Quotes about Parenting

Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.

I am a believer in sensible choices, so different from many of my own. Also in sensible names for children.

You were such a sensitive child. So easily wounded. So I told you those things. I didn't want you to feel defenseless in the face of life. Life can be harsh. I wanted you to feel protected, and to know that there was a greater power watching over you. That the Universe was taking a personal interest.

My parents are pleased, but they're not like other parents when it comes to grades. They never worry about report cards, good or bad. As long as I'm healthy and happy and don't talk back too much, they're satisfied. If these three things are all right, everything else will take care of itself.

Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate.

I'm probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac.

You want to protect your child from pain, and what you get instead is life, and grace; and though theologians insist that grace is freely given, the truth is that sometimes you pay for it through the nose. And you can't pay your child's way.

It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.

Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal Koran and you should die, infidel.

Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate, like having Janis Joplin with a bad hangover and PMS come to stay with you.

I had to grip myself by the wrist not to pitch one good idea after another at them. . . . I writhed with the effort to stay silent. . . . Since Jax's birth my ideas about what would be best for everyone usually got in the way. Life is already an obstacle course, and when you're adding your own impediments (thinking they're helping), you really crazy it up. You make it harder to even just cross the room. You should not bring more items and hurdles to the obstacle course.

Your three-year-old and your work in progress teach you to give. They teach you to get out of yourself and become a person for someone else. This is probably the secret to happiness. So that's one reason to write. Your child and your work hold you hostage, suck you dry, ruin your sleep, mess with your head, treat you like dirt, and then you discover they've given you that gold nugget you were looking for all along.