A Quote by Blake Lively
We're all born feeling perfect until somebody tells us we're not. So there's nothing I can teach my daughter. She already has all of it. The only thing I can do is protect what she already feels.
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I was raised the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people's misery, to eat my own bitterness. And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.
If some woman tells me how she feels about something, my immediate assumption is that she wants an answer, or that she wants me to solve her problem. In fact, all she wants to do is share, or show how she feels.
It's a very good thing to teach kids to finish what they started in the sense of fulfilling their commitments. So when my daughter told me on the second track meet that she was done with it because she discovered she didn't like competing, I made her finish the season.
I was 20 when my daughter was born, and making all these plans during my wife's pregnancy. I was going to be the perfect father. Once she was born, it was suddenly, 'Oh, my God! I'm a parent!'
The thing I'm writing now, I have various characters, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, this couple dies. And they have a daughter. ...I thought, 'OK, we have to do something with the daughter' ... then I realized she's not really their daughter. She has her own story. And she's become the most interesting character. She was this throwaway character that I didn't even conceive of before I started writing her into it, and now she's become very important in this book.
The difference between my sister and I is that she is an extreme extrovert. She is right up front and tells you what she feels. I'm the quiet nobody-knows-me type.
I watch my daughter wanting to be like other kids and getting upset that she's not. But I always try and instill in her the idea that she's perfect as she is.
Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it's something to do to pass the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about.
I'll see Naomi Wolf on television periodically, I have nothing against her and what she says, but I'll feel that she's a politician, like she's got an agenda to get across and that she doesn't always say what's really true or exactly what she feels.
I've just returned from my daughter's Halloween parade at grade school. She was supergirl - and she was perfect. And, even better, she still considers boys to be made of kryptonite.
A woman cannot do the thing she ought, which means whatever perfect thing she can, in life, in art, in science, but she fears to let the perfect action take her part and rest there: she must prove what she can do before she does it, -- prate of woman's rights, of woman's mission, woman's function, till the men (who are prating, too, on their side) cry, A woman's function plainly is... to talk. Poor souls, they are very reasonably vexed!
Maybe everything really does just have an expiration date--one that you can't see until she tells you she's leaving, and then she's gone.
Now let me teach you another thing about my daughter. I love her very much but she has the ability to hide as expertly as a sock in a washing machine. No one knows where it goes, just as no one knows where she goes, but at least when she decides to come back, we're all here, waiting for her.
And my daughter said, 'Why are you yelling at us?' and I said, 'I'm trying to discipline you!' And then she looked up at me with her tear-stained eyes and said, 'This is how you teach children, by making them cry.' And it was such a clenching reminder - she won not only the argument, but she won life with that statement. I just burst out laughing, and I think they were so surprised that I burst out laughing, that they did too.
The certainty that she would find what it was she sought just slipped away, until one night she knew there was nothing, no one waiting for her. That no matter how far she walked, how carefully she searched, how much she wanted to find the person she was looking for, she was alone" - The Forgotten Garden
Because mothers make us, because they map our emotional terrain before we even know we are capable of having an emotional terrain, they know just where to stick the dynamite. With a few small power plays - a skeptical comment, the withholding of approval or praise - a mother can devastate a daughter. Decades of subtle undermining can stunt a daughter, or so monopolize her energy that she in effect stunts herself. Muted, fearful, riddled with self-doubt, she can remain trapped in daughterhood forever, the one place she feels confident she knows the rules.
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