On every formal visit a child ought to be of the party, by way of provision for discourse. In the present case it took up ten minutes to determine whether the boy were most like his father or mother, and in what particular he resembled either, for of...
Pop, why didn't you ever marry again?" "I was a good husband to your mother," Pop said. "I would not be a good husband to another woman. It would not be fair, because I gave everything I had to my first marriage. Love is like that for some people.
...I remember that my mother had always said to be polite and finish my meal. At last he gave no more struggles. The deed was done. Now the boat contained four men, not one heartbeat among us. The fate they had destined for another claimed them as we...
Cricket’s voice broke through Thomas’s memory. He was reading a letter, most likely from his mother. He was trying hard to hide it, but he was tearing up. “Captain I don’t want to be here,” was all he could choke out. Thomas reached over an...
The two stand in the fast-thinning throng of victims, but they speak as if they were alone. Eye to eye, voice to voice, hand to hand, heart to heart, these two children of the Universal Mother, else so wide apart and differing, have come together on ...
If writers write, then rangers range. And I’d like to wake up every morning and be a mother, so I could eat my own clothes.
According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I'd written any ficton, by wich she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I prefered this kind of fantasising or pure imagining to what other people generally liked - ...
--what's really unique about maternal anxiety today is our belief that if something goes wrong with or for our children, it's a reflection on us as mothers. Because we believe we should be able to control life so perfectly that we can keep bad things...
What kind of choice is it, really, when motherhood forces you into a delicate balancing act -- not just between work and family, as the equation is typically phrased, but between your premotherhood and postmotherhood identities? What kind of choice i...
He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us. "Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the wate...
My father had a healthy disregard for social conventions: he once let me paint the house windows in rainbows with my watercolor set, to my mother's horror, and he'd clap for trees that he thought were doing a good job of exploding into red during the...
When her mother combed Harriet's hair, she said that the woods were disgustingly muddy and mosquito-ridden. During her history unit on pioneers, her father bashfully admitted that he couldn't pitch a tent, barbeque, or fight off bears in a forest. Th...
I looked up "skin" in the encyclopedia and confirmed that, sure enough, it is the human body's largest organ, a fact that suggests our surfaces are critical to who we are, not just the gateway to physical or spiritual depths but a profoundly importan...
My mother always told me not to pick my nose, so I’m going let the plastic surgeon decide what my new nose will look like. I’m hoping he makes it look like either a Tiffany lamp, a Heckler and Koch assault rifle, or Bill Clinton’s erect cigar.
He still had the power to stagger her at timessimply the fact that he was breathing that all his organs were in their proper places that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small sturdy limbs. He was her flesh and blood her mother had to...
If only he’d taken one look at her and seen that they were soul mates, swept her off her feet and taken her to Las Vegas to be married in the same little chapel where Britney Spears had been. She laughed to herself. It would probably have lasted ju...
As he was forced to tell his father more than once, “I said I’d fight for my mother’s throne. I never said I’d die for it.” Then he’d add, simply to annoy the old bastard into one of his frothy temper tantrums, “Don’t you think I’m ...
I never do enjoy my breaks, long or short...I look forward to them intensely, but as soon as they begin, I can feel them starting to end. I feel the temporariness of my freedom, and find it hard to concentrate on anything other than the sensation of ...
That way I wouldn't have to see the guys in their walking shorts. They looked as if nothing had ever touched them- all well-mothered, protected, with a soft sheet of contentment. None of them had ever been in jail, or worked hard with their hands, or...
I want to tell him that it's just a stupid car, but bits of me are scattered all over town; the graveyard, school, Cassie's room, the motel, and standing in from of the sink in my mother's kitchen. It takes too much energy to gather all the bits toge...
My youngest sister, Cindy, has Down syndrome, and I remember my mother spending hours and hours with her, teaching her to tie her shoelaces on her own, drilling multiplication tables with Cindy, practicing piano every day with her. No one expected Ci...
