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 cheat...
All parents damage their children. IT cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagg...
Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father.
Are parents always more ambitious for their children than they are for themselves?
As I walk behind her down the halls, it happens. I shrink inch by inch until I am no longer an adult, but a baby toddling along in a comically oversized business suit. I have been pretending to be a g...
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...
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...
But I had never caused my parents a minute's worry. Didn't they know that worry proves you care? Didn't they realize that I needed their worry to assure myself that I was worth something?
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...
Cand ne mor parintii, ne simtim intodeauna vulnerabili, pentru ca nu ne confruntam doar cu o pierdere, ci si cu propria moarte. Cand devenim orfani, intre noi si mormant nu mai sta nimeni.
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
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 strin...
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,...
Each of Nora's children had arrived on this earth as him or herself, the more she knew them, the more she felt it to be true. They were so different from one another, and from her.
Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.
First, I'm not getting married, so you can forget the wife. Second, if I was insane enough to get married, I wouldn't have kids. Third, if I was insane enough to get married and have kids, it would be...
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 gratit...
For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis ... [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother's Day card. There was a horrible, mushy poem in it. I re...
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 th...
Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
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