Quotes About Pressure

We've made hyper motherhood a measure of female success.

There's some muscle group around your shoulders that seizes up during the perfection dance and doesn't let go until you are asleep, or alone. Or maybe it never really lets go at all.

If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.

Occasionally Rebecca wished her son would not be so very kind to her, as though she was the losing pitcher on a Little League team.

After all those years of people counting off seconds in her earpiece, I swear she has time wired into every bit of her body, so that it was almost exactly an hour when she climbed out.

Don't condemn me, remember rather that sometimes I, too, can reach the bursting point.

He clings to his masculinity, his solitude and his feigned indif- ference so he can maintain his role, so he'll never, ever have to show his feelings. Poor Peter, how long can he keep it up? Won't he explode from this superhuman effort?

It won't take long before I explode with pent-up rage.

Kitty, if only you knew how I sometimes boil under so many gibes and jeers. And I don't know how long I shall be able to stifle my rage. I shall just blow up one day. Still

Du bist doch eine echte Rabenmutter.

Really, it's not easy being the badly brought-up center of attention of a family of nitpickers.

The whole game in the fifties and early sixties was for no one to know who you really were. We children were witness to the total pretense of how our parents wanted the world to see them. We helped them maintain this image, because if anyone outside the family could see who they really were deep down, the whole system, the ship of your family, might sink. We held our breath to give the ship buoyancy. We were little air tanks.

Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while

This is parenting on steroids.

how most of us are raised to be somebodies and what a no-win game that is to buy into, because while you may turn out to be much more somebody than somebody else, a lot of other people are going to be a lot more somebody than you. And you are going to drive yourself crazy.

little girls baked and learned to dust furniture, and this pleased everyone—briefly. When I was needy, shy, worried, deeply sensitive, too skinny or, later, overweight—in other words, most me—not so much.

So you—I—stuck to the family plan for a long time, because your success made everyone else so happy, even if you made yourself frantic and half dead trying to achieve it. You couldn't win at this game, and you couldn't stop trying. At least it was a home to return to, no matter how erratic, which is better than no home.

Woman's life today is tending more and more toward ... 'Zerrissenheit'--torn to pieces-hood. She cannot live perpetually in 'Zerrissenheit.' She will be shattered into a thousand pieces.

Too many women waste their lives grieving because they do not have something other people tell them they should want.

He could see those two tall delicate women and their arms entangled, the one struggling but not enough and the other pressuring for the deed to the accompanied.

Oh, the lengths this family would go to so as not to spoil the picture of how things were supposed to be!

Oh, the terrible, crushing, breath-stealing burden of people who think they own you!

There were advantages to being a girl and having nothing much expected of you.

Boehm's research has led him to believe that much of the evolutionary basis for moral behavior stems from group pressure. Not only are bad actions punished, but good actions are rewarded.