All mothers love their own children as best they can, according to their temperament and circumstances, and all mothers should have done better, in their children's eyes, when the going gets tough for the children.
Pity the poor infant. Born perfect into the world from imperfect parents.
We will have to give up the hope that, if we try hard, we somehow will always do right by our children. The connection is imperfect. We will sometimes do wrong.
Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents' shortcomings.
My mother wasn't any better than my father.
I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
Middle-class mothers and fathers turned out to be a very well-defined consumer group, easily gulled into buying almost anything that might remedy their parental deficiencies.
As parents, we're human beings, too, but sometimes we're not as understanding as we'd like to be.
That was the rule that you never mixed up troubles at home with life at school. When parents were poor or ignorant or mean, or even just didn't believe in having a TV set, it was up to their kids to protect them.
