when my mother relapsed on a whim, I think I needed that two years away from that horrible little coastal town where time is frozen and ideas creep forward too slow to notice any progress.
I know that my grandmother certainly did nothing to warrant my mother stealing all of her jewelry that my grandfather had given her as gifts over the years, just so she could peddle it for heroin on the street. Those were precious metals and gems that could never be replaced, and each one had a story behind it. A love story between my grandparents, that my mother flushed down a proverbial toilet so that she could shoot up, throw up and pass out.
My mother was obviously never there to take the blame she deserved. She left me to absorb it all in her place. She was far too busy in her own world, that incidentally revolved around herself. I'm pretty sure she dated a new guy every few months for most of my childhood. Some would last longer and show up again later after disappearing for a while, like the last day of a cold or flu before you start feeling better.
The biggest mistake that parents make, is believing that their assigned task in life is to teach their children and to guide them in every situation of their children's lives. The truth is that it is the task of parents to both learn from their children and to guide them as well. Parenting is a relationship that goes both ways, from the moment your child is born, you learn from that person, and in fact, your lessons begin long before your child's lessons do. Later on, when you've learned a great deal already, then they begin to learn from you. Throughout our lives, it is a give-and-take relationship, in many ways. Our assigned task is to learn from our children, and to guide and teach them. Their assigned task is to learn from us, and also to teach us.
The sacred gift of parenthood is inscribe in the universal words ‘Papa’ and ‘Mama’.
When you blame others, what you are really saying is what is inside of you can’t be fixed, so you have no control of your own happiness. Therefore, you have made the conscience choice to give focus and fuel to a bad situation that will take you nowhere and give you nothing, but ignorance and pain.
That's right", she says, wiping tears from her cheeks. "You weren't with me that time I walked in on them doing the deed. Seriously Freudian horror.""You saw your parents at the best," Mom murmurs, before Dad sweeps her into another kiss. "Go ahead," Josie calls. "Mate in public. Tonight we won't even mind. You deserve to break a few decency laws.
At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don't see how your gestures already mirror his; you don't see him in the way you hold your body, in the way you sign your name. You don't hear his whisper in your blood.
My emotional world imploded, and there is nothing that could have been said or done to make it easier. No one was in the wrong, and maybe that is what made it so painful. I wanted someone to blame, but instead got the two people I loved most doing their best to navigate uncharted waters.
I sometimes heard the parents of Michel's playmates sigh about how, after a busy day, they really needed "a moment to themselves." The children were in bed at last, and then came the magic moment, and not a minute earlier. I've always thought that was strange, because for me that moment began much earlier. When Michel came home from school, for example, and everything was as it should be.
All this waiting.Waiting for the rain to stop. Waiting in traffic. Waiting for the bill. Waiting at the airport for an old friend.Waiting to depart. Then, there’s the big waiting: waiting to grow up. Waiting for love. Waiting to show youryour parents that when you have kids you’ll be different. Waiting to retire. Waiting for death. Why do we think waitingis the antithesis of lifewhen it is almostall of it?
If you have no armsTo hold your crying child but your own armsAnd no legs but your own to run the stairs one more timeTo fetch what was forgottenI bow to youIf you have no vehicleTo tote your wee one but the wheels that you driveAnd no one else to worry, “Is my baby okay?”When you have to say goodbye on the doorsteps of daycareor on that cursed first day of schoolI bow to youIf you have no skill but your own skillTo replenish an ever-emptying bank accountAnd no answers but your own toSatisfy the endless whys, hows, and whens your child asks and asks againI bow to youIf you have no tongue to tell the truthTo keep your beloved on the path without a precipiceAnd no wisdom to impartExcept the wisdom that you’ve acquiredI bow to youIf the second chair is emptyAcross the desk from a scornful, judging authority waitingFor your child’s father to appearAnd you straighten your spine where you sitAnd manage to smile and say, “No one else is coming—I’m it.”Oh, I bow to youIf your head aches when the spotlight finally shineson your child because your hands are the only hands there to applaudI bow to youIf your heart aches because you’ve given until everything in you is goneAnd your kid declares, “It’s not enough.”And you feel the crack of your own soul as you whisper,“I know, baby. But it’s all mama’s got.”Oh, how I bow to youIf they are your life while you are their nurse, tutor, maidBread winner and bread baker,Coach, cheerleader and teammate…If you bleed when your child falls downI bow, I bow, I bowIf you’re both punisher and huggerAnd your own tears are drowned out by the running of the bathroom faucetbecause children can’t know that mamas hurt tooOh, mother of mothers, I bow to you.—Toni Sorenson
Come on!' he muttered, staring about. 'Where are you? Dad, come on--" But no one came. Harry raised his head to look at the circle of dementors across the lake. One of them was lowering its hood. It was time for the rescuer to appear--but no one was coming to help this time-- And then it hit him--he understood. He hadn't seen his father--he had seen himself--... 'It was stupid, thinking it was him,' he (Harry) muttered. 'I mean, I knew he was dead.' 'You think the dead we loved ever truly leave us? You think that we don't recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble? Your father is alive in you, Harry, and shows himself most plainly when you have need of him. How else could you produce that particular Patronus? Prongs rode again last night.'... 'You know, Harry, in a way, you did see your father last night...You found him inside yourself.' And Dumbledore left the office, leaving Harry to his very confused thoughts.
It takes courage to gather children from whatever they’re doing and kneel together as a family. It takes courage to turn off the television and the computer and to guide your family through the pages of the scriptures every day. It takes courage to turn down other invitations on Monday night so that you can reserve that evening for your family. It takes courage and willpower to avoid over-scheduling so that your family can be home for dinner.
Courageous parenting does not always involve saying no. Parents also need courage to say yes to the counsel of modern-day prophets. Our Church leaders have counseled us to establish righteous patterns in our homes. Consider five fundamental practices that have the power to fortify our youth: family prayer, family scripture study, family home evening, family dinner together, and regular one-on-one interviews with each child.
I never asked my mother where babies came from but I remember clearly the day she volunteered the information....my mother called me to set the table for dinner. She sat me down in the kitchen, and under the classic caveat of 'loving each other very, very much,' explained that when a man and a woman hug tightly, the man plants a seed in the woman. The seed grows into a baby. Then she sent me to the pantry to get placemats. As a direct result of this conversation, I wouldn't hug my father for two months.
Seeing your mother naked is not something you easily recover from. Seeing your mother naked and jumping from one side of a king-sized bed to the other with a nurse's hat on while your father, who is also naked, is chasing her with a bandanna around his neck, is reason to put yourself up for adoption.
When my late father died — now I'm in mourning for my late mother — that sense of grief and bereavement suddenly taught me that so many things that I thought were important, externals, etc., all of that is irrelevant. You lose a parent, you suddenly realize what a slender thing life is, how easily you can lose those you love. Then out of that comes a new simplicity and that is why sometimes all the pain and the tears lift you to a much higher and deeper joy when you say to the bad times, "I will not let you go until you bless me.
We find these joys to be self evident: That all children are created whole, endowed with innate intelligence, with dignity and wonder, worthy of respect. The embodiment of life, liberty and happiness, children are original blessings, here to learn their own song. Every girl and boy is entitled to love, to dream and belong to a loving “village.” And to pursue a life of purpose.We affirm our duty to nourish and nurture the young, to honour their caring ideals as the heart of being human. To recognize the early years as the foundation of life, and to cherish the contribution of young children to human evolution.We commit ourselves to peaceful ways and vow to keep from harm or neglect these, our most vulnerable citizens. As guardians of their prosperity we honour the bountiful Earth whose diversity sustains us. Thus we pledge our love for generations to come.
Avoid providing material for the drama that is always stretched tight between parents and children; it uses up much of the children’s strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn’t comprehend. Don’t ask for advice from them and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is strength and blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.
No, Miss Wright didn't want to meet her kid. To her, that relationship was just as important, just as ideal and impossible as it would be to the child. She'd expect that young man to be perfect, smart, and talented, everything to compensate for all the mistakes that she'd made. The whole wasted, unhappy mess of her life.
Have times really changed? Don't we today, as always, love our children and want them to live righteously? Don't we today, as always, need God's divine protecting care? Don't we today, as always, continue to be at his mercy and in his debt for the very life he has given us?
For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and—by some sad, strange irony—it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.
You see parents as kind or unkind or happy or miserable or drunk or sober or great or near-great or failed the way you see a table square or a Montclair lip-read. Kids today... you kids today somehow don't know how to feel, much less love, to say nothing of respect. We're just bodies to you. We're just bodies and shoulders and scarred knees and big bellies and empty wallets and flasks to you. I'm not saying something cliché like you take us for granted so much as I'm saying you cannot... imagine our absence. We're so present it's ceased to mean. We're environmental. Furniture of the world.
Matthew knew that phrenology was nonsense, and yet, years later, he found himself making judgments similar to those made by his father; slippery people looked slippery; they really did. And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudiced and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!
New Rule: Don't name your kid after a ballpark. Cubs fans Paul and Teri Fields have named their newborn son Wrigley. Wrigley Fields. A child is supposed to be an independent individual, not a means of touting your own personal hobbies. At least that's what I've always taught my kids, Panama Red and Jacuzzi.
How strange was the relation between parents and children! When they were small the parents doted on them, passed through agonies of apprehension at each childish ailment, and the children clung to their parents with love and adoration; a few years passed, the children grew up, and persons not of their kin were more important to their happiness than father or mother. Indifference displaced the blind and instinctive love of the past. Their meetings were a source of boredom and irritation. Distracted once at the thought of a month's separation they were able now to look forward with equanimity to being parted for years.
Justified within ourselves that we have suffered more than others, we feel guiltless when we disregard those in front of us, be they our family, our co-workers, strangers we interact with during our daily business, or faceless masses in foreign lands.There are those who transcend the bitter acts done unto them, declaring that the pain shall end with them. And then there are those who use the crimes committed against them as a free pass to commit crimes against others. Wronged as we each have been, nothing gives us the right to disregard the fragility of another. We can and must halt the hate passing throughout this world. A hateful act done unto us can be absorbed and transcended or it can be re-projected, thus allowing its ill force to continue moving throughout the population.We must work to transcend those hateful things already carried out upon each of us and in doing so prevent new acts of hate from being done. We must work to heal from the wounds already received and connect to a sense of consideration, to ensure that we do not pass along any of our pain to the generations as yet unburdened.We must declare a general amnesty; we must forgive each other and in doing so find that we have been forgiven. We must put away our bitterness and extend an open hand.
More than Captain America your kids need Amelia Earhart – more than Ant Man, they need Abraham Lincoln - more than Green Arrow they need Gandhi – more than Iron Man they need Isaac Newton.
Human making is our mission, but if you break the very soul of the would-be humans, then there will be no human to raise.
Let your children nourish their knack, for that knack shall one day provide them with the way to live with dignity and contentment.
Let your child be the torch of truth and they shall shine over the entirety of the human society brightening even the darkest corners.
There is nothing glorious about creating life out of passionate penetration. Even the animals can do that. The real glory comes when the life you create becomes the help in the lives of countless other humans.
Do not raise creepy crawlers my dear braveheart parents. Raise mighty humans with Himalayan strength in their veins. Give them the voice that has gone extinct in today’s society. And if there is only one thing you could give to your children, then give them courage – courage to pursue their passion – courage to trample every obstacle in their path – courage to keep walking even when their heart bleeds in agony.
Your children are not your children.They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.They come through you but not from you,And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts.You may house their bodies but not their souls,For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.You are the bows from which your childrenas living arrows are sent forth.The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
The children's hobbies aren't only the children's hobbies - the parents put just as many hours into them, year after year, sacrificing so much, paying out such huge amounts of money, that their significance eats its way even into adult brains. They started to symbolize other things compensating for or reinforcing the parents' own failures.
Through the blur, I wondered if I was alone or if other parents felt the same way I did - that everything involving our children was painful in some way. The emotions, whether they were joy, sorrow, love or pride, were so deep and sharp that in the end they left you raw, exposed and yes, in pain. The human heart was not designed to beat outside the human body and yet, each child represented just that - a parent's heart bared, beating forever outside its chest.
Children, as persons, are entitled to the greatest respect. Children are given to us as free-flying souls, but then we clip their wings like we domesticate the wild mallard. Children should become the role-models for us, their parents, for they are coated with the spirit from which they came- out of the ether, clean, innocent, brimming with the delight of life, aware of the beauty of the simplest thing; a snail, a bud....
Only children simply accept the fact that their parents have the right to make choices for them. Even disobedient children never question the fact that their parents have that right. They may choose to flout the rules, but they don't question their parents' right to make those rules.
We came around the corner and stood in the doorway of what looked like a paint-testing ground. This was where we proved once and for all that we were good loving parents. We decided to let him live."What is painting doing in my best Tupperware bowl?" I yelled."Well, I needed something lightweight I could carry around with me," he began."You've been carrying around a brain for year," the boy's father said.
That we shall use every discovery of science in the preservation of our children's health goes without saying; but we shall do more than this - we shall give them a free start, not loading them up with our own ideas and experiences, nor advising them to live according to our lights. We were burned in the fire here and there, but - who knows? - fire may not burn our children, and if we warn them away from it they may end by never growing warm. We will not even inflict our cynicism on them as the sentimentality of our fathers was inflicted on us. The most we will do is urge a little doubt, asking that the doubt be exercised on our ideas as well as on all the mortal things in this world.
25. Whenever two human beings spend time together, sooner or later they will probably irritate one another. This is true of best friends, married couples, parents and children, or teachers and students. The question is: How do they respond when friction occurs? There are four basic ways they can react:• They can internalize the anger and send it downward into a memory bank that never forgets. This creates great pressure within and can even result in disease and other problems.• They can pout and be rude without discussing the issues. This further irritates the other person and leaves him or her to draw his or her own conclusions about what the problem may be.• They can blow up and try to hurt the other person. This causes the death of friendships, marriages, homes, and businesses.• Or they can talk to one another about their feelings, being very careful not to attack the dignity and worth of the other person. This approach often leads to permanent and healthy relationships.
Peer pressure becomes more powerful when our children are away from our influence and when their defenses are weakened late at night. If you have ever felt uneasy about an overnight activity, don’t be afraid to respond to that warning voice inside. Always be prayerful when it comes to protecting your precious children.
One of the most effective ways we can influence our sons and daughters is to counsel with them in private interviews. By listening closely, we can discover the desires of their hearts, help them set righteous goals, and also share with them the spiritual impressions that we have received about them. Counseling requires courage.
It isn't what you will do for your children that makes you a great mother or father. It is what you do for God that isn't self serving, which sets the stage for children to learn to care about something other than what is expected.
If we throw blankets over our children's dreams, we darken their world and extinguish their desire to live. I'd rather my kid die with a wild fire in his/her heart than with a malfunctioning or drained out fuse. Always allow your kids to keep humming with dreams and ideas that fuel their passions. Never tell them something is impossible. If you have a really strong determined kid, they'll go out there killing themselves trying to do the unachievable just to prove you wrong. And if you have a weak kid, they'll give up on life and settle for bagging Cokes and potato chips at your local grocery store.
I finally made friends with my father when I entered my twenties. We had so little in common when I was a boy, and I am certain I had been a disappointment to him. He did not ask for a child with a book of its own world. He wanted a son who did what he had done: swam and boxed and played rugby, and drove cars at speed with abandon and joy, but that was not what he had wound up with.
Your children are not your children.They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.They come through you but not from you,And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.You might give them your love but not your thoughts,For they have their own thoughts.
...but oh, it would just break your heart to see some of them waiting for their visitors. They get their hair all done up on Saturday, and on Sunday morning they get themselves all dressed and ready, and after all that, nobody comes to see them. I feel so bad, but what can you do? Having children is no guarantee that you'll get visitors . . . No, it isn't.
Her gaze shifted away. "I don't remember my dreams anymore." It was like she was confessing a dirty secret. And maybe it was, because even though he hated the dreams, each time he had them, he was with his parents again. Hearing their laughter. Watching them live. But when he woke up they were really gone.
Love your kids and just be there for them. You don't have to eyeball their every moment or to orchestrate all their comings and goings. They know this. They know that's too much. All they want is to be assured that there's a home fire cooking, that there are two foremen and a rulebook, and that there's someone to tuck them in at night.
It’s so easy and convenient to buy our children gifts, but I encourage and challenge you to give them gifts that TRULY matter! The gift of unconditional love. The gift of encouragement. The gift of support. The gift of friendship. The gift of communication, understanding, and patience. The gift of guidance and support. The gift of quality time. And the gift of loving them for who THEY are. Material things are nice, but NOTHING compares to genuine love! Parenting should be taking seriously.
You know, Junie, you're fourteen now. I think you can certainly manage to put together a sandwich. ...The thing is, if my mother had any idea what I had in my backpack, she would have made me that sandwich. If she knew that I'd searched and searched the house until I finally found the little key to the fireproof box buried in the bottom of her underwear drawer, if she knew that I'd unlocked the box and taken my passport out, that I had it with me right that very second in a Ziploc bag in the bottom of my backpack, if she knew why I had it there, if she knew even a bit of all that, she might have made me that PBJ. She wouldn't have said, "You're fourteen now," like she thought I was some kind of responsible adult. No. If she knew about my plan, she would have said, "you're only fourteen." She would have told me that I was crazy to think about going to England with I was only fourteen.
As you pray for your children, you will find it to be an unending habit of your heart. Being able to positively affect your children in prayer will keep you in close contact with them and actively involved in their lives, even after they leave home. And it will continually contribute to your joy as a parent!
I thought, Dad.Could I go to Vietnam for you?Dad, I could do it. I could do it for you. I could go to the places you fought. I could find the bits and pieces of your heart and soul left behind. If I bring them back, would it heal your pain?Dad, you gave me life. You made possible every good thing in my life. Why do you insist on fighting your nightmares and memories and monsters alone?You don’t have to do it alone, Dad. I could help you fight.Dad, you know what?I’ll be back before you find out so you don’t have to be afraid. I’m going to Vietnam.
Children imitate their parents, employees their managers.
Children coming forth today have a greater capacity to deal with the greater variety of information that is coming forward than you did. They deliberately are coming forth into this environment where there is more to contemplate. This generation gap that you are talking about, it has ever been thus. Each new generation, every new individual, that comes forth, is doing with you having prepared a different platform for them to proceed from. There is this thing that gets in the way of that that says, "I'm the parent. I got here first. I know more than you do." From the children's perspective, and from the purity of their Nonphysical perspective, that they are saying is, "You're the parent. You got here first. You prepared a platform that I am leaping off from - and my leap will be beyond anything that yo have ever known.
It's been said that parents should give their children roots and wings. That was a perfect description of my parents. Even in a wheelchair, my father was a dreamer with his head in the clouds and my mother was the roots with both feet planted firmly on terra quaking firma.
Good parents use the mistakes they did in the past when they were young to advice the children God gave to them to prevent them from repeating those mistakes again. However, bad parents always want to be seen as right and appear "angelic and saintly" as if they never had horrible youth days.
What is much harder to handle is the sense that you have to live up to the mark someone else has set for you. The grades become too important, the competition too frantic, the fear of disappointing those who believe in you turns into an overwhelming nightmare. And it is desperately unfair to the boy. He cannot live his parents' life over again for them. He cannot make up for their own lacks, their own unfulfillments. He cannot carry their torch -- only his own.
Genuine love for a child, it seems to me, must include a desire for his maturity and ultimately his independence. WAtching a personality unfold is perhaps the deepest pleasure of parenthood; wishing, or trying, to retard this growth is one of the deepest sins.
Do we not see the influence we have when we say we believe in one thing, but our children see us living something else? Do we not realize how little we encourage our children to actually decide what they believe, declare what they believe, and then live by it? Whether it’s religion, politics, sports, or societal norms. It is not our place to tell our kids what to think. It is our place to teach our kids to think correctly. If we do this, we need have no fear of what they will decide for themselves and how strongly they’ll stand behind it. A man will follow his own convictions to his death, but he’ll only follow another man’s convictions until he steps in manure.
Dads. Do you honestly expect anybody to believe that you can’t find 20 minutes to step away from your computer or turn off the television to play with your child? It has to happen every single day. Do you not understand that children will hinge their entire facet of trust on whether or not their dad plays with them and how involved he is when he plays with them? Do you know the damage you do by not playing with your children every day?
And if you are a mom who has watched your child’s father leave, my heart goes out to you. I also pray that you had no part in it. I pray that you didn’t make it impossible for him while he was there. I pray that you didn’t try and force him to live up to impossible expectations. And, I pray that if he is a good man and he wants to be there in his child’s life that you love your child enough to let him. Even if that seems impossible to you.
I am far from a perfect dad. And I always will be. But I’m a damn good dad, and my son will always feel bigger than anything life can throw at him. Why? Because I get it. I get the power a dad has in a child’s life, and in a child’s level of self-belief. I get that everything I ever do and ever say to my son will be absorbed, for good or for bad.
Dads. Do you not realize that your child needs to feel your skin on his? Do you not realize the incredible and powerful bond that skin on skin contact with your daughter will give you? Do you not understand the permanent mental connections that are made when you stroke your son’s bare back or rub your daughter’s bare tummy while you tell bedtime stories? And if any idiot says anything about that being inappropriate, you’re gonna get kicked in the face, first by me, and then by every other good dad out there. Touching your child is your duty as a father.
Good fathers, and by that I mean real fathers who are there, have the ability to change almost every social problem we now find ourselves facing. I’d be assumptive enough to say that there isn’t a single type of crime or a single problem so big that it couldn’t be fixed or wiped out if fathers would just step up.
Children who are not encouraged to do, to try, to explore, to master, and to risk failure, often feel helpless and inadequate. Over-controlled by anxious, fearful parents, these children often become anxious and fearful themselves. This makes it difficult for them to mature. Many never outgrow the need for ongoing parental guidance and control. As a result, their parents continue to invade, manipulate, and frequently dominate their lives.
Just as verbally and physically abused children internalize blame, so do incest victims. However, in incest, the blame is compounded by the shame. The belief that ‘it’s all my fault’ is never more intense than with the incest victim. This belief fosters strong feelings of self-loathing and shame. In addition to having somehow to cope with the actual incest, the victim must now guard against being caught and exposed as a ‘dirty, disgusting’ person
Children get food shelter pocket money longholidays and love, all of it apparently free gratis, and most of the little fools think it's a sort of compensation for having been born. 'There are no strings on me!' They sang; but I, pinnoccio, saw the strings. Parents are impelled by the profit motive - nothing more, nothing less. For their attentions, they expected, from me, the immense dividend of greatness.
Judith Rey watches the young woman. Once upon a time, I had a baby daughter. I dressed her in frilly frocks, enrolled her for ballet classes, and sent her to horse-riding camp five summers in a row. But look at her. She turned into Lester anyway. She kisses Luisa’s forehead. Luisa frowns, suspiciously, like a teenager. “What?
In the agricultural age, women conceived younger and had many more children because children were economic assets as workers on the farm. In the postindustrial age, children are emotional assets but economic liabilities, costing both a middle-class husband and wife or a single parent over $10,000 a year.
...The life of the parents is the only thing that makes good children. Parents should be very patient and ‘saintlike’ to their children. They should truly love their children. And the children will share this love! For the bad attitude of the children, says father Porphyrios, the ones who are usually responsible for it are their parents themselves. The parents don’t help their children by lecturing them and repeating to them ‘advices’, or by making them obeying strict rules in order to impose discipline. If the parents do not become ‘saints’ and truly love their children and if they don’t struggle for it, then they make a huge mistake. With their wrong and/or negative attitude the parents convey to their children their negative feelings. Then their children become reactive and insecure not only to their home, but to the society as well...
Strange combination, isn't it--gratitude and resentment? But this is the way I think. Actually, I think everybody thinks that way. Even the children of the humans who died long ago, I think they lived their lives holding similar contradictory thoughts about their parents. They were raised to learn about love and death, and they lived out their lives passing from the sunny spots to the shady spots of this world.
Mr. Lisbon knew his parental and neighborly duty entailed putting the retainer in a Ziploc bag, calling the Kriegers, and telling them their expensive orthodontal device was in safe keeping. Acts like theses -- simple, humane, conscientious, forgiving -- held life together. Only a few days earlier he would have been able to perform them. But now he took the retainer and dropped it in the toiler. He pressed the handle. The retainer, jostled int he surge, disappeared down the porcelain throat, and, when waters abated, floated triumphantly, mockingly, out, Mr. Lisbon waited for the tank to refill and flushed again, but the same thing happened. The replica of the boy's mouth clung to the white slope.
Sorry is the day, and full of lament, when the young have to guard themselves from being food for the old.I am moved to bewilderment, when I glance my eyes upon a society that kills its young, and then pretends to mourn their modus operandi.Worse still, are those who have no compassion for the legacy and lack of positive inheritance being left to us, the future.We have to save our parents and their friends. They raised us,but do not trust us. They are too tired to enact change. The source of progress, and the wealth of the future is, us.
12. There will come a day, much quicker than your parents would wish, when you will no longer be comfortable living at home. You will want to move out and establish a home of your own. After that time, your mother and father will be more like your friends than your parents. And someday, if they live long enough, you will be more like a parent to them than a son or daughter.
Remember, Little Ones, everything is not important all the time. Only living is important all the time. Not things. Not money. Not more things and more endless money. Spend well the quality of your time. And yes, be greedy with your hours. If only to then give those hours away as the most precious gifts you have to offer to yourself, your family, and your friends. And yes, to my Little Ones.” –From The Legacy Letters–“The Everything and Nothing of Money.
Neither parents nor schools are very effective at teaching the young to find pleasure in the right things. Adults, themselves often deluded by infatuation with fatuous models, conspire in the deception. They make serious tasks seem dull and hard, and frivolous ones exciting and easy. Schools generally fial to teach how exciting, how mesmerizingly beautiful science or mathematics can be; they teach the routine of literature or history rather than the adventure.
Paco Fuentes," Mrs. Peterson says, pointing to the table behind Mary.The handsome young man with pale blue eyes like his mother's and smoky black hair like his father's takes his assigned seat.Mrs. Peterson regards her new student over the glasses perched on her nose. "Mr. Fuentes, don't think this class will be a piece of cake because your parents got lucky and developed a medication to halt the progression of Alzheimer's. Your father never did finish my class and he flunked one of my tests, although I have a feeling your mother was the one who should have failed. But that just means I'll expect extra from you.
Like Alan Turing, Zuse was educated in a system that focused on a child's emotional and philosophical life as well as his intellectual life, and at the end of school, like Turing, Zuse found himself to be something of an outsider—to the disappointment of his very conventional parents, he no longer believed in God or religion.(Jane Smiley (2010). The Man Who Invented the Computer)
I think maybe, when I was very young, I witnessed a chaste cheek kiss between the two when it was impossible to avoid. Christmas, birthdays. Dry lips. On their best married days, their communications were entirely transactional: 'We're out of milk again.' (I'll get some today.) 'I need this ironed properly.' (I'll do that today.) 'How hard is it to buy milk?' (Silence.) 'You forgot to call the plumber.' (Sigh.) 'Goddammit, put on your coat, right now, and go out and get some goddamn milk. Now.' These messages and orders brought to you by my father, a mid-level phonecompany manager who treated my mother at best like an incompetent employee.
Most parents try really hard to give their kids the best possible life. They give them the best food and clothes they can afford, take their own kind of take on training kids to be honest and polite. But what they don't realize is no matter how much they try, their kids will get out there. Out to this complicated little world. If they are lucky they will survive, through backstabbers, broken hearts, failures and all the kinds of invisible insane pressures out there. But most kids get lost in them. They will get caught up in all kinds of bubbles. Trouble bubbles. Bubbles that continuously tell them that they are not good enough. Bubbles that get them carried away with what they think is love, give them broken hearts. Bubbles that will blur the rest of the world to them, make them feel like that is it, that they've reached the end. Sometimes, even the really smart kids, make stupid decisions. They lose control. Parents need to realize that the world is getting complicated every second of every day. With new problems, new diseases, new habits. They have to realize the vast probability of their kids being victims of this age, this complicated era. Your kids could be exposed to problems that no kind of therapy can help. Your kids could be brainwashed by themselves to believe in insane theories that drive them crazy. Most kids will go through this stage. The lucky ones will understand. They will grow out of them. The unlucky ones will live in these problems. Grow in them and never move forward. They will cut themselves, overdose on drugs, take up excessive drinking and smoking, for the slightest problems in their lives. You can't blame these kids for not being thankful or satisfied with what they have. Their mentality eludes them from the reality.
The best way to teach a child is live an exemplary life.
Our parents can show us a lot of things: they can show us how we are to be and what things we ought to strive for, or they can show us how not to be and what things we ought to stray from, then you may have the kind of parents that show you all the things about you that you want to get rid of and you realize those traits aren't yours at all but are merely your parents' marks that have rubbed off onto you.
Dear God," said Nudge under her breath, "I want real parents. But I want them to want me too. I wantthem to love me. I already love them. Please see what you can do. Thanks very much. Love, Nudge."Okay, so I'm not saying we were pros at this or anything. (Max thoughts)
I also believe that forgiveness is appropriate only when parents do something to earn it. Toxic parents, especially the more abusive ones, need to acknowledge what happened, take responsibility, and show a willingness to make amends. If you unilaterally absolve parents who continue to treat you badly, who deny much of your reality and feelings, and who continue to project blame onto you, you may seriously impede the emotional work you need to do.
Because the truth was, and we both knew it, he'd gone long, long ago. I'd just made him stick around when he really wanted to be somewhere else. In his own weird way, he was another victim of the shooting, One of the ones who couldn't get away. "Are you mad?" he asked, which I thought was a really strange question. "Yes," I said. And I was. It's just that I wasn't so sure I was mad at him. But I don't think he needed to hear that part. I don't think he wanted to hear that part. I think it was important to him to hear that I cared enough to be angry."Will you ever forgive me?" he asked."Will you ever forgive me?" I shot back, leveling my gaze directly into his eyes.He stared into them for a few moments then got up silently and headed for the door. He didn't turn around when he reached it. Just grabbed the doorknob and held it. "No," he said without facing me. "Maybe that makes me a bad parent, but I don't know if I can. No matter what the police found, you were involved in that shooting, Valerie. You wrote those names on that list. You wrote my name on that list. You had a good life here. You might not have pulled the trigger, but you helped cause the tragedy."He opened the door."I'm sorry. I really am." He stepped out into the hallway. "I'll leave my new address and phone number with your mother," he said before walking slowly out of my sight.
As children inch their way into adolescence, the parent changes. He is an authority, a source of answers, and a chastising voice. Depending on the day, he may be resented, emulated, questioned, or defied.Only as an adult can a child imagine his parent as a whole person, as a husband, a brother, or a son. Only then can a child see how his parent fits into the world beyond four walls. Saleem had only bits and pieces of his father, mostly the memories of a young boy. He would spend the rest of his life, he knew, trying to reconstruct his father with the scraps he could recall or gather from his mother.
The best part, though, was hearing my mother's voice. It was like having her again, coming out from far inside me. It hurt, of course, but more often than not the best things do, I've found. You wouldn't think it could be so, but-as the oldtimers used to say - the world's titled, and there's an end to it.
I remember the big gaping hole left by my dad’s absence in the months following the accident. He’d been the one who went to my parent-teacher conferences, the one who taught me mnemonics to memorize the Great Lakes and the Earth’s atmospheres. Whenever I did something silly, my dad always made me feel better by telling me a story from the firehouse about someone who had done something even sillier. Sometimes you don’t realize all the things a person does for you until they aren’t there to do them anymore.
Standing on the edge with my patients — abiding with them — means that I must harbor a true awareness that I, too, could lose my child through the play of circumstance over which I have no control. I could lose my home, my financial security, my safety. I could lose my mind. Any of us could.
Coming back last time to the house she grew up in, Isabel had been reminded of the darkness that had descended with her brothers' deaths, how loss had leaked all over her mother's life like a stain. As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent loss a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or daughter. That seemed odd. As to her own status, she wondered whether she was still technically a sister, now that her adored brothers had died.
Parents need to realize that the world is getting complicated every second. With new problems, new diseases, new habits. They have to realize the vast probability of their kids being victims of this age, this complicated era. Your kids could be exposed to problems that no kind of therapy can help. Your kids could be brainwashed by themselves to believe in insane theories that drive them crazy. Most kids will go through this stage. The lucky ones will understand. They will grow out of them. The most unlucky ones will live in these problems. Grow in them and never move forward. They will cut themselves, overdose on drugs, take up excessive drinking and smoking, for the slightest problems in their lives. You can't blame these kids for not being thankful or satisfied with what they have. Their mentality eludes them from the reality.
When I was in junior high school, I used to think that Disney's 1990's paranormal television program 'So Weird' was every kid's ideal life - not going to school, living on a tour bus, having rockstar parents, traveling all over North America and never staying in one place for more than a week or so. Of course, eventually the realization hits you that the kids out there who really do live like this, pulling up stakes every week and never staying with their friends or having a permanent residence, aren't really happy.
I hate smug people.”Ros laughed. “That you do. And so you’re using his phone. He’ll explode, you know.”“Oh, it’ll be bad. ‘Cause I made all the phone calls on my list.”There was a pause. “No. You didn’t.”“I did.”“Fifty-one phone calls on the off-limits phone?” “Yup.”“Did you fall down the stairs or something? What is wrong with you?!
German is a much more precise language than English. Americans throw the word love around for everything: I love my wife! I love all my friends! I love rock music! I love the rain! I love comic books! I love peanut butter! The word you use to describe your feelings for your wife should not be the same word you use to describe your feelings for peanut butter. In German, there are a dozen different words that describe varying degrees of liking something a lot. Germans almost never use the word love, unless they mean a deep romantic love. I have never told my parents I love them, because it would sound melodramatic, inappropriate, and almost incestuous. In German, you tell your mother that you hold her very dear, not that you are in love with her.
For my success I am immensely grateful to God, my parents, my family, my friends, my teachers and to the books I read.
The world gives us PLENTY of opportunities to strengthen our patience. While this truth can definitely be challenging, this is a good thing. Patience is a key that unlocks the door to a more fulfilling life. It is through a cultivation of patience that we become better parents, powerful teachers, great businessmen, good friends, and a live a happier life.
We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even after we outgrow some of these others—our parents, for instance—and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.
A warm feeling fell over the boy. A mix of security and comfort, as if a blanket were wrapping its soft layers around his heart and nuzzling him snuggly. Gavin loved his mother, and he would be forever grateful to his father for protecting her. The whole mystery behind it made him itch with curiosity, however.
From then on, I was terrified that I or one of my parents were going to die. My mother worried me the most. She was the force around which our world turned. Unlike our father, who spent his life in the clouds, my mother was propelled through the universe by the brute force of reason. She was the judge in all of our arguments. One disapproving word from her was enough to send us off to hide in a corner, where we would cry and fantasize our own martyrdrom. And yet. One kiss could restore us to princedom. Without her, our lives would dissolve into chaos.
All people cross the line from childhood to adulthood with a secondhand opinion of who they are. Without any questioning, we take as truth whatever our parents and other influentials have said about us during our childhood, whether these messages are communicated verbally, physically, or silently.
Some secret of nurture withered a generation or two before I arrived, if it had ever existed before among the poor, marginalized people on the edges of Europe from whom I descend. Both my parents grew up with a deep sense of poverty that was mostly emotional but that they imagined as material long after they clambered into the middle class, and so they were more like a pair of rivalrous older siblings than parents who see their children as extensions of themselves and their hopes. They were stuck in separateness.I didn't realize anything was odd until I was already on my own and found out that not everyone's parents cut them off financially as soon as the law allowed. I tried to leave home unsuccessfully at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and did so successfully at seventeen, heading off to another country, as far away as I could go, and once I got there I realized I was more on my own than I had anticipated: I was henceforth entirely repsonsible for myself and thus began a few years of poverty.
Parents have bought into the world’s pastimes chock-full of pop culture, and it is searing the souls of our children. Parents have allowed electronic babysitters to infiltrate their homes and minds; young people’s sense of right and wrong is being choked by wild and rank weeds in a moral wasteland.
Both my parents had a great influence on me. I never heard my father use a profane or even a slang word. I always respected him because of his complete integrity. In his business dealings his handshake was like a contract. He was as good as his word. Of all the people I have ever known, my mother had the greatest influence on me.
And one day when you wake up, you happen to realise that your battle isn’t with the man you had got into a brawl with the other day, it isn’t with a friend turned foe, it isn’t with those parents who chose to give up on you, it isn’t with the bus driver for not having waited until you got in, it isn’t with the employer who cancelled the application to your leave, it isn’t with the examiner who resolved into failing you, it isn’t with the woman who did not reciprocate your feelings, it isn’t with child who dropped his ice-cream cone on you, it isn’t with your ill fate and it isn’t with that superior being above you. Your battle, your fight isn’t against the world but against yourself and the only way to come through all of it and beyond, to win, is improvement, self-improvement which needs to be gradual and progressive with the transverse of each day.
I have heard that, with some persons, temperance – that is, moderation – is almost impossible; and if abstinence be an evil (which some have doubted), no one will deny that excess is a greater. Some parents have entirely prohibited their children from tasting intoxicating liquors; but a parent’s authority cannot last for ever; children are naturally prone to hanker after forbidden things; and a child, in such a case, would be likely to have a strong curiosity to taste, and try the effect of what has been so lauded and enjoyed by others, so strictly forbidden to himself – which curiosity would generally be gratified on the first convenient opportunity; and the restraint once broken, serious consequences might ensue.
Because that’s what parents do, without even thinking about it, that’s what parents do. They fill their children with love and understanding and compassion and knowledge so that when they’re adults no one can extinguish them. They’ll burn so bright they can’t be brought down.
...my father, [was] a mid-level phonecompany manager who treated my mother at best like an incompetent employee. At worst? He never beat her, but his pure, inarticulate fury would fill the house for days, weeks, at a time, making the air humid, hard to breathe, my father stalking around with his lower jaw jutting out, giving him the look of a wounded, vengeful boxer, grinding his teeth so loud you could hear it across the room ... I'm sure he told himself: 'I never hit her'. I'm sure because of this technicality he never saw himself as an abuser. But he turned our family life into an endless road trip with bad directions and a rage-clenched driver, a vacation that never got a chance to be fun.
We drove on in silence, Dad shaking his head in disgust every few minutes. I stared at him, wondering how it was we got to this place. How the same man who held his infant daughter and kissed her tiny face could one day be so determined to shut her out of his life, out of his heart. How, even when she reacyhed out to him in distress - Please, Dad, come get me, come save me - all he could do was accuse her. How that same daughter could look at him and feel nothing but contempt and blame and resentment, because that's all that radiated off of him for so many years and it had become contagious.
Unlike my mother, my father does not cry quietly. His wails roll out like a wave of pain, and I scramble to roll up my window. My mother cannot hear that. I cannot bear to hear it myself. I am not used to my father's crying. I've had no time to harden my heart against him.
The reality is that most of us communicate the same way that we grew up. That communication style becomes our normal way of dealing with issues, our blueprint for communication. It’s what we know and pass on to our own children. We either become our childhood or we make a conscious choice to change it.
Human making is our mission.
As parents one of the biggest jobs we have, is teaching our children how to resolve problems effectively. We live in an era where everyone is quick to act the fool over simple issues. As we used to say when I was on the streets, ‘everybody wants to cut a movie’.
Then we talked a lot about our parents and how we didn't want to become them, but we had no other role models--or "maps," Alex kept saying. "My father is a terrible map, mostly because he doesn't ever lead me anywhere." And I thought about my parents being maps that led to places I didn't want to go-- and it made a shocking amount of sense, using the word maps to describe parents. If almost made you feel like you could fold Mom and Dad up and lock them away in the glove compartment of your car and just joyride for the rest of your life maybe.
My parents were two-faced. To me, they showed no mercy. They preached from theBook of Fallen Children - Commandment 1: The Child Is Always Ungrateful. At eighteen, the free ride would stop, and I'd be dumped into the mess of the world. But in their private moments, they were soft, cowed by love. They critiqued their own parenting skills and thought of all the ways the could help their kids get ahead.
There is something about being loved and protected by a parent (or guardian) knowing that I can be loved for who I am, not what I can do, or might one day become. Unfortunately it’s not usually like this in every single situation. From time to time, my parents made mistakes during my childhood. Possibly I was the mistake, or unwanted. But I don’t know. I had every material thing that I could have ever wanted, but there was still something missing, as if I felt distanced from my parents, or misunderstood, in the ways that they treated me. At times, I had felt completely loved and accepted by my parents, but for one reason or another, they were unable to care for me, provide for me, in some ways that would have been very important. Sometimes I feel like I am trying to make up for the experiences in life that were absent when I was a child.
It’s so important for husbands and wives to be united when making parenting decisions. If either parent doesn’t feel good about something, then permission should not be granted. If either feels uncomfortable about a movie, a television show, a video game, a party, a dress, a swimsuit, or an Internet activity, have the courage to support each other and say no.
Parents of medically fragile children find themselves becoming experts in lots of different areas, including laws and regulations, research and treatments, and the various specialists that support the health of their children.
Even though our journey as parents of a medically fragile child began with emotional turmoil, it has since become a purposeful odyssey that brings meaning and depth to our lives. This is the road we were born to travel.
So often parents of abused children feel helpless. When a child falls, and scrapes her knees parents can erase the hurt by kissing it and putting a Band-Aid on it, but not so with the pain of sexual abuse.
I felt like I needed to comfort both the little girl inside me and my mother, assuring them that neither of them could have prevented the rape. I didn't want my mother to blame herself and I didn't want to blame the little girl inside of me for not speaking up at the age of six.
I had to ask Scottie what TYVM meant, because now that I’ve narrowed into her activities, I notice she is constantly text-messaging her friends, or at least I hope it’s her friends and not some perv in a bathrobe.“Thank you very much,” Scottie said, and for some reason, the fact that I didn’t get this made me feel completely besieged. It’s crazy how much fathers are supposed to know these days. I come from the school of thought where a dad’s absence is something to be counted on. Now I see all the men with camouflage diaper bags and babies hanging from their chests like little ship figureheads. When I was a young dad, I remember the girls sort of bothered me as babies, the way everyone raced around to accommodate them. The sight of Alex in her stroller would irritate me at times—she’d hang one of her toddler legs over the rim of the safety bar and slouch down in the seat. Joanie would bring her something and she’d shake her head, then Joanie would try again and again until an offering happened to work and Alex would snatch it from her hands. I’d look at Alex, finally complacent with her snack, convinced there was a grown person in there, fooling us all. Scottie would just point to things and grunt or scream. It felt like I was living with royalty. I told Joanie I’d wait until they were older to really get into them, and they grew and grew behind my back.
When I think of Tomodachi, I think of your mother. Your mother, she too lose her baby. She lose you. That very sad thing for her. Maybe she come looking, and she not find you. You not there when she come. She think you dead for ever. But she see you in her mind. Now as I speak maybe she see you in her mind. You always there. I know. I have son too. I have Michiya. He always in my head. Like Kimi. They dead for sure, but they in my head. They in my head forever.
I've tried to teach what I learned all those years in my mother and father's house, all those things I didn't realize I was learning and that I never knew I'd be so grateful for. When you have love and it's proffered every day in a kind of tender, yet stern insistence and even reckless laughter, when it is given to you and you accept it in life as a thing as natural as rain or snow, or the littler of leaves in fall, you can't help but take it for granted. For a bewildered while you incorrectly understand that the world has given you this becuase it's there in equal measure, everywhere. You never knowuntil it's too late to do anything about it, how seet the effort is: how lasting the human will to love can be in the breast of people who want to make it for you, who want to give it to you, without calculating what's in it fo them, without thinking at all of what it will mean when you grow to full adulthood, see the world as it is, and forget to mention what you have been given.Ever day of my grown-up life, I have wanted to do what my parents did. I have wanted to widen the province of love and weaken hate and bitterness in the hearts of my children. And I've done these things because of what I got from my family, all those lovely years when I was growing up, being loved and cherished and, unbeknown to me, and in the best way, honored, for myself.
That took the view that every misbehavior, every cruelty perpetuated by one kid on another should be let slide in the name of letting kids be kids? (Let them be kids, really let them, and you will end up with a tribe of bulimic eugenicists with huge amounts of credit card debt.)
Can you taste it Bruce? Can you taste the filth, the dirt, the oily blackness of that fossil fuel in our mouth as you choke and gag and spit it out? Do you still hear his voice in your head urging you to eat? Eat, eat eat. Your mother's cries. Do you hear them? You should be Bruce. Because I know that it's never left you alone. Now you can eat what you want to eat. For me, for you, for all the others. Now you can consume to your heart's content or your soul's destruction, whichever comes first. So eat.
The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.
the toilet is an intimacyonly shared with parents when you are youngand once again when they are olderand with lovers when say on a Sundaymorning stretching into the bathroomyou wake to the sound of stream into bowland go to hug the naked bodystood with its back to you and kiss the neckand taste the whole of the night on thereand smell the morning’s pale yellow lossand take the whole of him in your handand feel the water moving through himand knowing that this is love the prone fleshwhat we expel from the body and what we let inside
An alarming number of parents appear to have little confidence in their ability to "teach" their children. We should help parents understand the overriding importance of incidental teaching in the context of warm, consistent companionship. Such caring is usually the greatest teaching, especially if caring means sharing in the activites of the home.
It would be autumn, and our fathers would be out threshing in the fields. We would walk through the mulberry groves, past the big loquat tree and the old lotus pond, where we used to catch tadpoles in the spring. Our dogs would come running up to us. Our neighbours would wave. Our mothers would be sitting by the well with their sleeves tied up, washing the evening's rice. And when they saw us they would just stand up and stare. "Little girl," they would say to us, "where in the world have you been?
Being at home was like a mattress to fall back on with the smallest of peas on the bottom, just large enough to bother the princess. I was damn lucky that I had a place to call home, but I didn't like the feeling of stealing my parents food and being unable to tell them when I could ever afford my own.
Why do you think, A.J.," they say in unison, "that you find these boys so attractive?" I didn't say that this fiery chemical explosion leaps from somewhere inside me. Parents don't want to hear these things. I shrugged and said nothing. "Maybe you should try sitting on the intensity," Mom suggests, "just until your feelings catch up with reality.""We could chain you to the water heater," Dad offers, "until these little moments pass."You see what I'm up against.
I love you unconditionally, his mom had said, once or twice, when he was younger. That’s how parents love. I love you no matter what. People said things like that, without thinking of potential nightmare scenarios or horrific conditions, the whole world changing and love slipping away. None of them ever dreamed love would be tested, and fail.
Now our father lived in a world where we didn’t belong, with a needy girlfriend who didn’t look much older than Henri, a saltwater pool in need of daily skimming, and a flashy Porsche that needed to be raced around the roads of wine country.Fortunately, we didn’t need him either—that’s what Henri said.
We’re here to execute a murderer,” Zil said, pointing at Hunter. “We are bringing justice in the name of all normals.”“There’s no justice without a trial,” Astrid said.Zil grinned. He spread his hands. “We had a trial, Astrid. And this chud scum was found guilty of murdering a normal.“The penalty,” he added, “is death.”Astrid turned to face the mob. “If you do this, you’ll never forgive yourselves.”“We’re hungry,” a voice cried, and was immediately echoed by others.“You’re going to murder a boy in a church?” Astrid demanded, pointing toward the church. “A church? In God’s house?”Zil could see that those words had an effect. There were some nervous looks.“You will never wash the stain of this off your hands,” Astrid cried. “If you do this, you will never be able to forget it. What do you think your parents would say?”“There are no parents in the FAYZ. No God, either,” Zil said. “There’s just humans trying to stay alive, and freaks taking everything for themselves.
Because you don't get to choose your parents, K, and at some point you realise that maybe your parents just aren't able to parent very well, but we exist, and the only choice we've got in the whole situation is whether we're gonna love them anyway. It's as simple and messy and complicated as that
To this day, being able to “take advantage” of someone is the measure in my mind of having a parent. For me and Lindsay, the fear of imposing stalked our minds, infecting even the food we ate. We recognized instinctively that many of the people we depended on weren’t supposed to play that role in our lives, so much so that it was one of the first things Lindsay thought of when she learned of Papaw’s death. We were conditioned to feel that we couldn’t really depend on people—that, even as children, asking someone for a meal or for help with a broken-down automobile was a luxury that we shouldn’t indulge in too much lest we fully tap the reservoir of goodwill serving as a safety valve in our lives.
It's like I'm dreaming of the imaginary friend Katie and I had when we were little. She'd been so real to us as kids. We each remembered Anna, that's what we'd called her, just like we remembered bits of our parents. But now, in this dreamscape of Paradise Lost, our imaginary third twin has all grown up.
People say they miss the deceased. I missed my father and my mother when they were still fully alive. They travelled through my childhood in the same way they moved around the hotel: my mother industrious, hurried, hidden; my father drunk, flamboyant, alone.
It felt strange to call them directly, to hear her father’s “Hello?” after the second ring, and when he heard her voice, he raised his, almost shouting, as he always did with international calls. Her mother liked to take the phone out to the verandah, to make sure the neighbors overheard: “Ifem, how is the weather in America?
Sometimes we mistake patience for weakness, but the patient person often realizes that it's much more important for another person to discover his or her own gifts and shortcomings--the patient person doesn't feel a need to "fix" other people, and sometimes will let certain things slide until the other person recognizes the problems. Patient parents often let their kids make the same mistake two or three times because they know that a lesson learned oneself is almost always preferable to a lesson given to us by an authority figure like a parent.
The pony is mad. She can go from a relaxed walk to a flat out gallop in seconds if something spooks her, and she won’t stop until she practically crashes into something. I’ve seen her buck, rear and spin around in circles. She’s completely unpredictable and I don’t even trust her on the ground. As far as I’m concerned, Alec’s welcome to her, and he relishes the challenge. For some reason, he loves that pony most of all. Perhaps it’s because no-one else would give her a chance, that they’d written her off as crazy, mean, dangerous. Alec admires her independent spirit, I think, and maybe he likes that she still has that strength of spirit, that she still challenges him every time he rides her. He can’t completely dominate her, and he doesn’t try. He wants a partnership with her. And slowly, slowly, his father is taking that away from him, bullying the mare and his son at the same time, seeking to fit them into the same mould, the only one he knows. The strong succeed while the weak fall behind.
The memories seem to come in layers. For example, the first memory might be of incest; then they remember robes and candles; next they realize that their father or mother or both were present when they were being abused. Another layer will be the memory of seeing other people hurt and even killed. Then they remember having seen babies killed. Another layer is realizing that they participated in the sacrifices. One of the most painful memories may be that they even sacrificed their own baby. With each layer of memory comes another set of problems with which they must deal.— Glenn L. Pace; "Ritualistic Child Abuse," memo
He died at the wrong time, when there was much to be clarified and established. They hadn’t even started to be grown-ups together. There was this piece of heaven, this little girl he’d carried around the shop on his shoulders; and then one day she was gone, replaced by a foreigner, an uncooperative woman he didn’t know how to speak to. Being so confused, so weak, so in love, he chose strength and drove her away from himself. The last years he spent wondering where she’d gone, and slowly came to realise that she would never return, and that the husband he’d chosen for her was an idiot.
When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
Your own life starts the moment you're born. Before that, even.""I just, I feel like as long as I live with you, I won't... I'm not... It's like George Jefferson.""From the TV show?""Right. George Jefferson. As long as he was on 'All in the Family', he was just somebody who made Archie Bunker's story more interesting. He didn't have anything of his own. He didn't have a plot or supporting characters. I don't know if you ever even got to see his house. But after he got his own show, George had his own living room and kitchen... and bedroom, I think. He even had his own elevator. Places for him to exist in, for his story to happen. Like this apartment. This is something that's mine.
Maybe you never stop feeling like an eight-year-old in front of your parents. You resolve to be your mature self, to react in this considered way rather than that elemental way, to breathe evenly from the bottom of your stomach and to see your parents as equals, but within five minutes your intentions are blown to hell, and you're babbling and screaming in rage like an angry child.
Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience.
I know more about my father than I used to know: I know he wanted to be a pilot in the war but could not, because the work he did was considered essential to the war effort… I know he grew up on a farm in the backwoods of Nova Scotia, where they didn’t have running water or electricity. This is why he can build things and chop things… He did his high school courses by correspondence, sitting at the kitchen table and studying by the light by a kerosene lamp; he put himself through university by working in lumber camps and cleaning out rabbit hutches, and was so poor he lived in a tent in the summers to save money… All this is known, but unimaginable. Also I wish I did not know it. I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
Your girlfriend's sibling or parents might be totally nuts, but always defend them. Always. All a girl wants to do is to get along with her family and if you are on the side of making it easy, you will be loved eternally. It might be easier to condemn them - especially if she's doing that already - but, remarkably, even if they are murderers, she will find the good in them, especially if you start trashing them.
Oh bell-dumb heart, it makes you a fool to think you were ever closer to opening up the world — to art, to breaking it apart — than those who came before. But knowing that can't make you read or breathe more slowly. Since when did you listen to anyone? To give up on motivation is to give up on the work we do with alphabet and light. It's not enough to hunt or haunt our parents' hearts; we must occupy our own.
When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again, yet after having given birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external, subject to all sorts of dangers and disappearance, so you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to keep it close enough for comfort. That's the strange thing about being a mother: until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one.
Great. Now Renata would have even more reason to dislike her. Jane would have an enemy. The last time she had had anything close to an enemy, she was in primary school herself. It had never crossed her mind that sending your child to school would be like going back to school yourself.
My parents are humans too. This has been one of my greatest awakenings in adulthood: my parents being regular people, too. They have baggage and losses, grown up in imperfect homes with imperfect families just as I did. Life hasn’t been easy on either of them between the mixture of poor decisions and bad breaks; this world lacks perfection for us all.
And what if the other kids laugh at me?” Kerry complained to her parents as she nibbled on a piece of toast that morning. “I have a Cape Breton accent! They’ll know I’m from Canada and they’ll start asking me if I lived in an igloo or ate maple syrup, bacon and seal meat every day!”“You’re really overreacting,” Susan chuckled, sipping on a glass of orange juice. “Canada is a lot like the States and the only thing separating both countries is an imaginary boarder! If anyone laughs at you, tell them it doesn’t snow year-round, you got free health care while you were there and that you never rode a polar bear to school. Besides, do you know how many popular movies and TV shows from the States were filmed in Canada?”“It’s not just the Canada stuff mom,” Kerry sighed worriedly. “I’m from Dym, it’s an industrial dump!”“Yeah, and have you looked at Pittsburgh lately?” Susan asked. “Full of coal mines and steel mills, just like Sydney was when we lived there! I actually rather came to like the pollution, I don’t think I’d ever want to leave it.
About a month after she found out about that, I got pregnant for the first time. I knew I didn't want to have a baby at all, and wanted to get an abortion. But the day I found out, I wasn't sure what to do first. I felt alone and lost and needed someone to call who I could tell. I needed help. I wasn't sure if she would talk to me again so soon after what had happened. I decided to take a chance and try calling her. When I told her, she said, "Well, an abortion is only like $500, so go turn a couple of tricks and get it taken care of," before she hung up on me. I probably should have called someone else, but I didn't know who else to call.
My sister is running away to get lost, but I am running away because I want to find something. And my parents love me so much that they want to help me. Yeah, Dad is a drunk and Mom is an ex-drunk, but they don't want their kids to be drunks.
Parents have this twisted belief that anyone under the age of about twenty simply can’t know what love is, like the age to love is assessed in the same way the law assesses the legal age to drink. They think that the ‘emotional growth’ of a teenager’s mind is too underdeveloped to understand love, to know if it’s ‘real’ or not.That's completely as
but my dad said it was no excuse."But I love him!" I had never seen my sister cry that much."No, you don't.""I hate you!""No, you don't." My dad can be very calm sometimes."He's my whole world.""Don't ever say that about anyone again. Not even me." That was my mom.
But I'm learning it's human nature to want the things you can't have. What changes is how you go about pursuing the things you want. When you're a little kid and you're told no, you scream and throw a temper tantrum. When you're a teenager and your parents tell you no, you're old enough to internalize your temper tantrum. But you're smarter and you're sneakier this time around. So you nod and act like you care when they say no, when they tell you who you can be friends with, when they say the know what's best. But then you go behind their backs to do it anyway. Because at some point, you need to start calling the shots. At some point, you need to start believing you know whats best. Or, I thought with a smile, you just stop asking for their permission in the first place.
It was as if something snapped in two deep inside me. My parents-- the people I’d loved the most in the world, the ones I’d always told all my secrets to, the ones I’d wanted to hide with far away from the rest of the world. They had lied, and I couldn’t imagine why. It couldn’t possibly matter why.
Mom always said people worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you, she said. It immunized your body and your soul, and that was why she ignored us kids when we cried. Fussing over children who cry only encouraged them, she told us. That's positive reinforcement for negative behavior.
Mom and Dad exchange a nervous glance and have a telepathic conversation about it. I hear every word. Do we let her out? It's past curfew. True, but look at that—at least she asked! I know! I can hardly believe it! She could have sneaked out, but she asked! I know! We're good parents! "What time will you be back?" Dad asks.
That first pregnancy is a long sea journey to a country where you don't know the language, where land is in sight for such a long time that after a while it's just the horizon - and then one day birds wheel over that dark shape and it's suddenly close, and all you can do is hope like hell that you've had the right shots.
Worship Allah and associate nothing with Him, and to parents do good, and to relatives, orphans, the needy, the near neighbor, the neighbor farther away, the companion at your side, the traveler, and those whom your right hands possess (slaves). Indeed, Allah does not like those who are proud and boastful.[Al-Qur'an Surah Nisa 4:36]
sodoyouthinkyoucouldtrustmetogotothedancetonight?" she blurted before losing her nerve. Viktor and Viveka exchanged a quick glance.Are they considering it? They are! They trust -"No," they said together. Frankie resisted the urge to spark. Or scream. Or threaten to go on a charging strike. She had prepared herself for this. It had always been a possibility. That's why she'd read 'Acting For Young Actors: The Ultimate Teenage Guide' by Mary Lou Belli and Dihah Lenney. So she could act like she understood their rejection. Act like she accepted it. And act like she would return to her room with grace. "Well, thanks for hearing me out," she said, kissing them on the cheeks and skipping off to bed. "Good night.""Good night?" Viktor responded. "That's it? No argument?""No argument," Frankie said with a sweet smile. "You have to see this punishment through or you're not teaching me anything. I get it.""O-kay." Viktor returned to his medical journal, shaking his head as if he couldn't quite believe what he was hearing."We love you." Viveka blew another kiss."I love you, too." Frankie blew two back.Time for Plan B.
No. Absolutely not. I forbid it. You'll have nightmares." "She was my friend! You must allow me. Why are you so horrid?" As soon as the angry words were out of my mouth, I knew I had gone too far. "Matilda!" Mother rose from her chair. "You are forbidden to pseak to me in that tone! Apologize at once.
Rationalizing him and the glass pipe, Dad smoked crack, but he was not a crackhead; it was just something he did. To do something didn't define you, I thought.I saw Dad through a dusty lens that distorted our relationship, as tarnished as his pipe. He was no longer just our father; he was his own person, with an identity and label and body separate from his relationship with us. He was someone who was judged outside of the lens of fatherhood, outside of our connection. When he was in the streets, he was not Dad. He was Charlie the crackhead.
I met this boy here who I knew as a kid and his mum left him with a pedophile for two weeks when he was eight years old and I'm presuming you know everything there is to know about Jonah's father, and that my father is dead, and my mother hasn't been around for years, and God knows Jessa's real story. So what I'm saying here, Sergeant, is that we're just a tad low on the reliable adult quota so you have no right to be all self-righteous about what Chaz did and if you're going to go around not talking to him when his only crime was wanting me to have what he has, then I think you're going to turn out to be a bit of a dud and you know something? I'm just a bit over life's little disappointments right now. Do you understand what I'm saying?
Nightmares did come true. Because, after her second night of major loving with the man of her dreams, the absolute last person she ever wanted to see was her mother. Yet there she was, her small, hefty frame trundling up the stairs to Maira’s front door.She was so frozen with horror, she couldn’t move until she heard the doorbell ring.Don’t answer it. Maybe she’ll go away.Well, that was just stupid.
The cake is pretty simple; they didn't want anything too fancy. Two tiers. The bottom is the Frango mint tier from the cake contest, but the top is a new one. An almond cake with a whipped honey caramel filling and a layer of thinly sliced spiced poached pears, with vanilla buttercream. The whole cake will get a smooth white fondant coating, and then a detailed lace pattern hand-piped with white royal icing. They've opted out of toppers, so I've made some simple wildflowers out of gum paste, colored with the powdered food colors to look incredibly real.
It’s funny… when you’re young you spend your life trying to convince yourself you’re not like your parents. And then, every now and then, you’ll do something a certain way, some mannerism, or you’ll say something. When our car broke down upstate, I remember I hit the wheel and said, ‘I’m not made of money!’ And I caught myself and thought, Gee, Louie, you just sounded like Pop. When you’re young and it happens, it drives you crazy. And then you live long enough, and it makes you smile a little.” He wipes a tear from his eyelashes with the back of his hand. “That’s a nice part of life,” he says.
There must be other leaps in life - as momentous as the "mirror stage" - that Lacan didn't mention. Some are universal; others, culturally particular. To understand that your parents are human (and not an element of the natural world), that they're separate from you, that they were children once, that they were born and came into the world, is another leap. It's as if you hadn't seen who they were earlier - just as, before you were ten months old, you didn't know it was you in the mirror. This happens when you're sixteen or seventeen. Not long after - maybe a year - you find out your parents will die. It's not as if you haven't encountered death already. But, before now, your precocious mind can't accommodate your parents' death except as an academic nicety - to be dismissed gently as too literary and sentimental. After that day, your parents' dying suddenly becomes simple. It grows clear that you're alone and always have been, though certain convergences start to look miraculous - for instance, between your father, mother, and yourself. Though your parents don't die immediately - what you've had is a realisation, not a premonition - you'll carry around this knowledge for their remaining decades or years. You won't think, looking at them, "You're going to die". It'll be an unspoken fact of existence. Nothing about them will surprise you anymore.
We’re too often guilty of thinking that our parents arrived on this planet as fully functioning adults on the day that we were born. That they don’t have pasts of their own prior to our birth. That the father is not also a son, that the mother is not also a child. My mother had a tough beginning, enduring things I know little about. And yet I more often discount her pain and overvalue mine.
What is the matter with people?” Sam fumed. “I said we needed a hundred kids and we get thirteen? Fifteen, maybe?”“They’re just kids,” Astrid said.“We’re all just kids. We’re all going to be very hungry kids.”“They’re used to being told what to do by their parents or teachers. You need to be more direct. As in, Hey, kid, get to work. Now.” She thought for a moment then added, “Or else.”“Or else what?” Sam asked.“Or else…I don’t know. We’re not going to let anyone starve. If we can help it. I don’t know the ‘or else.’ All I know is you can’t expect kids to just automatically behave the right way. I mean, when I was little my mom would give me a gold star when I was good and take away a privilege when I wasn’t.”“What am I supposed to do? Tell three hundred kids spread out in seventy or eighty different homes that they can’t watch DVDs? Confiscate iPods?”“It’s not easy playing daddy to three hundred kids,” Astrid admitted.“I’m not anyone’s daddy,” Sam practically snarled. Another sleepless night, in a long string of them, had left him in a foul mood. “I’m supposed to be the mayor, not the father.”“These kids don’t know the difference,” Astrid pointed out. “They need parents. So they look to you. And Mother Mary. Me, even, to some extent.
I want you to remember that you can’t feel responsible for everything. We’re your parents, and we will figure us out. All you need to do— any of you”— she looks at my brothers—” is be a kid for now and let us be there for you.”“All of us?” Dusty says. “Even those of us without neurological disorders?” “All of you.
I’ve written more about my parents than any writer in the history of the world, and I still return to their mysterious effigies as I try to figure out what it all means—some kind of annunciation or maybe even a summing-up They still exert immense control over me even though they’ve been dead for so long. But I can conjure up their images without exerting a thimbleful of effort.
My parents spent countless hours teaching me to read and write. My mother was an English teacher who patiently taught me where to put my periods and commas, and my father, who loves books more than anyone I know, taught me from an early age that books are precious and should be handled gently , "like butterflies.
Because you don't get to choose your parents, , and at some point you realise that maybe your parents just aren't able to parent very well, but we exist, and the only choice we've got in the whole situation is whether we're gonna love them anyway. It's as simple and messy and complicated as that
Do you have kids?" Anna asks.I laugh. "What do you think?""It's probably a good thing," she admits. "No offense, but you don't exactly look like a parent."That fascinates me. "What do parents look like?"She seems to think about this. "You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he's really just hoping he makes it all the way across? Like that.
My parents have always worried that I’d take Amy too personally — they always tell not to read too much into her, And yet I can’t fail to notice that whenever I screw something up, Amy does it right: When I finally quit violin at age twelve, Amy was revealed as a prodigy in the next book. (“Sheesh, violin can be hard work, but handwork is the only way to get better!”) When I blew off the junior championship at age sixteen to do a beach weekend with friends, Amy recommitted to the game. (“Sheesh, I know it’s fun to spend time with friends, but I’d be letting myself and everyone else down if I didn’t show up for the tournament.”) This used to drive me mad, but after I wend off to Harvard (and Amy correct those my parents’ alma mater), I decided it was all too ridiculous to think about. That my parents, two child psychologists, chose this particular public form of passive-aggressiveness toward their child was not just fucked up but also stupid and weird and kind of hilarious.
As I discussed in the previous chapter, attachment researchers have shown that our earliest caregivers don't only feed us, dress us, and comfort us when we are upset; they shape the way our rapidly growing brain perceives reality. Our interactions with our caregivers convey what is safe and what is dangerous: whom we can count on and who will let us down; what we need to do to get our needs met. This information is embodied in the warp and woof of our brain circuitry and forms the template of how we think of ourselves and the world around us. These inner maps are remarkably stable across time.This doesn‘t mean, however, that our maps can‘t be modified by experience. A deep love relationship, particularly during adolescence, when the brain once again goes through a period of exponential change, truly can transform us. So can the birth of a child, as our babies often teach us how to love. Adults who were abused or neglected as children can still learn the beauty of intimacy and mutual trust or have a deep spiritual experience that opens them to a larger universe. In contrast, previously uncontaminated childhood maps can become so distorted by an adult rape or assault that all roads are rerouted into terror or despair. These responses are not reasonable and therefore cannot be changed simply by reframing irrational beliefs.
We have relinquished and abandoned and left behind and forgotten what we believed we had to relinquish, abandon and leave behind and ultimately forget; we have let ourselves go and we have gone away and we have gone under, but we have relinquished nothing and abandoned nothing and left behind nothing and forgotten nothing; we have in reality extinguished nothing whatsoever, because our parents did not inform us of or enlighten us about the fact that our life-process is in reality nothing but a process of illness. We were up above, in the company of our parents, locked up in our walls and in our rooms and in our books and papers and everything around us and in us was nothing but lethal and we are down below, without our parents, again locked up in these walls and in our rooms and in our books and papers and everything around us and in us is nothing but lethal.
It felt like so many years' worth of anxiety and worry were trying to escape all at once—maybe like an emotional volcano, only my mom and dad, they didn't run away to save themselves but sprinted right into my lava. They both jumped up off the couch and wrapped their arms around me even though it meant touching each other. We stayed like that for a long time, and it felt good—almost enough to justify everything that had precipitated it, but not quite.
You do what you can," he said, after seconds of silence had stretched to a minute, "to make sure your kids are safe. From the second they're born..." He stared at the lines of Nightshade's face, the ordinariness of it. "You want to protect them. From every skinned knee, from hurt feelings and punk kids who push smaller ones into the dirt, form the worst parts of yourself and the worst parts of this world.
1. Santa Claus is real. However, your parents are folkloric constructs meant to protect and foritfy children against the darknesses of the real world. They are symbols representing the return of the sun and the end of winter, the sacrifice of the king and the eternal fecundity of the queen. They wear traditional vestments and are associated with certain seasonal plants, animals, and foods. After a certain age, no intelligent child continues believing in their parents, and it is embarrassing when one professes such faith after puberty. Santa Claus, however, will never fail us.
I have heard people say love is weak but they're wrong--love is strong. In nearly everyone it trumps all other things--patriotism and ambition, religion and upbringing. And of every kind of love--the epic and the small, the noble and the base--the one that a parent has for their child is the greatest of them all.
...when your child dies, you feel everything you'd expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won't even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that's written about mourning is all the same, and it's all the same for a reason - because there is no read deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same.But here's what no one says - when it's your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come.Ah, you tell yourself, it's arrived. Here it is.And after that, you have nothing to fear again.
I'm sorry. For all of us. Sorry for all the little ways the people who were supposed to love us most could hurt us so deeply, despite their shared heritage and blood, as thought their knowledge of our pasts gave them unlimited access to all the most tender places, the old wounds that could be so easily reopened with no more than a glance, a comment, a passing reminder of all the ways in which we failed to live up to their expectations.
I think we ought to find something else to do,” said Mandy. “But Alecto my love, you’re the first person to notice my retro diner kitchen. When my parents saw it, they thought I was creating a weird art project.”“I like it. It's got that let’s-drown-ourselves-in-better-days type ambiance,” Alecto declared, his gray eyes narrowed.
I was an infant when my parents died.Thye both were ornithologists. I've triedSo often to evoke them that todayI have a thousand parents. Sadly theyDissolve in their own virtues and recede,But certain words, chance words I hear or read,Such as "bad heart" always to him refer,And "cancer of the pancreas" to her.
Mommy, Daddy, what are they doing?” a little girl asked, watching the bonobos play. Her forehead and palms were pressed against the glass, as if she thought she could break on through to the other side and join them if only she pushed hard enough.“Looks like they need private time!” her father barked back, steering the girl away from the window as her mother brightly proposed, “Let’s go see the hippos!” Not everybody is quite ready for the Bonobo Way, and far be it from me to push it on anyone, especially some stressed-out parents at the zoo. On the other hand, maybe they’re more ready than they realize. Ready or not, its moment has come. The time is now for human beings to step up to the plate and protect our kissing cousins from extinction, as well as learn as much as we can from them about our noblest and kinkiest characteristics, our capacity for peace (even world peace) through pleasure, more satisfying relationships, better communication, hotter sex and deeper love.
Eventually, many years later, I came to see him the way everyone else saw him—a nice guy who, despite all the damage he did to us, wasn’t a bad man, not inherently bad, anyway. He just wasn’t very bright, and was in over his head on almost every level of life. He was capable of only so much and not a drop more, and because he seemed so harmless and lost, people not only liked him, they protected him. My mother, despite her poverty, left the opposite impression. She left no doubt that she was psychologically tough and mentally sharp, and because of that the Wozniaks disliked her. And that was another difference between my mother and father. My father was a whiner, a complainer, a perpetually unhappy man unable to comprehend the simple fact that sometimes life is unfair. My mother never complained, and yet her poverty-stricken life was miserable. She never carried on about the early death of her raging alcoholic mother, or the father who raped her, or of a diet dictated by the restrictions of food stamps.
Going home means going back in time. It's not a trip you care to take alone, and anyway, isn't that the main reason to take a mate? So you have an ally in the civil war against your parents?
They were no better than common thieves. They stole our childhood. But even with that, I was heartbroken that I would not know the Wozniaks anymore, the only people who came close to being parents to me. I would be conscious of their absence for the rest of my life. I needed them. You know, if you think about it, we all need each other. But even with all of the evidence against the Wozniaks, I had conflicted emotions about them, then and now. They were the closest I had to a real family and real parents. But now I was bankrupt of any feelings at all towards them at all. I felt then, and feel now, a great sense of loss. I felt as if I were burying them. when I never really had them to lose in the first place. Disillusioned is probably a better word. In fact the very definition of disillusionment is a sense of loss for something you never had. When you are disillusioned and disappointed enough times, you stop hoping. That’s what happens to many foster kids. We become loners, not because we enjoy the solitude, but because we let people into our lives and they disappoint us. So we close up and travel alone. Even in a crowd, we’re alone. Because I survived, I was one of the lucky ones. Why is it so hard to articulate love, yet so easy to express disappointment?
What are you doing?" my mom asked. One side of her mouth curled up."I'm trying to move that cup."My parents laughed. I concentrated on the coffee cup, but it didn't budge."I guess I'll have to work on this telekinesis thing. It'll come in handy when Ben is hogging the TV remote and forcing me to watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the fifty-millionth time.
That's such bullshit, Mythology repeated by parents because it lets them force their kids into sports and push them too hard by pretending that in the end it will pay off with the holy scholarship. You know how many kids get a free ride? Hardly any. Like, maybe fourteen.' -Finn (165)
This was the danger of sharing your dreams with your parents. If you told them you wanted to learn to play the guitar, all they heard you say was, “I want to learn to play the guitar,” and then they found some practical, convenient, cheap way, often involving a church basement, for you to do it. But Hector had not come up with any plan of his own. And owning a guitar seemed like an important stepping stone on the way to being a guitar player. So he pawned his soul and said he would take the lessons from the Presbyterian youth minister. What the hell, he thought. Or heck, he thought. What the heck.
Many a man has known that startling instant in which Dan Cupid, that busy young rascal, took things in hand, and told him that his baby girl was not a baby girl now, and was about to fly away from him. It is both a happy and a sad thrill that shoots through a man at such an instant. Happy and joyous at his girl’s arrival at maturity; sad, as it brings to mind that awkward fact that his own youth is now but a myth; and that his scalp is showing vacant spots. His baby girl in a bridal gown! His baby girl a Matron! His baby girl proudly placing a grandchild in his lap!! It’s an impossibility!! But this big world is full of this kind of impossibility, and will stay so as long as Man lasts.
He had been searching for it his entire life. He had devoted himself to poetry to find it. Now, in the middle of his life, he found it. It was in the face of the love of his life, his daughter. She who had never blushed before, now blushed. And in that blushing, he knew, was the existence of God. That was the day her father learned what God was. God was pure beauty, God was his daughter’s face when she blushed.
If only parents would listen! If only they would let us talk instead of forever and eternally and continuously harping and preaching and nagging and correcting and yacking, yacking, yacking! But they won’t listen! They simply won’t or can’t or don’t want to listen, and we kids keep winding up back in the same old frustrating, lost, lonely corner with no one to relate to either verbally or physically.
Maybe I was crazy to consider it, but I’d always hoped that if I were a good enough girl, if I did everything right, if I said the right things or said nothing at all—I thought my parents would change their minds. I thought they would finally listen when I tried to talk. I thought they would give me a chance. I thought they might finally love me. I always had that stupid hope.
The return to the "Father from whom all fatherhood takes its name" allows me to let my dad be no less than the good, loving, but limited human being he is, and to let my heavenly Father be the God whose unlimited, unconditional love melts away all resentments and anger and makes me free to love beyond the need to please or find approval.
Every human relationship begins with a coincidence. Even the most fundamental relationship - that of parent and child - begins entirely with a coincidence. The child is produced by whatever serendipity brought its parents together, and the fact that the child was born to its particular parents instead of to another couple is pure happenstance. Thus, children have no choice over the relationship that is most important to their existence.By contrast, friends and lovers choose each other, but even these choices are reactions to whatever random coincidence made the resulting relationship possible.
My grandfather was a duck trapperHe could do it with just dragnets and ropesMy grandmother could sew new dresses out of old clothI don't know if they had any dreams or hopesI had 'em once though, I suppose, to go alongWith all the ring-dancin' Christmas carols on all of the Christmas evesI left all my dreams and hopesBuried under tobacco leaves
You can't blame her,' said Amit. 'After a life so full of tragedy anyone would become hard.''What tragedy?' asked Mrs. Chatterji.'Well, when she was four,' said Amit, 'her mother slapped her--it was quite traumatic--and then things went on in that vein. When she was twelve she came in second in an exam...It hardens you.
At a certain age our parents offhandedly start telling us things we’ve never heard before, about themselves and their families, their upbringing and history. They’re turning their lives into stories, trying to make sense of them in retrospect and pass them on while there’s still time. You begin, embarrassingly belatedly, to see them as people with lives long preceding your own.
Some of our parents were always on our side. Some of our parents chose to banish us rather than see us for who we were. And some of our parents, when they found out we were sick, stopped being dragons and became dragonslayers instead. Sometimes that’s what it takes—the final battle. But it should take much, much less than that.
He has little hope that university, when he gets there next year, will be any different. Like right now, all these pupils taking notes as if their life depended on it. All for what? he wants to shout. To get into the top university, so that you can somehow convince yourself you are better than the great unwashed? So that your parents can convince themselves that they are better parents than the great unwashed? So that Mum and Dad’s fourteen-hour days at the office, paying for a fucking private education you never asked for, wasn’t just a pathetic waste of a life?
It dawned on him—as it hadn’t before; he was dense, he was slow—that his parents were five hundred miles away. They could make him come home, they could refuse to pay the portion of his tuition they’d agreed to pay, but they couldn’t see his jeans. “Understood,” he said.
There is nothing so difficult to arrive at as the nature and personality of one's parents. Death, about which so much mystery is made,is perhaps no mystery at all. But the history of one's parents has to be pieced together from fragments, their motives and characters guessed at, and the truth about them remains deeply buried, like a boulder that projects one small surface above the level of smooth lawn, and when you come to dig around it, it proves to be too large ever to move, though each year's frost forces it up a little higher.
When her mother combed Harriet's hair, she said that the woods were disgustingly muddy and mosquito-ridden. During her history unit on pioneers, her father bashfully admitted that he couldn't pitch a tent, barbeque, or fight off bears in a forest. They both agreed that such a place was unsafe. Hotels were better.
Becky --" he begins, and there's a tiny intake of breath around the churchyard. "Will you--" "Yes! Yeee-esssss!" I hear the joyful sound ripping through the churchyard before I even realize I've opened my mouth. I'm so charged up with emotion, my voice doesn't even sound like mine. In fact, it sounds more like...Mum.I don't believe it.
Nothing worse... nothing worse that to be stuck somewhere with some married a-hole and have to listen to him tell you about his f***in' kids... Let me tell ya something, folks... nobody cares about your children, okay?" Nobody cares about your children. I speak for everyone. I've been appointed by the rest of the group to inform you we don't care about your children – that's why they're your children, so you can care about them and we don't have to bother.
Aw, man. I’d just shot an angel in the face.I made my way into the foyer and sat down on the stairs. I glanced up at the big old grandfather clock. It was going on ten. My folks would be home soon.“How was your evening, honey?”“Killed an angel.”“Well, isn’t that nice.”That wasn’t happening. Daddy never liked guns in the first place, Mother just pretended to. I was so grounded.
I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
After I lie there for a while, I realize that Dad isn't every going to do anything but be there to drive us home from the airport. And cook. And if I want something bigger to change, it's up to me. I'm scared shitless, yes. I'm doubtful, yes. But I'm angry. Angry that I am doing this because Dad can't. But then I sniff breakfast, and I know that Dad is doing what he can.
Above all, staring at my old bedroom ceiling, I feel safe. Cocooned from the world; wrapped up in cotton wool. No one can get me here. No one even knows I'm here. I won't get any nasty letters and I won't get any nasty phone calls and I won't get any nasty visitors. It's like a sanctuary. I feel as if I'm fifteen again, with nothing to worry about but my Homework. (And I haven't even got any of that.)
Why shouldn't Mom trust me, Dad" Why are you so determined to make me out to be the bad guy all the time?" I stared at the side of his face, willing him to make eye contact. He didn't. "I've been doing really good late and you don't even care.""Yet you still managed to get into trouble tonight," he said."You have no idea what happened tonight," I said, my voice ratcheting up a notch. "All you know is that, because I was involved, I'm somehow guilty of something. You could at least pretend to care, you know. You could at least try to understand."Dad gave a sardonic little laugh. "I'll tell you what I understand," he said. "I understand that when you're left to your own devices you get into trouble, that's what I understand. I understand I was trying to have a happy, restful evening with Briley and once again you screwed it up.
Reading Chip's college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England winters can be very cold. The curtains he'd bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric with a backing of foam rubber. They were heavy and bulky and stiff. "You'll appreciate these on a cold night," he told Chip. "You'll be surprised how much they cut down drafts." But Chip's freshman roommate was a prep-school product named Roan McCorkle who would soon be leaving thumbprints, in what appeared to be Vaseline, on the fifth-grade photo of Denise. Roan laughed at the curtains and Chip laughed, too. He put them back in the box and stowed the box in the basement of the dorm and let it gather mold there for the next four years. He had nothing against the curtains personally. They were simply curtains and they wanted no more than what any curtains wanted - to hang well, to exclude light to the best of their ability, to be neither too small nor too large for the window that it was their task in life to cover; to be pulled this way in the evening and that way in the morning; to stir in the breezes that came before rain on a summer night; to be much used and little noticed. There were numberless hospitals and retirement homes and budget motels, not just in the Midwest but in the East as well, where these particularly brown rubber-backed curtains could have had a long and useful life. It wasn't their fault that they didn't belong in a dorm room. They'd betrayed no urge to rise above their station; their material and patterning contained not a hint of unseemly social ambition. They were what they were. If anything, when he finally dug them out of the eve of graduation, their virginal pinkish folds turned out to be rather less plasticized and homely and Sears-like than he remembered. They were nowhere near as shameful as he'd thought.
[E]verywhere I'm looking at kids, adults mostly don't seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don't want to actually play with them, they'd rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there's a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn't even hear.
I am most anxious to give my own children enough love and understanding so that they won't grow up with an aching void in them--like you and I and Harold and Martha. That can never be filled, and one goes around all one's life trying, trying to make up for what one didn't get that was one's birthright, asking the wrong people for it.
exemplar, n.It's always something we have to negotiate- the face that my parents are happy, and yours have never been. I have something to live up to, and if I fail, I still have a family to welcome me home. You have a storyline to rewrite, and a lack of faith that it can ever be done.You love my parents, I know. But you never get too close. You never truly believe there aren't bad secrets underneath.
It’s a bit burned,” my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something — a much-loved pet perhaps — salvaged from a tragic house fire. “But I think I scraped off most of the burned part,” she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream — so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not too startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my dad.
He winced at her efforts to mollify him. Why didn't she say she was disgusted with his behaviour, with his long absence, his infrequent superficial letters? And if she did say it - would he defend himself? Would he give reasons, try to explain how meaningless every endeavour seemed to him? No. For then she would start crying again, he would tell her to stop being silly, she would ask for details, and he would tell her to mind her own business.
After having so nobly disentangled themselves from the shackles of Parental Authority, by a Clandestine Marriage, they were determined never to forfeit the good opinion they had gained in the World, in so doing, by accepting any proposals of reconciliation that might be offered them by their Fathers – to their farther trial of their noble independence however they never were exposed.
It's amazing--my parents call everything a discussion. If I were standing across the street, firing a bazooka at my mother, while my father was launching mortar back at me, and Jeffery was charging down the driveway with a grenade in his teeth, my parents would say we should stop having this public "discussion".
Carpe Infans! Beware BabiesThere is no other human so seductive that an otherwise rational human will feed, clothe, sit up nights, work trigonometry with, bake cookies for, and generally tolerate for such long extents of time for such paltry returns of goods and services. They are a trap for the unwary ... all of us.
When the Indians saw us whipping our children, they thought at first that we must hate our children, but then they thought, no, no one can hate his child. They decided it must be a religious rite, to make the child hate this world and long for the next. We're a strange vicious people.
Damn! - I'd rather walk into something of my own accord than to be frogmarched into it.""So it says here in the file. James Mowry, twenty-six, restless and pigheaded. Can be trusted to do anything at all - provided the alternative is worse.""You sound like my father. Did he tell you that?""The Service does not reveal its sources of information.
As children, a great number of us were taught by our parents, carers, extended family members, and teachers, that showing any form of emotional vulnerability was “not OK.” We were conditioned to believe that in order to be acceptable as human beings, we had to be like the other children. We were taught to “suck it up,” “stop being cry babies,” “get thicker skin,” “stop being so sensitive” and go participate with the other kids, even if they overwhelmed us with their energy.