Quotes from Kim Brooks

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.

People don't think that leaving children alone is dangerous and therefore immoral. They think it is immoral and therefore dangerous.

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.

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.

Motherhood has become a battleground on which prejudice and class resentment can be waged without ever admitting that's what we're doing.

In college, I'd gone abroad to get away from a campus where I felt I didn't fit in. And I started writing fiction, at least in part, because it was a way to feel like I was around people, to feel the energy and hum of others' inner lives, without the real-time frustrations and difficulties of actual relationships.

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 had never intended to be a stay-at-home-mom.

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.

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.

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.

Motherhood was the first instance in my life where I was asked to sacrifice anything for anyone.

We're contemptuous of 'distracted' working mothers. We're contemptuous of 'selfish' rich mothers. We're contemptuous of mothers who have no choice but to work, but also of mothers who don't need to work and still fail to fulfill an impossible ideal of selfless motherhood. You don't have to look very hard to see the common denominator.

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.

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.

We're really doing children a disservice when we underestimate what they're capable of.

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 grew up in a time when I could play and bike in the neighborhood, largely because my parents assumed that if I ever needed help, I could ask a nearby adult.

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.

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.

I have a profound and unshakable love of good eating.

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'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.

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.