A Quote by William Zinsser
One of the saddest sentences I know is "I wish I had asked my mother about that." Or my father. Or my grandmother. Or my grandfather. As every parent knows, our children are not as fascinated by our fascinating lives as we are.
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Even when I became cognizant of this societal problem in this country, I asked my father and my mother if they knew anything that had been passed on to them, about slavery, and my father was very reticent about it. He often said, "No, I don't know anything about it, and it was bad, it was awful and it's over and we want to get on with our lives."
Neither my father or mother, grandfather or grandmother, great grandfather or great grandmother, nor any other relation that I know of, or care a farthing for, has been in England these one hundred and fifty years; so that you see I have not one drop of blood in my veins but what is American.
When we send our children to school, they learn nothing about us other than we used to be cotton pickers. Why, your grandfather was Nat Turner; your grandfather was Toussaint L'Ouverture; your grandfather was Hannibal. It was your grandfather's hands who forged civilization and it was your grandmother's hands who rocked the cradle of civilization. But the textbooks tell our children nothing.
If every parent understood the huge educational benefits and intense happiness brought about by reading aloud to their children, and if every parent- and every adult caring for a child-read aloud a minimum of three stories a day to the children in our lives, we could probably wipe out illiteracy within one generation.
A conscious parent is not one who seeks to fix her child or seek to produce or create the 'perfect' child. This is not about perfection. The conscious parent understands that is journey has been undertaken, this child has been called forth to 'raise the parent' itself. To show the parent where the parent has yet to grow. This is why we call our children into our lives.
My mother and my father were teachers. My grandmother and my grandfather were teachers. This is something I really know about. Even when I was a kid, it was a profession my father couldn't stay in, because he couldn't make enough money.
My grandmother was a flight attendant; my mother had a pilot's license, and my grandfather was a pilot. That's how my grandmother and grandfather met.
We grow because the clamorous, permanent presence of our children forces us to put their needs before ours. We grow because our love for our children urges us to change as nothing else in our lives has the power to do. We grow (if we're willing to grow, that is: not every parent is willing) because being a parent helps us stop being a child.
I wish my mother had left me something about how she felt growing up. I wish my grandmother had done the same. I wanted my girls to know me.
My mother went to a school called 'The Club of the Three Wise Monkeys'. And my grandmother, my father's mother, had a gold charm for her made with the speak no, see no, hear no evil monkeys. And I was fascinated by that charm. I'd sit in my mother's lap and play with it all the time.
I'm part Spanish. My paternal grandfather came from Spain via Singapore to Manila. On my mother's side it's more mixture, with a Filipino mother and a father who was Scotch Irish-French; you know, white American hybrid. And I also have on my father's side a great-great-grandmother who was Chinese. So, I'm a hybrid.
After the fire, when I'd tried to express my gratitude for their kindness to our customers, they'd been awkward, uncomfortable. My father had had to explain to me that giving thanks is not a common practice in India. 'Then how do you know if people appreciated what you did?' I'd asked. 'Do you really need to know?' my father had asked back.
No matter what is happening in our lives, we choose how we wish to think about it. And the greatest gift we give ourselves is often our willingness to change our minds. Despite what might seem to be the saddest and most intractable situation, we have the power to believe that something else is possible, that things can change, that a miracle can happen.
Children that are raised in a home with a married mother and father consistently do better in every measure of well-being than their peers who come from divorced or step-parent, single-parent, cohabiting homes.
My mom was a terrible parent of young children. And thank God - I thank God every time I think of it - I was sent to my paternal grandmother. Ah, but my mother was a great parent of a young adult.
Not only my parents but the whole family was involved in the resistance - my grandfather and grandmother, my uncles and aunts, my cousings of both sexes. So ever so often the police came and took them away, indiscriminately. Well, the fact that they arrested both my father and mother, both my grandfather and grandmother, both an uncle and an aunt, made me accustomed to looking on men and women with the same eyes, on an absolute plane of equality.
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