fatherhood

We were immortal, did you know that? Did you feel it like me? We had the world at our feet and we were going to live forever. Then came life _ growing inside you _ and I became mortal.

What is less often noticed is that it is precisely the kind of moral instruction that parents are constantly trying to give their children _ concrete, imaginative, teaching general principles from particular instances, and seeking all the time to bring the children to appreciate and share the parent's own attitudes and view of life_ The all-embracing principles of conduct

What a face this girl possessed!__ould I neither die then nor gaze at her face every day, I would need to recreate it through painting or sculpture, or through fatherhood, until a second such face could be born.

Repudiating the vulnerability I felt had wrecked the lives of women around me, I modelled myself on my controlled father. I wanted his freedom and his focus. To him, a family was an aquarium: controlled, contained. To the women I knew, a family was everything.

Now let's make Virginia Heffernan a man. Can you imagine the same kind of spittle-flecked rage directed at a busy working father who admits to feeding his kids Annie's Organic Mac & Cheese?

All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she never could.

[Nathan] wasn't blindly obsessed with a possession. He wasn't crazy. He was a hero--a father who'd risked his life to rescue his son.

The best gift you can give to your kids is a happy marriage.

He was not being courageous as he bore the freezing stream for his wife and children. He simply chose between the lesser of two evils__he pain and suffering he would endure in the river, a physical pain that he could stand to bear, or the pain and suffering he would feel if he had to watch his family wade across and freeze. It was not a decision. The choice had already been made the moment Ole proposed marriage to his wife and welcomed these beautiful daughters into the world.

Papas should be loving their children so much that they cry when they gone. That__ what papas is supposed to do.

A successful father is not more successful than his children.

Do whatever you must do to protect your children and wife.

He says that we must protect our families no matter what. No matter what we got to do to protect them.

We're constantly judging and grading other parents, just to make sure that they aren't any better than us. I'm as guilty as anyone. I see some lady hand her kid a Nintendo DS at the supermarket and I instantly downgrade that lady to Shitty Parent status. I feel pressure to live up to a parental ideal that no one probably has ever achieved. I feel pressure to raise a group of human beings that will help America kick the shit out of Finland and South Korea in the world math rankings. I feel pressure to shield my kids from the trillion pages of hentai donkey porn out there on the Internet. I feel pressure to make the insane amounts of money needed for a supposedly 'middle-class' upbringing for the kids, an upbringing that includes a house and college tuition and health care and so many other expenses that you have to be a multimillionaire to afford it. PRESSURE PRESSURE PRESSURE.

Memory loss is the key to human reproduction. If you remembered what new parenthood was actually like you wouldn__ go around lying to people about how wonderful it is, and you certainly wouldn__ ever do it twice.

You__e saying, __hat the hell am I gonna do with her?_ You__e saying, __hit, did she take her pills?_ You__e saying, __nce upon a time, I used to have a little girl.

Parenting has nothing to do with perfection. Perfection isn__ even the goal, not for us, not for our children. Learning together to live well in an imperfect world, loving each other despite or even because of our imperfections, and growing as humans while we grow our little humans, those are the goals of gentle parenting. So don__ ask yourself at the end of the day if you did everything right. Ask yourself what you learned and how well you loved, then grow from your answer. That is perfect parenting.

As fathers, we should have a desire to be active participants in our children__ lives.