parenthood

The struggle of today, is not altogether for today - it is for a vast future also.

He saw the pleasure you took from your job every day of his life, and THAT was what he wanted.

On my fifteenth birthday, I came to realize that the expression spoiled rotten meant exactly that. We kids were the apples of our parents' eyes, and I, for one, was rotting from inside out.

In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. He may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stance as many hands high according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter.

It probably takes many years of monastic practice to equal the spiritual growth generated by one sleepless night with a sick child.

Because __e human beings are imaginative by nature, we cannot choose to live by the routine of the ant-heap. If deprived of the imagery of virtue_ _ imaginative depictions of the truly good life _ __e will seek out the imagery of vice.

No true...father would be unconcerned about discord in his family that may cause it to disintegrate in his absence...

If you are financially affluent, think of adopting a kid and raise him or her right next to your biological offspring. And let your love become the proof of your parenthood, instead of your DNA.

Coming back last time to the house she grew up in, Isabel had been reminded of the darkness that had descended with her brothers' deaths, how loss had leaked all over her mother's life like a stain. As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent loss a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or daughter. That seemed odd. As to her own status, she wondered whether she was still technically a sister, now that her adored brothers had died.

But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody__ mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen. -Thanksgiving in Mongolia, The New Yorker, November 18, 2013 Issue

Goldfish get big enough only for the bowl you put them in. Bonsai trees twist in miniature. I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them.

Fatherhood to us was an act of passion, soon forgot; but not to Orem ap Avonap. Never guessing that the blond and happy farmer was no blood of his, Orem had taken a part of that simple man into himself and saved it for this time. At any time in the Palace he might run by, Youth on this shoulders or, as time went by, toddling along behind.

If you do not have a close friendship with your children, I will." Child Molester warning all parents from the book Type 1 Sociopath

We grow up opposing our parents only to become like them enough to oppose our children who behave as we once did__ reminder of how dreadful we were toward those now vindicated grandparents. And you thought God had no sense of humor.

Distrust won__ do good to you.But still if you ever do.Doubt you husband,Maybe doubt your wife.But never suspect,your kid__ father,or the mother of your child.

The best way to teach a child is live an exemplary life.

The circumstances surrounding your birth are not as important as the opportunity to live life.

The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children__ lunch boxes. The last thing we want to admit is that the bickering of the playground perfectly presages the machinations of the boardroom, that our social hierarchies are merely an extension of who got picked first for the kickball team, and that grown-ups still get divided into bullies and fatties and crybabies. What__ a kid to find out? Presumably we lord over them an exclusive deed to sex, but this pretense flies so fantastically in the face of fact that it must result from some conspiratorial group amnesia. [_] In truth, we are bigger, greedier versions of the same eating, shitting, rutting ruck, hell-bent on disguising from somebody, if only from a three-year-old, that pretty much all we do is eat and shit and rut. The secret is there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its supression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect.