Quotes About Family

During one week when I was little, Dad got stopped three times for DWI: Driving While Indian.

No, Miss Warren said. Your sister, she's dead

I then vowed to finally finish the years-late sequel to my best-selling book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I needed that money. My mother needed that money. I hadn't been able to finish the book because of the pathological fear that my sequel would be The Phantom Menace instead of The Empire Strikes Back. But, on the airplane, I thought, Okay, okay, Phantom sucked, but it still made big cash. I'm gonna Yoda this book for my mother.

Sibling Rivalry Yes, my mother was a better mother To my sisters and brothers, But they were better children Than me, the prodigal who yearned And spurned and never returned.

But my grandmother wanted us to forgive her murderer.

Sometimes I caught my mother digging through old photo albums or staring at the wall or out the window. She'd get that look on her face that I knew meant she missed my father. Not enough to want him back. She missed him just enough for it to hurt. On

Hey, Dad," I said. "What do Indians have to be so thankful for?" "We should give thanks that they didn't kill all of us." We laughed like crazy.

My mother and grandmother's conversation doesn't belong in the cloud.   That old song is too sacred for the Internet.   So

One morning she sewed while her son and husband watched television. It was so quiet that when her son released a tremendous fart, a mouse, startled from his hiding place beneath my aunt's sewing chair, ran straight up her pant leg.

My mother was a lifeguard on the shores of Lake Fucked.

family of four coughing blood into handkerchiefs in the examining room.

You know, I said to my sister later at the funeral. I think Mom is telling the truth about losing us. We're never going to know the exact details. But there's too much real pain in this story for it to be a lie. My sister nodded. She agreed. But what did we agree to? Jesus, we as adults were grateful that our mother had probably told us the truth about endangering us as children. How fucked is that?

I began to count mile markers, made mental lists of everything I really needed: a new pair of shoes, a winter coat for the baby, a ticket for a Greyhound traveling back or ahead five hundred years.

My parents sold blood for money to buy food. Poverty was our spirit animal.

We order Diet since my father and I are both diabetic. Genetics, you know?

yet, I have spent my literary career writing loving odes to my drunken and unreliable father. I have, in a spectacular show of hypocrisy, let my father off the hook for his lifetime of carelessness. That is completely unfair to my mother.

Lynn's parents refused to accept Sean Casey's Indian blood and, in fact, exhibited a kind of denial that was nearly pathological in its intensity.

It is warm, soon to be cold, but that's in the future, maybe tomorrow, probably the next day and all the days after that. Today, now, I drink what I have, will eat what is left in the cupboard, while my mother finishes her quilt, piece by piece. Believe me, there is just barely enough goodness in all of this.

I have this deep need to bond with real blood relatives, but I feel like I'm not really a part of either of my families.

the truth is, the very act of adoption is built upon loss. For the birth parents, the loss of their biological offspring, the relationship that could have been, a very part of themselves. For the adoptive parents, the loss of giving birth to a biological child, the child whose face will never mirror theirs. And for the adopted child, the loss of the birth parents, the earliest experience of belonging and acceptance. To deny adoption loss is to deny the emotional reality of everyone involved.

they look at adoption through rose-colored glasses, trying to make it a win/win situation for unplanned pregnancies and infertility, never giving a thought about what effect adoption has on the child.

It is a celebration of the fact that we were adopted for a purpose and that adoption is an experience that has the potential of teaching us some of life's richest and deepest lessons.

Adoptive parents often say about adoption day: It was the happiest day of our lives! While most of us are happy to be adopted, our own hearts tell us that adoption day was the most painful day of our lives, for the person with whom we shared deep intimacy suddenly disappeared from our world.

You realize you've never walked in another person's shoes. Never have. Never will. The same is true in adoption. There are three sets of adoption shoes sitting at the end of the boardwalk. The adoptees...the birth parents'...and the adoptive parents'. Each is unique and each has a story to tell.