parents-and-children

But she knew it would never happen. She had no intention of visiting him there. Even if she were open to the idea, as Mom and Dad both hoped she would be, the mathematics of it seemed utterly impossible to her. What was she supposed to do, spend Christmas there and Easter here? See her dad every other holiday and one week during the summer, just enough to glimpse his new life in fragments, tiny slivers of a world she had no part in? And all the while missing out on those moments of her mom__ life__er mom, who__ done nothing to deserve to spend Christmas alone?That, it seemed to Hadley, was no way to live. Perhaps if there were more time, or if time were more malleable; if she could be both places at once, live parallel lives; or, simpler yet, if Dad would just come home. Because as far as she was concerned, there was no in-between: She wanted all or nothing, illogically, irrationally, even though something inside of her knew that nothing would be too hard, and all was impossible.

The words marriage and divorce were always used together, like they went hand in hand together.

Wart meets Merlin for the first time _ only for Merlin, who lives backwards, it's the last time. The old wizard weeps and the boy can't understand why. It's a powerful expression of the gulf between the ancient and the young.

He wanted to argue like this forever. This was better than nothing. There was no exhausting his anger at his father, and every word, however well intentioned or intentionally barbed, was a pull at a scab on his bloody heart. It was too late for any of this. There could ultimately be no healing. Marty had terminal cancer, and so did the two men have a cancer between them. They were terminal together, as father and son. They remained, momentarily exhausted, but it was really only that quiet between lightning and thunder as sound lags behind speed. The lightning had cracked the ground already, you just hadn't heard it yet.

Sadie heard her inside cleaning up the kitchen and wondered what dreams Betty's mother had for herself, if all mothers had them, bottled up beneath their mother exteriors.

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.

I don't think it matters how many parents you've got, as long as those who are around make their presence a good one.

All of us have parents. Generations pass. We are not unique. Now it is our family's turn.

My parents have lived longer than most and have expected very little. We have been blessed in too many ways to count.

Is there a magical age when children become parents to their parents?

Because you don't get to choose your parents, , and at some point you realise that maybe your parents just aren't able to parent very well, but we exist, and the only choice we've got in the whole situation is whether we're gonna love them anyway. It's as simple and messy and complicated as that

Is there a magical time when children become parents to their parents?

He had been searching for it his entire life. He had devoted himself to poetry to find it. Now, in the middle of his life, he found it. It was in the face of the love of his life, his daughter. She who had never blushed before, now blushed. And in that blushing, he knew, was the existence of God. That was the day her father learned what God was. God was pure beauty, God was his daughter__ face when she blushed.

We are born with our father's names. We are not responsible for their failures. We are responsible for what they made us believe in. That is our only obligation. And it is even then a choice which we may sometimes be wise to ignore.

Children see beauty in everything.

It__ funny_ when you__e young you spend your life trying to convince yourself you__e not like your parents. And then, every now and then, you__l do something a certain way, some mannerism, or you__l say something. When our car broke down upstate, I remember I hit the wheel and said, ____ not made of money!_ And I caught myself and thought, Gee, Louie, you just sounded like Pop. When you__e young and it happens, it drives you crazy. And then you live long enough, and it makes you smile a little._ He wipes a tear from his eyelashes with the back of his hand. __hat__ a nice part of life,_ he says.

It's easy for parents to pull the strings that make one dance...after all, they are the ones who tied those strings in the first place

How to advise parents for being successful in raising children stillremains an important unsolved problem.