#daughter

I usually enjoy setting up a new kitchen, but this has become a joyless and highly charged task. My mother and I each have our own set of kitchen boxes, which means that if there are two cheese graters between us, only one will make it into a cupboard. The other will be put back in a box or given to Goodwill. Each such little decision has the weight of a Middle East negotiation. While her kitchenware is serviceable, I’m a sucker for the high end: All-Clad saucepans and Emile Henry pie dishes. Before long, I’m shaking my head at pretty much everything my mother removes from her San Diego boxes. She takes each rejected item as a personal slight – which in fact it is. I begrudge her even her lightweight bowls, which she can lift easily with her injured hand. Here she is, a fragile old woman barely able to bend down as she peers into a low cupboard, looking for a place where she can share life with her grown daughter. At such a sight my heart should be big, but it’s small, so small that when I see her start stuffing her serving spoons into the same drawer as my own sturdy pieces, lovingly accumulated over the years, it makes me crazy. Suddenly I’m acting out decades of unvoiced anger about my mother’s parenting, which seems to be materializing in the form of her makeshift collection of kitchenware being unpacked into my drawers. When I became a mother myself, I developed a self-righteous sense of superiority to my mother: I was better than my mother, for having successfully picked myself up and dusted myself off, for never having lain in bed for days on end, too blotto to get my child off to school or even to know if it was a school day. By sheer force of will and strength of character, I believed, I had risen above all that she succumbed to and skirted all that I might have inherited. This, of course, is too obnoxiously smug to say in words. So I say it with flatware. ↗

— Katie Hafner

#mothers-and-daughters #anger

Aware that his disappointment has its source in a defective education, he looks with anxiety on his other daughters, whose minds, like lovely buds, are beginning to open. Where shall he find a genial soil in which he may place them to expand? ↗

— Emma Willard

#aware #beginning #buds #daughters #defective

We dreamed together of the world remade. ↗

— Laini Taylor

#daughter-of-smoke-and-bone #madrigal #dreams

I have friends who have daughters and there's times I think I'm glad I have boys instead of girls. ↗

— Liam Neeson

#friends #glad #i #i think #instead

When I look at my daughter, who's 24, she is much more confident than I ever was and her expectations are higher. But I worry that there is a backlash brewing against progress on equality. ↗

— Frances O'Grady

#backlash #confident #daughter #equality #ever

I've got two daughters. 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby. ↗

— Barack Obama

#am #baby #daughters #first #first of all

Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where you backbone ought to be. ↗

— Clementine Paddleford

#daughter #grow #never #ought #where

My vision is that I'm living to see two more daughters get married, dance at their weddings and then lift the Lombardi Trophy several times. ↗

— Chuck Pagano

#daughters #get #get married #i #lift

To the families of special needs children all across this country I have a message for you: for years you have sought to make America a more welcoming place for your sons and daughters, and I pledge to you that if we're elected, you will have a friend, an advocate, in The White House. ↗

— Sarah Palin

#advocate #america #children #country #daughters

I think Desperate Housewives is a pretty good show, I watch it, I like it and I don't love reality tv that much. I do watch some, I've got three daughters so we'll watch the good stuff, the fun stuff. ↗

— Bob Saget

#desperate #fun #fun stuff #good #got