Quotes About Family

I listen to parenting books on tape.

After we got our first family car with a tape deck, my dad acquired exactly three cassette tapes: A 'Best of ABBA,' 'Private Heaven' by Sheena Easton, and the soundtrack to 'Xanadu.' I also unironically love 'Xanadu.'

The process was remarkably cathartic. I'd sit and listen to my father's voice - having not heard some of these tapes for 30 years and hearing his voice laying me down for a nap, our giggles and cooking dinner - and I remembered all those wonderful days. Normal days.

He's only 4 years old, so I don't think he realized, you know, that I played so many years. Of course, we watch tapes here from the Stanley Cup years, but I don't think he realized how many years I played.

When we were younger, we sang at the dinner table. We started doing two part harmony, then three part, and then we added back up tapes and instruments.

My mom used to buy us a whole lot of VHS tapes - we had boxes of them, hundreds of them. So we would just go through movies all the time.

When I was a little girl, whenever I would get sick, my mom would go and get stacks and stacks of VHS tapes from Blockbuster.

My mum records everything I'm in on VHS. Like, who still has VHS? I told her it's all online now, but she still tapes it.

'Tapestry' was the first album my mom ever bought with her own money when she was 14. So, needless to say, it was a staple in the household, at least when my mom was choosing the music.

The rich emotional tapestry of being a mother, becoming a mother, connects you to your own mother. I didn't realize how much I'd become her. I pass a mirror, and am surprised by how much I look like her.

Though I didn't quite plan it that way, I had my two sons at just about the same ages my mother saw me and my sister off to college, and my first novel was published when I was 46. This 'tardiness' isn't something I'm proud of, but I'm happy to be an inspiration to others who arrive at these milestones later than most of us do.

When I was growing up, every Sunday was a rest day, so after church, we'd get all my cousins and sisters together, and my parents would take us all shop hopping. We'd go to all the different shops, and Target was always the last on the list; we'd walk in, and Mum would say, 'Go on, go crazy!'

My father died when I was 9 years old. The miserable condition of my family at that time is beyond description. My family, solitary and without influence, became at once the target of much insult and abuse.

Latino kids are not rejected by their parents for being Latino, nor are most Muslims disowned by their parents for being Muslims, but those who are gay are often the target of their families' disapprobation or outright hostility.

The target audience goes back to conception. That means pre-natal care, safe delivery, post-natal screening, and the ordinary stuff you do in pediatrics.

Growing up in New Orleans as Archie Manning's son, I felt like a target, and I've always known that whatever I'd do, people would hear about it. So I've had my guard up, and maybe that's molded my personality.

It's very alienating to become a target, and it can be really difficult to try and explain to people, to family members.

Dad's very hard on me and is my biggest critic, so 10 is always going to be the target. He has said that my whole life. If you are averaging 10 goals as a midfielder, you are having a good season.

My mother reads tarot cards, actually, but I won't let her read mine.

In my family, we can't just sit and be together. We have to be shelling peas or husking corn or something. A larger task. Some way of being with people.

There's plenty to read about keeping your sanity while raising children, but it's all common-sense stuff about task division and taking breaks and the relentlessly repeated magic of date night with your spouse. What's missing is some 'tude.

Women run the small country called Home, millions of us do it in our spare time, and no one who doesn't run that small country really knows what it feels like in the dead of night when task lists jitter like tickertape through your seething brain.

I have the greatest respect for single parents who struggle and sacrifice, trying against almost superhuman odds to hold the family together. They should be honored and helped in their heroic efforts. But any mother's or father's task is much easier where there are two functioning parents in the home.

How do you make your kids read more? It needs to be presented as a joy and a privilege to get to do it, and the kids should get to see you as a parent reading for your own pleasure. It's not something you send your kids off to do, 'Go into your room and read for 15 minutes or else.' It becomes a task then.