Quotes from Claire Fontaine

Travel empties out everything you've into the box called your life, all the things you accumulate to tell you who you are

Caretaking is never about the other person. It's about wanting to feel needed because you're afraid you're not wanted.

We carve our destinies blindfolded, with sharp knives.

God doesn't create suffering Claire, we do. We make the world and then we break it.

Travel empties out everything you've into the box called your life, all the things you accumulate to tell you who you are

A woman's relationship with herself is mirrored everywhere in her life, but no place more than with her daughter.

Samantha Dunn] wrote that when God wants your attention, first He throws feathers. After that, He starts throwing bricks.

Once your baby arrives, the world is no more the same than you are. Because from our very bodies we add to the collective human destiny. Our deepest urge is always toward life, to wholeness and well being.

Sometimes, we have to give birth to our children twice....Once your child becomes the "garbage" other parents are afraid of, you never look at any teen, or yourself, the same again. All you see is the child they once were.

We tell our daughters we don't trust them in a thousand ways. We don't consciously mean to, but we steal their confidence in their own strength by stealing their pain. And their confidence in our strength by saying we aren't strong enough to see them struggle.

My relationship with God has evolved as well. I no longer rail or beg or sass back. I was standing on a bluff over the ocean the other day and suddenly laughed out loud as I realized what an illusion that was, what an impossibility. That would assume a relationship between a "me" and "Other," a separation. There is no otherness; to be separate from God is to be separate from myself, from life itself. What I've been looking for, I'm looking with.

These are the kinds of regrets all women have, mistakes and missteps, paths not chosen, opportunities gone. Youth gone. Forever. And until I honestly acknowledge how this regret feels, acknowledge that I'm not okay with how some of my life went, it's like having a fake past, and a fake present, which is surely a prescription for a fake future.

I could see where I'd mistaken drama and conflict for life, which meant years of living reactively instead of generatively, a life I let be determined by circumstances and the choices of others. We like to think life happens to us, but pretty much everything in your life is there because you wanted it, even if unconsciously. Results, I have learned, don't lie.

There are lots of ways to lose yourself—motherhood's just one of them.

I know that for every mother, there is always the possibility of three in your relationship with your daughter. You, your daughter the way she is, and your daughter the way you want her to be. I learned the hard way ten years ago that that kind of control is an illusion and a barrier.

Accountability is not about blame, it's not about being wrong, it is about owning the choices you've made, or are making, that create the results you have in your life. And you do create everything in your life.

Sex isn't something children should be protected from, Claire. It's like protecting them from good food or music.

Every culture seems to have customs to ward off evil. Italians use the curved horn, and Eastern European Jews used to say insulting things to babies, such as "Oy, such an ugly girl!" to avoid tempting the devil. America's magic charms are private education, science camp, and SAT tutors to ward off our evil: personal failure. Mothers