He still heard his mother's voice--"Davey"--rise like whisper-dust from unseen corners in the house, but it was no longer the only voice he heard. His ears were also filled with the voices of others--his father and Primrose and Refrigerator John and ...
How I wish, how fervently I ache, to take my mother's hand, kiss her check,tell her I love her, and watch her smile. For me it was not, nor can ever be. But for you, reach out now. Reach out for your mother's hand-the hands of those you love. Say I l...
She loved your mother', Taliesin said gently. 'This is her farewell.' As he spoke, a chanted melody began inside the chamber, a song without words. Yet it spoke of the beauty in the heart of the flame, of the passing glory of the white bird on the wi...
Intelligence, goodness, humanity, excitement, serenity. Over time, these are the things that change the musculature of your face, as do laughter, and animation, and especially whatever peace you can broker with the person inside. It's furrow, pinch, ...
The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable-even legally actionable-to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty-lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue,...
The French believe that kids feel confident when they're able to do things for themselves, and do those things well. After children have learned to talk, adults don't praise them for saying just anything. They praise them for saying interesting thing...
Amber Rorman had told me too that our third grade teacher, Ms. Lizetti, was really a lesbian, which I thought was a disease until I asked Amber and Amber told me to ask her mother who told me to ask my mother, who said, “Lesbians are women who like...
Well, honey, it’s capitalism that brings out the meanness and greed,” says I. “Our founding fathers did a decent job of framing our democracy. They wrote the Constitution and added a Bill of Rights that intended for people of all classes to enj...
His mother?" Gracie couldn't believe it. Suzy Denton looked much too young to be his mother. And much too respectable. "But you're not a-" She cut herself off in mid-sentence as she realized what she'd almost let slip. Suzy's wedding ring clicked aga...
Going home means going back in time. It's not a trip you care to take alone, and anyway, isn't that the main reason to take a mate? So you have an ally in the civil war against your parents?
May we do it again? She sounds remarkably bright and cheerful. 'And I didn't bleed. My mother said I would experience great agony.' 'Half an hour.' 'I beg your pardon? Your mumbling.' Eyes closed, I attempt to enunciate a little more clearly. 'In hal...
As for the young men whose company I keep (Why does it keep sounding like that?), I try to teach them that every young lady is somebody’s sister or daughter with the potential to be somebody’s wife and mother. I ask them, “Would you want somebo...
Getting to this point hasn't always been easy; it took me years to really learn to silence my mind. But as you move through your career and your life, you will have to learn that if you're not what you do, then what you do has no business keeping you...
That was when I first observed a phenomenon I now call the "New York Slide": you offer your words to try to communicate and connect with someone, but your words just hit a brick wall the person has erected to ward off human contact- the words slide d...
Dreams won't always take you on a straight path to destiny but they're usually related to what your soul wants for you. They'll force you to ask yourself the hard questions, they'll kick your ass and more importantly, they'll turn you on.
After all, you can't truly be happy if you've never known pain. You can't truly feel joy if you've never felt heartbreak. You can't know what it's like to be filled unless you've been empty.
Her mother was Jewish, but her father had insisted that she and Anne be raised Catholic. So she went to mass every Sunday as a child, received communion, went to confession, and was confirmed, but because her mother never participated in any of this,...
A child’s bond to her mother cannot be understated, and my bond with Helen was a ragged, baffling, disheartening, chaotic mess. I felt crazy, often, around my own mother. I grew up questioning what was normal, asking what reality was and wasn’t, ...
As Louis Cozolino Ph. D., observes, a consistent theme of adult psychotherapy clients is that they had parents who were not curious about who they were but, instead, told them who they should be. What Cozolino explains, is that the child creates a "p...
My mother is European and expresses her love through food and cuddling. She wasn't the type of mother who would make it to school plays or soccer games, but if you wanted to stay at home sick, she was your girl. Whenever you'd go up to her room to cu...
Many of my classmates have happier memories of Blessed Sacrament, and in time I would find my own satisfaction in the classroom. My first years there, however, I met with little warmth. In part, it was that the nuns were critical of working mothers, ...