Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I had never intended to be a stay-at-home-mom.
I struggled with math and had no interest in sports.
I have a profound and unshakable love of good eating.
I don't know that I want to live in a world without cheese.
Children are pretty darn smart and capable if we give them space and structure to grow.
We're really doing children a disservice when we underestimate what they're capable of.
Motherhood was the first instance in my life where I was asked to sacrifice anything for anyone.
A slice of perfectly buttered, warm-from-the-oven bread has been known to bring tears to my eyes.
Lke so many depressive, creative, extremely lazy high-school students, I was saved by English class.
I worked as a restaurant hostess and tutored English-as-a-second-language without a formal work visa.
I allow myself to feel fear without always capitulating to it... You don't have to live your life by fear.
I think part of the way in which kids develop emotional and psychological resiliency is by having some independence.
In spring 2011, I was arrested for allowing my son, then 4, to wait in a car with the windows open for a few minutes.
I wonder if all love affairs, all marriages, all lifelong partnerships, aren't in some ways a turning away from the world.
This is what shame does to women: It isolates us and makes us feel our stories aren't really stories at all but idiosyncratic flaws.
People don't think that leaving children alone is dangerous and therefore immoral. They think it is immoral and therefore dangerous.
My husband and I both attended public schools. We believe in the benefits, both individual and communal, of supporting public schools.
Motherhood has become a battleground on which prejudice and class resentment can be waged without ever admitting that's what we're doing.
There is so much people hate about Kim Kardashian, it sometimes seems as though her critics get as much enjoyment out of her as her fans.
We need to challenge this assumption that any child who's alone, who isn't being directly supervised and observed, is a child in in peril.
We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second.
It shouldn't be normal to be anxious all the time about your children, so women should seek mental health help if they're having excessive levels of anxiety.
I grew up in a time when I could play and bike in the neighborhood, largely because my parents assumed that if I ever needed help, I could ask a nearby adult.
What an awful burden we mothers and fathers, Jewish and not, have to bear - to hatch a thing we love more than ourselves into a world so fundamentally unworthy.
I was 15 when I first read 'The Feminine Mystique,' locked in my bedroom, probably wearing black, groping for any ideas I could find on how not to become my mother.
I have no choice but to admit that, for a while, I was a casual viewer of 'American Idol.' By 'casual viewer,' I mean I watched every episode aired between 2004 and 2007.
As a teenager, I'd longed to get my driver's license so I could get away from my parents. Then I'd longed to go to college to get away from the people I'd called my friends.
If you've driven your kids to the store, and you leave them for five minutes, by far the most dangerous thing you've done is just put your kid in the car and driven them to the store.
When I first learned I was pregnant with my son, I had only two firm convictions about parenting: I knew it was important, and I knew that I wanted to get it right. I was 29 at the time.
I adore cooking and baking and holiday feasts and dining with friends and spending too much money on mind-blowing meals in wonderful restaurants, but mostly, and quite simply, I love food.
I love food, but I can't bear to read about it, to talk about it, to discuss the consequences and context of how we consume it. And this is more or less how I feel about raising children, too.
Having a kid who begged for 'just a few more minutes' of television was the antithesis of what I had hoped parenthood would be. It was resigning ourselves to a universe of want and consumption.
A father who is distracted for a few minutes by his myriad interests and obligations in the world of adult interactions is being, well, a father. A mother who does the same is failing her children.
I'm sure all of us can find fault in our own education, and I certainly wished at times that I'd had other options. My own K-12 education may have been free and easy, but it wasn't necessarily very good.
'Did our parents really let us do that?' is a game my friends and I sometimes play. We remember taking off on bikes alone, playing in the woods for hours, crawling through storm drains to follow creek beds.
A lot of my friends aren't parents. I find this culture of all-consuming motherhood so oppressive. Not that I don't like to talk about my kids, but if I'm socializing, I don't want to talk about Montessori versus Waldorf.
For so much of my young life, I'd felt lonely, isolated, cut off from like-minded people. I yearned for human connections and relationships with the sort of people I knew only from books and movies, a lifeline into some other, richer world.
I think that the expectation on parents has changed from giving your children shelter and love and support and guidance to this idea that observation and structure and sort of watching them all the time - that that's what a good parent does.
I don't know exactly when I started watching television, but I know that Muppets and Smurfs hold privileged places in my memory. Without television, I surely could have mastered several classical languages or learned to play the violin, right?
Virginia, like most states, has few guidelines about how closely parents are expected to supervise their children. As a result, I was charged not with leaving my son in the car, but with the misdemeanor of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Serious relationships draw us away from the circle of friends that seemed so adequate, so fulfilling. Marriage cements these inward movements. Children draw partners closer, but they can also draw you further away from the friends and lives you once knew.
Having children, entering the realm of parents and parenthood, changes our relationship to the world in ways we could not have anticipated and might not have signed up for. Before I had children, for example, I believed strongly in the nobility of suffering.
When I earned my diploma from the University of Virginia in the spring of 2000, it never occurred to me before my senior year to worry too seriously about my post-graduation prospects. Indeed, most of my professors, advisors, and mentors reinforced this complacency.
I attended a middling high school in central Virginia in the mid-'90s, so there were no lofty electives to stoke my artistic sensibility - no A.P. art history or African-American studies or language courses in Mandarin or Portuguese. I lived for English, for reading.
I've harassed pediatricians and nurses, demanded extra conferences with preschool teachers, contacted speech therapists and occupational therapists over delays other mothers probably wouldn't have noticed, stressed over magnet school applications three years before they're due.
All interesting, worthwhile humans suffered and struggled and overcame adversity of one sort or another. Pain is constructive. Misery can be useful. I believed this the way I believe the sun rises in the east. Then I had children, and I slowly began to disbelieve and disavow it.
I always knew my mother loved me, but I also knew just as surely that there were moments, hours, days, when she could hardly cope with her own life, much less motherhood. Often, these episodes came without warning, like a change in weather, and so I became a meteorologist of her dysphoria.
In a country that provides no subsidized child care and no mandatory family leave, no assurance of flexibility in the workplace for parents, no universal preschool and minimal safety nets for vulnerable families, making it a crime to offer children independence in effect makes it a crime to be poor.
At times, our collective anger seems a worthwhile thing - it has a weight and shape and force we couldn't achieve as individuals - but at other times, I can't help wondering how much it really accomplishes, if in some ways it might even impede us in our attempts to be more thoughtful, 'enlightened' human beings.
In college, I'd gone abroad to get away from a campus where I felt I didn't fit in. And I started writing fiction, at least in part, because it was a way to feel like I was around people, to feel the energy and hum of others' inner lives, without the real-time frustrations and difficulties of actual relationships.