Quotes About Parenthood

Having children had knocked it all into a different arrangement. The minute you had children, you closed ranks. You didn't plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations.

I'M SCURRYING AROUND THE HOUSE, TRYING TO DECIDE WHAT I should pack (cloth diapers, knitted booties, cotton jumpers?) and what I should leave behind (cloth diapers, knitted booties, cotton jumpers?) when I'm stopped in my tracks by the lowing and braying of the animals in the barn.

After all, you can't hang out at the park with your kid and shop for coordinating head scarves and flip-flops (or whatever else Bethany does to fill the endless expanse of nonworking days) without a college education. Oh, that's right. You totally can.

She didn't really want to have a baby; she wanted to want to have a baby.

I accept that people with children are having a deeper, more complex experience of being alive than I am, and this is fine with me. Raising children is one of many life experiences I'm happy to die without having had, like giving birth, going to war, spending a night in jail, or seeing Forrest Gump. If I could get through life without experiencing death, I would gladly do that, too.

Parents need to somehow justify the lives of sputum, tuition, and sarcastic abuse to which they've condemned themselves, and so make their own grandiose claims about parenthood's ineffable fulfillments and beneficent effects—that one cannot possibly know what real love is unless you've had children, that it is life's ultimate purpose, et cetera.

My not being a father had kept me young, had kept my curiosity awake.

Children exhaust us, even the ones we love most. Our solitude is the most valuable thing we have, and we cherish it above most other things and work hard to maintain it.

and arrogant, to tell people it is fine to poison themselves with chemicals and mutilate their bodies at the very sources of life, just so they can escape children! As if children could ever—ever—be a burden!

In the months to come, we'll buy a house together and get married and have a son--all of it occurring so naturally that we won't even think of ourselves as having given up our freedom, but rather as having more of it.

Es ist mir egal, wie viel jemand auf der Bank hat - solange er kein Kind hat, besitzt er nichts von Wert.

Kinder zu lieben, ist leicht. Sie zu behalten, ist schwer.

All parents disappoint us eventually.

Quiero a ese niño más que a nada en el mundo. Pero nunca he conseguido aceptar su existencia

Not having children derives not from dislike, but from love too great to bring them into this world, too limited, too vain, too cruel.

In one particularly witty, stinging passage, he wrote, "Heterosexuals get drunk and pregnant, producing unwanted children; their reward is to be allowed to marry. Homosexual couples do not produce unwanted children; their reward is to be denied the right to marry. Go figure.

Kids aren't bothers. They're blessings,

El matrimonio es un experimento… psicológico; la paternidad lo es… patológico.

Hansu did not believe that man was designed to have sex with only one woman; marriage was unnatural to him, but he would never abandon a woman who had borne him children.

I told her I don't know if I'll have another baby, but if it meant she would come and live with me, I may just go ahead and do it.

Oh, the future. I see." A shadow fell over the doctor's face. "You're wondering if your son will get cancer? Or be hit by a car? Or be bipolar? Or have autism? Or drug problems? I don't know, I'm not a psychic. Welcome to parenthood.

Parents like the idea of kids, they just don't like their kids.

In the thirteenth century, Bishop Henry of Liege had sixty-one children, fourteen of them within twenty-two months, setting perhaps a record of clerical philoprogenitiveness.

Fathers and mothers," she found herself saying, "leave their mark, no matter if we've known them a lifetime or only a day.