A Quote by Alison Gopnik
I'm the oldest of six children and I had my own first baby when I was 23. So I've always been interested in babies, and I had lots of opportunities to watch them.
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When I had a baby, I didn't leave the second floor for six months. I nursed my babies. I was a full-time homemaker. I taught them all how to read before I let them go to school. So I gave them that care in the early life that somehow feminists have been led to believe is demeaning and is not worth the time of an educated woman.
I've had every chemo in the alphabet, most of them more than once. Some of them that aren't even in the alphabet, they're just numbers - clinical trials. But I bet if you added all those up, it would have to be like 60- or 70-something. I've had 23 bone marrow aspirations. Having one isn't fun and I've had 23. So that's been tough.
I always knew I wanted to have children of my own. I met my husband Daniel when I was 23; we were married when I was pregnant with my first child, Ossian. We've had our ups and downs like every couple, especially when we were younger.
Women say . . . that if men had to have babies there would soon be no babies in the world. . . . I have sometimes wished that some clever man would actually have a baby in some new labor-saving way; then all men could take it up, and one of the oldest taunts in the world would be stilled forever.
I've had more acne as an adult than I had as a teenager. After weaning babies, my skin's gone totally bonkers. I didn't even know about dermatologists until I had weaned my first baby, and my skin was so damaged. It was just beyond. And then, I realized, there's a whole doctor who can help you with this.
I became very successful at a young age... I had lots of opportunities and lots of power and had no idea how to focus it.
I always thought I'd be the quintessential Earth Mother, but when I had Harrison, I really wasn't the natural mother that I always thought I would be. I adore children, but I was never that interested in newborn babies.
In most places and times in human history, babies have had not just one person but lots of people around who were really paying attention to them around, dedicated to them, cared to them, were related to them. I think the big shift in our culture is the isolation in which many children are growing up.
My husband and I had five biological children but we also have been raising 23 foster children.
After my parents divorced, my father remarried and my brothers were born when I was twelve and sixteen. I was thunderstruck at these kids. The "baby-ness" of them. Their toes. I had never been around babies before.
My brother had fabulous children before I had children and for some reason I wanted to photograph them, and that was when I got my first camera. Children have something totally unconscious about them. That's how I learned.
If she'd spaced her children out and had eleven babies in eleven years, she would have been no better than her own mother and sisters: irresponsible, a welfare cheat, another bit of Sawdust Lane white trash. But as luck would have it, she'd had them all at once, and now she was, overnight, middle-class. And respectable.
Wherever life is, its main objective is to keep going, and it always wins. And nature? It's all built into nature. Survivability, life perpetuating. And that means there have to be babies. Baby everything! Baby birds, baby human beings, baby ants. You name it. There have to be babies, and what has to happen for there to be babies? Okay, birds and bees. What has to happen for that to happen? It's all intertwined, and it's all nature, and the left has come along and tried to monkey with it by politicizing as much of it as they can for whatever just really convoluted reasons.
I had known Colonel Charlie Flynn since he was a lieutenant 23 years earlier, and I remembered how his first child, Molly, had been born while Charlie was deployed to the first Gulf War.
We already had an adopted daughter, 10-year-old Courtney, from my previous marriage. To me, there is no difference between 'natural' and 'adopted.' My own childhood showed me that when it comes to loving your kids, concepts like that don't apply. I was the oldest of six, and three of my siblings were adopted. Mom and Dad even took in foster children. 'There are no limits to how much you can love,' Dad always said.
I think oldest children have a different mentality or know that there were different expectations of them, and I was not only the oldest child - I was the oldest grandchild of 18 grandchildren. I definitely grew up feeling like there were a lot of people who expected me to do something. But it was a very conservative family, very conservative neighborhood. I'm talking mid- to late '60s when I was growing up there, and so if I had stayed in the Boston area, I think my life would have been radically different.
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