Children are pretty darn smart and capable if we give them space and structure to grow.
— Kim Brooks
I allow myself to feel fear without always capitulating to it... You don't have to live your life by fear.
It is impossible to make it a crime to take your eyes off your children without also making it a crime to be poor.
A father who is distracted for a few minutes by his myriad interests and obligations in the world of adult interactions is being, well, a father. A mother who does the same is failing her children.
Every time we watch a little story play out inside our head, we're fantasizing, whether we realize it or not, and it seems to me that, though succumbing to fantasies about other people can be dangerous or self-defeating, the act of fantasizing itself is also an essential part of being human, of being capable of both abstraction and empathy.
I always knew my mother loved me, but I also knew just as surely that there were moments, hours, days, when she could hardly cope with her own life, much less motherhood. Often, these episodes came without warning, like a change in weather, and so I became a meteorologist of her dysphoria.
As an angsty teenager and college student, I used to mock people who lived in gated communities, who were so afraid of the unfamiliar world they had to erect a physical boundary to keep it at bay. But now I wonder, aren't the boundaries we draw with Facebook just as secure as a man-made moat or an underpaid security guard manning a booth?
I've written out itineraries for baby sitters with years of experience. I've gotten up in the middle of the night and stood over my children's sleeping bodies just to make sure they're breathing, and breathing well. In short, I'm the worst Jewish mother in the world. I make Alexander Portnoy's mother look like a laid-back Earth mama.
I got an MFA in fiction.
Sometimes we do things not because they're fun but because they're important.
Lke so many depressive, creative, extremely lazy high-school students, I was saved by English class.
I have a profound and unshakable love of good eating.
I think part of the way in which kids develop emotional and psychological resiliency is by having some independence.
I have no choice but to admit that, for a while, I was a casual viewer of 'American Idol.' By 'casual viewer,' I mean I watched every episode aired between 2004 and 2007.
The desire to keep television out of our son's life was one of the few parenting priorities my husband and I agreed on from the beginning. We debated the pros and cons of co-sleeping, of pacifiers, of chemical-free crib mattresses and baby sign language. The television question, on the other hand, was a no-brainer.
All interesting, worthwhile humans suffered and struggled and overcame adversity of one sort or another. Pain is constructive. Misery can be useful. I believed this the way I believe the sun rises in the east. Then I had children, and I slowly began to disbelieve and disavow it.
Motherhood was the first instance in my life where I was asked to sacrifice anything for anyone.
A lot of my friends aren't parents. I find this culture of all-consuming motherhood so oppressive. Not that I don't like to talk about my kids, but if I'm socializing, I don't want to talk about Montessori versus Waldorf.
We're really doing children a disservice when we underestimate what they're capable of.
Motherhood has become a battleground on which prejudice and class resentment can be waged without ever admitting that's what we're doing.
When I read stories of suffering, I still feel something. It seems inhuman not to. At the same time, I'm more aware than ever of how little my feeling is worth, of how - if we are to truly keep alive the conditions that make ethical life possible - it is not empathy that's needed but insight, organization, and action.
I was 15 when I first read 'The Feminine Mystique,' locked in my bedroom, probably wearing black, groping for any ideas I could find on how not to become my mother.
I'm sure all of us can find fault in our own education, and I certainly wished at times that I'd had other options. My own K-12 education may have been free and easy, but it wasn't necessarily very good.
At times, our collective anger seems a worthwhile thing - it has a weight and shape and force we couldn't achieve as individuals - but at other times, I can't help wondering how much it really accomplishes, if in some ways it might even impede us in our attempts to be more thoughtful, 'enlightened' human beings.
I've harassed pediatricians and nurses, demanded extra conferences with preschool teachers, contacted speech therapists and occupational therapists over delays other mothers probably wouldn't have noticed, stressed over magnet school applications three years before they're due.
I worked as a restaurant hostess and tutored English-as-a-second-language without a formal work visa.
I attended a middling high school in central Virginia in the mid-'90s, so there were no lofty electives to stoke my artistic sensibility - no A.P. art history or African-American studies or language courses in Mandarin or Portuguese. I lived for English, for reading.
I don't know that I want to live in a world without cheese.
I adore cooking and baking and holiday feasts and dining with friends and spending too much money on mind-blowing meals in wonderful restaurants, but mostly, and quite simply, I love food.
It shouldn't be normal to be anxious all the time about your children, so women should seek mental health help if they're having excessive levels of anxiety.
I don't know exactly when I started watching television, but I know that Muppets and Smurfs hold privileged places in my memory. Without television, I surely could have mastered several classical languages or learned to play the violin, right?
I don't want to believe it - that parenting itself makes art hard, that you must always sacrifice one for the other, that there is something inherently selfish and greedy and darkly obsessive in the desire to care as much about the thing you are writing or making as you do about the other humans in your life. What parent would want to believe this?
Having children, entering the realm of parents and parenthood, changes our relationship to the world in ways we could not have anticipated and might not have signed up for. Before I had children, for example, I believed strongly in the nobility of suffering.
When I first learned I was pregnant with my son, I had only two firm convictions about parenting: I knew it was important, and I knew that I wanted to get it right. I was 29 at the time.
I consider myself a B-minus mom. I think I would be considered an A-plus dad.
I think that the expectation on parents has changed from giving your children shelter and love and support and guidance to this idea that observation and structure and sort of watching them all the time - that that's what a good parent does.
There is so much people hate about Kim Kardashian, it sometimes seems as though her critics get as much enjoyment out of her as her fans.
For so much of my young life, I'd felt lonely, isolated, cut off from like-minded people. I yearned for human connections and relationships with the sort of people I knew only from books and movies, a lifeline into some other, richer world.
I had never intended to be a stay-at-home-mom.
My husband and I both attended public schools. We believe in the benefits, both individual and communal, of supporting public schools.
What an awful burden we mothers and fathers, Jewish and not, have to bear - to hatch a thing we love more than ourselves into a world so fundamentally unworthy.
I always knew my mother was different, different from the other mothers in the way she dressed, the way she spoke, but most obviously, the way she mothered. I remember a slumber party where, instead of a sleeping bag, she urged me to bring a small, inflatable mattress because the dust on the floor was liable to aggravate my allergies.
When I earned my diploma from the University of Virginia in the spring of 2000, it never occurred to me before my senior year to worry too seriously about my post-graduation prospects. Indeed, most of my professors, advisors, and mentors reinforced this complacency.
I struggled with math and had no interest in sports.
A slice of perfectly buttered, warm-from-the-oven bread has been known to bring tears to my eyes.
We need to challenge this assumption that any child who's alone, who isn't being directly supervised and observed, is a child in in peril.
If you've driven your kids to the store, and you leave them for five minutes, by far the most dangerous thing you've done is just put your kid in the car and driven them to the store.
Having a kid who begged for 'just a few more minutes' of television was the antithesis of what I had hoped parenthood would be. It was resigning ourselves to a universe of want and consumption.
I love my husband. I love my family.
I love food, but I can't bear to read about it, to talk about it, to discuss the consequences and context of how we consume it. And this is more or less how I feel about raising children, too.
