#parent

We all have the best laid plans for our children, and they go and ruin it all by growing up any way they want to. What the hell was it all for, then? (Real Life and Liars) ↗

— Kristina Riggle

#fiction #life #mothers #parenting #poignant

The sound of her breathing reminded me, as it so often did, of how vulnerable she was. And how vulnerable we were because of how much we loved her. The fear - that something could happen to her at any moment, something I'd be helpless to stop - had become so omnipresent in my life that I sometimes pictured it growing, like a third arm, out of the center of my chest. ↗

— Dennis Lehane

#life

Some of the best friends you'll ever meet in your life, you'll meet though your children--mothers and fathers of their friends, parents from school. You'll see. That's the way it was for Bill and me. It's one of the many gifts of parenting. ↗

— Michael J. Fox

#life

I didn’t know how I could live with that knowledge, without it eating me up, without it poisoning every happy memory I had of growing up. Without it ruining everything Beck and I had. I didn’t understand how someone could be both God and the devil. How the same person could destroy you and save you. When everything I was, good and bad, was knotted with threads of his making, how was I supposed to know whether to love or hate him? ↗

— Maggie Stiefvater

#love #parenting #sam-roth #love

You can't make your kids do anything. All you can do is make them wish they had. And then, they will make you wish you hadn't made them wish they had. ↗

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

#compassion #discipline #love #parenting #love

How strange was the relation between parents and children! When they were small the parents doted on them, passed through agonies of apprehension at each childish ailment, and the children clung to their parents with love and adoration; a few years passed, the children grew up, and persons not of their kin were more important to their happiness than father or mother. Indifference displaced the blind and instinctive love of the past. Their meetings were a source of boredom and irritation. Distracted once at the thought of a month's separation they were able now to look forward with equanimity to being parted for years. ↗

— W. Somerset Maugham

#maugham #parents #love

He died at the wrong time, when there was much to be clarified and established. They hadn’t even started to be grown-ups together. There was this piece of heaven, this little girl he’d carried around the shop on his shoulders; and then one day she was gone, replaced by a foreigner, an uncooperative woman he didn’t know how to speak to. Being so confused, so weak, so in love, he chose strength and drove her away from himself. The last years he spent wondering where she’d gone, and slowly came to realise that she would never return, and that the husband he’d chosen for her was an idiot. ↗

— Hanif Kureishi

#father-daughter #parents #regret #love

Parenthood wasn’t about blood or biology, he found; it was about a joyful willingness to give yourself over, to subordinate your own needs for someone else’s. When you loved your kids, you’d give up everything to keep them safe and make them happy, and you didn’t care about the other things, the ones that went away. ↗

— Lisa Unger

#love

Scratch a female inmate, I've discovered, and you'll usually find a girl whose mother had terrible taste in men. ↗

— Cammie McGovern

#prisons #men

If we fail to provide boys with pro-social models of the transition to adulthood, they may construct their own. In some cases, gang initiation rituals, street racing, and random violence may be the result. ↗

— Leonard Sax

#parenting #role-models #men