#pa

Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who'd sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who'd cried with me over boyfriends, who'd clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother? Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#children #motherhood #parenting #life

The job of every generation is to discover the flaws of the one that came before it. That's part of growing up, figuring out all the ways your parents and their friends are broken. ↗

— Justine Larbalestier

#human-nature #intergenerational-relations #parents #nature

In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who loses a child. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#english #inadequacy-of-words #language #lose #loss

Shapeshifter parenting motto—if your kid slit somebody's throat, always have a backup plan to make the body disappear. ↗

— Ilona Andrews

#parenting

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in... ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#world #parenting

Fathers. Mothers. With all their caring and attention. They will f--- you up, every time. ↗

— Chuck Palahniuk

#father #mother #palahniuk #parent #snuff

Emma is a mattress who got thrown off the truck when her parents split up. It's not like you can blame a mattress when people don't tie it down tight enough. ↗

— Laurie Halse Anderson

#parenting

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#fundamentalism #religion #secularism #separation-of-church-and-state #united-states

By picking him up again, i guess you're just lost, baby. Lost. ↗

— Ariel Seraphino

#past #relationships #relationship

I honestly never once heard them fight. They yelled at us kids all the time, but never at each other. My siblings and I joke to this day about how the reason we have trouble in relationships is because we never learned how to fight from our parents. ↗

— Kathy Griffin

#parents-and-children #relationships #relationship