My parents told me from the time I can remember that, 'Yeah, you're adopted. But this is your family.' I can remember my mom, she tells me this story: when I was little, I was looking at her, and I was like, 'Why isn't my skin the same color as yours?' She was like, 'Oh, you're adopted, but I wish I had pretty brown skin like you.'
Right now some future general is lying in his crib trying to get his big toe in his mouth. Such was probably the case of our guest of honor tonight.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
A sick child is always the mother's property; her own feelings generally make it so.
I don't remember my mother ever playing with me. And she was a perfectly good mother. But she had to do the laundry and clean the house and do the grocery shopping.
Fatherhood didn't change me in the beginning very much.
There is a tension in relationships between wanting to return to the womb, but also wanting to be free. Because sometimes the woman's attentions can be overly maternal, and you want to go, 'Ahhhh!'
Everyone should have kids. They are the greatest joy in the world. But they are also terrorists. You'll realize this as soon as they're born, and they start using sleep deprivation to break you.
The character and history of each child may be a new and poetic experience to the parent, if he will let it.
I had a son born to me when I was 50, and I thought, 'He needs someone to bowl to him.'
I think that being a parent has expanded my writing, expanded my understanding of my characters, and has added a depth and richness to my work. Having kids deepened my idea of parenting and all the anxieties that come along with it.
Fatherhood is a process you can't really express.
My mother died of cystic fibrosis before I knew her. I was two years old, and I don't remember her. I do remember, though, when it was just my father and me, before he met the woman who would become the mother who raised me, before my younger sister, Gillian. It was just the two of us, and he was my whole world.
I, as a man, don't even pretend to know what a woman goes through during pregnancy.
They have to exist or not in their own right. I mean, with kids, you don't say, 'Which is your favourite,' or 'Which did you enjoy bringing up the best?'
When I was born, I was born very prematurely so I was very tiny and small. And so, my mom just nicknamed me Pixie, like a little fairy.
A sympathetic parent might see the spark of consciousness in a baby's large eyes and eagerly accept the popular claim that babies are wonderful learners, but it is hard to avoid the impression that they begin as ignorant as bread loaves.
Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.
I'm still a mummy's boy!
I've been my mom's kitchen helper since I was a little kid.
When one begins, as I did, to analyze men after a fairly long experience of analyzing women, one receives a most surprising impression of the intensity of this envy of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, as well as of breasts and of the act of suckling.
When you hold a baby in your arms, you don't want to put it in a basket right away. You want to keep the baby close.
I think I realized my parents' relationship was special when I had my first girlfriend, and she came from a broken marriage. I watched how much closeness there was between her and her mom, and also how much bickering.
My mam and dad were blasting Steely Dan when I was born; the music hasn't stopped since then.
Shared parental leave is good for dads. Looking after their newborn on their own is a unique learning experience.
I would have gone home to my mother, but I'm not that crazy about my mother.
