“Putting down the power right from the whistle would be ugly and brutal, but it would get the job done. He wanted to tell her that, but this was the thing with coaching: you had to step back at exactly the moment you ached to step forward.”
“I figure when my husband comes home from work, if the kids are still alive, then I ve done my job.”
“Yes it s true, you wake the child inside of you up because you re a Mom!”
“Some of the best friends you ll ever meet in your life, you ll meet though your children--mothers and fathers of their friends, parents from school. You ll see. That s the way it was for Bill and me. It s one of the many gifts of parenting.”
“A dam doesn t try to reason with the water. Its main purpose is to hold it still for a while. When I lecture my kids I m doing much the same thing. I m not trying to necessarily reason with them, just hold them still for a short while.”
“Mina wanted some of the kind of love Momma gave to her children, wheere love was the first and deepest thing, and the questions came later and the answers wouldn t matter much measured up against the love.”
“Interesting how fashion is cyclical,” Jaccob said when she came out of the store with two black plastic bags. “Goth was the look when I was young, too.” “It’s not a look,” Chuck said. “I’m just wearing my feelings on the outside.” “Uh huh.” His phone buzzed. “Hang on a second. He rolled up his sleeve to check his HUD, but the call hadn’t come through there. Huh. He had to pick up his phone and check the read-out, which listed a phone number: an old school page. “That’s funny…” “Dad, you’re doing that thing again,” Chuck said. “What thing?” Jaccob asked. “That thing where you have to check every single doohickey you carry around.” “I am not.” Jaccob took his hand out of his coat pocket, where he’d been reaching to check his police scanner or music player (he hadn’t decided which to use first).”
“I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents. Those who do tend to cite the markers that indicate (their own) status in the world: the Stanford degree....Those of us less inclined to compliment ourselves on our parenting skills, in other words most of us, recite rosaries of our failures, our neglects, our derelictions and delinquencies.”
“Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting.”
“As a young father it s important to remember that, when you re at the beach, there s a BIG difference between telling your five year old son to just go pee in the ocean and telling him to get in the water at least waist deep and then pee in the ocean.”