Absent Parent Quotes

God is an absent parent who demands loyalty despite never being around...

Just because your father's present, doesn't mean he isn't absent.

Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.

Books were precious things, meant to be treated well, both because they deserved it and because if she didn't treat them well, her parents might stop buying them for her.

That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word ‘lost’ comes from the old Norse ‘los’ meaning the disbanding of an army…I worry now that people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private life conspire to make it so. A recent article about the return of wildlife to suburbia described snow-covered yards in which the footprints of animals are abundant and those of children are entirely absent. Children seldom roam, even in the safest places… I wonder what will come of placing this generation under house arrest.

No one tells you before you procreate that the hardest thing about being a good parent is that you never feel like one. If you’re absent you’re committing one big mistake, but if you’re present the whole time you commit a million tiny ones, and teenagers keep a count. Oh, how they keep a count.

No parent should have to bury a child ... No mother should have to bury a son. Mothers are not meant to bury sons. It is not in the natural order of things. I buried my son. In a potter's field. In a field of Blood. In empty, acrid silence. There was no funeral. There were no mourners. His friends all absent. His father dead. His sisters refusing to attend. I discovered his body alone, I dug his grave alone, I placed him in a hole, and covered him with dirt and rock alone. I was not able to finish burying him before sundown, and I'm not sure if that affected his fate ... I begrudge God none of this. I do not curse him or bemoan my lot. And though my heart keeps beating only to keep breaking--I do not question why. I remember the morning my son was born as if it was yesterday. The moment the midwife placed him in my arms, I was infused with a love beyond all measure and understanding. I remember holding my son, and looking over at my own mother and saying, "Now I understand why the sun comes up at day and the stars come out at night. I understand why rain falls gently. Now I understand you, Mother" ... I loved my son every day of his life, and I will love him ferociously long after I've stopped breathing. I am a simple woman. I am not bright or learn-ed. I do not read. I do not write. My opinions are not solicited. My voice is not important ... On the day of my son's birth I was infused with a love beyond all measure and understanding ... The world tells me that God is in Heaven and that my son is in Hell. I tell the world the one true thing I know: If my son is in Hell, then there is no Heaven--because if my son sits in Hell, there is no God.

Parents lied to children when they thought it was necessary, or when they thought that it would somehow make things better. It only made sense that children should lie to parents in the same way.

Some kids tell me their parents are never at home. How I wish. I never have a minute to myself, except in my room. Our back yard is no escape. Every time I sit by the pool, Mom is at the kitchen window doing this and that. Always watching.

Mr Babbington,' he said, suddenly stopping in his up and down. 'Take your hands out of your pockets. When did you last write home?' Mr Babbington was at an age when almost any question evokes a guilty response, and this was, in fact, a valid accusation. He reddened, and said, 'I don't know, sir.' 'Think, sir, think,' said Jack, his good-tempered face clouding unexpectedly...'Never, mind. Write a handsome letter. Two pages at least. And send it in to me with your daily workings tomorrow. Give your father my compliments and tell him my bankers are Hoares.' For Jack, like most other captains, managed the youngsters' parental allowance for them. 'Hoares,' he repeated absently once or twice, 'my bankers are Hoares,' and a strangled ugly crowing noise made him turn. Young Ricketts was clinging to the fall of the main burton-tackle in an attempt to control himself, but without much success.

You're a grown man now, Nathan. I'm sorry for any problems you have, but part of being an adult is to stop blaming your parents for whatever shortcomings you have. That's pretty basic.

Of women who choose not to have children, most are undermothered and fear they won’t know how. Sometimes they fear they will “mess up” their kids like they feel they have been messed up. (Although let’s not forget that there are other important reasons someone may choose not to become a parent.)

A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.

The answer to the question ‘How many children do you have?’ and the one to the question ‘How many children are you raising?’ are not identical in all cases: some men are not taking care of their own children, some are knowingly or unknowingly raising other men’s children, and some do not even know that they each have a child, another child, or other children.

There are people in this home- human beings- drowning in their desire for you to look them in the eye. You made this family. And all you have to do is show up and like them. It's called 're-la-ting.' So get over whatever totally-absent-buying-your affection parenting that you received and get here, man- because this is your LIFE and you're just pissing it away!

We want desperately to believe that every mother falls in love with her baby at first sight and that the complexity of relationships, so evident elsewhere as part of the human condition, is totally absent from the connection between mother and child.

If you complain about how you spend your Saturdays taking your kid to birthday parties, that means you are taking your kid to birthday parties. If you complain about how hard it is to get your kid to read, it means you are trying to get your kid to read. If you are complaining about your kid not helping around the house, that means you have a fat, lazy kid. You joke about it. That’s how you deal. If parents don’t like being a parent, they don’t talk about being a parent. They are absent. And probably out having a great time somewhere.

You think of dead lakes overflowing with corpses, of police stations where the rich lock up the poor, of palaces where those who follow orders torture those who refuse to. You think of distraught lovers, abandoned friends and absent parents. Of lapsed treaties and photographs that are seen and forgotten, regardless of the walls they hang on. How the world will go on without you and forget you were even here. You think of the mother, the old man and the dog, of the things you did, or failed to do, for the ones you loved. You think about evil causes and about worthy ones. That the chances of violence ending violence are one in nothing, one in nada, one in squat.

Yet I’ve also found common ground sharing my story with people who, while not adopted, have distant or absent parents. Some of them, too, seek reconnection and reunion, with complicated results. A year or two after I met my birth father, I became friends with a woman who had grown up without her father, only to look for him as an adult. She seemed to understand and relate to my story as much as a fellow adoptee might.

It’s hard to see that what’s NOT THERE can be more important than what IS there. She had no idea that between her absent father and preoccupied mother, no one had taken the time and energy to actually parent her.

A child can also feel emotional distress when the parent is physically present but emotionally unavailable. Even adults know that kind of pain when someone important to us is bodily present but psychologically absent.

Frequently I go to conferences and listen to speakers decry the absent father as somehow a new phenomenon. Though their recriminations against absent or emotionally distant fathers are generally meant to help society, at the same time they are built on a lie that evolution disproves generation after generation. Fathers have often gone to war, or the long hunt on the savannah, or to work in another village or city. But only in the last decade or so have manhood and fathering been trashed completely.

There is something about being loved and protected by a parent (or guardian) knowing that I can be loved for who I am, not what I can do, or might one day become. Unfortunately it’s not usually like this in every single situation. From time to time, my parents made mistakes during my childhood. Possibly I was the mistake, or unwanted. But I don’t know. I had every material thing that I could have ever wanted, but there was still something missing, as if I felt distanced from my parents, or misunderstood, in the ways that they treated me. At times, I had felt completely loved and accepted by my parents, but for one reason or another, they were unable to care for me, provide for me, in some ways that would have been very important. Sometimes I feel like I am trying to make up for the experiences in life that were absent when I was a child.

enlightened geriatric professionals told me that physical therapy had benefits, even absent improvement,

The absence of a parent plays the role of a parent.

With emotionally immature parents, they have trained you to either give too much or too little,

Hes that kind of man. Every few years he sends news of where he is, and he even turned up on the doorstep unannounced once or twice when we were still at school. He's not a bad person, just a flighty one.

I mean imagine that shit. You bust your ass as a single parent, and your kid treats the absentee parent like a rock star. But love is like water and it slides over the smooth places. Sinks into the cracks.

Other attempts appear as scars, weals, parentheses in conversation, absent days in his diary. But, at the same time, according to Stuart's weird sense of etiquette on such subjects, only one son in a family is allowed to kill himself, else it puts too much strain on the parents, and his brother, Gavvy, like Jacob in the Old Testament, has stolen Stuart's birthright.

9. Your Photo Album Many people have a photo album. In it they keep memories of the happiest of times. There may be a photo of them playing by the beach when they were very young. There may be the picture with their proud parents at their graduation ceremony. There will be many shots of their wedding that captures their love at one of its highest points. And there will be holiday snapshots too. But you will never find in your album any photographs of miserable moments of your life. Absent is the photo of you outside the principal’s office at school. Missing is any photo of you studying hard late into the night for your exams. No one that I know has a picture of their divorce in their album, nor one of them in a hospital bed terribly sick, nor stuck in busy traffic on the way to work on a Monday morning! Such depressing shots never find their way into anyone’s photo album. Yet there is another photo album that we keep in our heads called our memory. In that album, we include so many negative photographs. There you find so many snapshots of insulting arguments, many pictures of the times when you were so badly let down, and several montages of the occasions where you were treated cruelly. There are surprisingly few photos in that album of happy moments. This is crazy! So let’s do a purge of the photo album in our head. Delete the uninspiring memories. Trash them. They do not belong in this album. In their place, put the same sort of memories that you have in a real photo album. Paste in the happiness of when you made up with your partner, when there was that unexpected moment of real kindness, or whenever the clouds parted and the sun shone with extraordinary beauty. Keep those photos in your memory. Then when you have a few spare moments, you will find yourself turning its pages with a smile, or even with laughter.

children in an industrial society are “time trained”—they learn to read the clock, and they learn to distinguish even quite small slices of time, as when their parents tell them, “You’ve only got three more minutes till bedtime!” These sharply honed temporal skills are often absent in slower-moving agrarian societies that require less precision in daily scheduling than our time-obsessed society.

We’ve never been a close family, so I’ve never been able to see him as much more than an absent provider who’s going through the motions for the sake of his family.” “It’s not easy,” Jende said, shaking his head as he turned onto Elm Street, where the dentist’s office was located. “Who is it not easy for?” “For you, for your father, for every child, every parent, for everybody. It’s just not easy, this life here in this world.

This is when I forgave my parents. This big secret that was not ready to reveal itself was the reason my parents had sent us here. This colossal secret was the reason my parents had been absent from their children, had never talked too much, but clearly had plenty to give. This is when I forgave my parents. On the remainder of our silent journey to the island, my soul was anything but mute. This is when I mourned the death of Murdoch and Elizabeth Benedict for the first time.

It may feel awkward at first, and there may be any number of obstacles. In addition to the obstructions that arise as we inch into this inner mothering, we may be stopped before we start by a discounting voice (a critical parent or protector most likely) saying, “This is ridiculous.” Its tactic is to deny the need. “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.” “It wasn’t that bad. Just buck up.” Here is where being aware of parts comes as an advantage. Only if we can recognize that this is a part speaking up—a part that has an agenda—will we have a choice to bracket these thoughts and move forward with our intention. One of the next barriers we may face is a feeling of inadequacy. If you were not well mothered, you can easily feel that you haven’t a clue how to do it. You’re uncomfortable, you don’t know what to say or do, and you feel phony trying what doesn’t come naturally. This is enough to stop you right here. If you succeed in making an authentic connection with the undermothered parts within yourself, you may be struck by a sense of guilt that you have inadvertently continued the abandonment by not showing up earlier. No one likes to feel the sharp pain of causing harm to another. And just as I’ve mentioned earlier that a mother may unconsciously keep a distance from a child so as not to arouse her own hurt, you may feel that opening up the locked-away pain in your heart is too high a price to pay for reconnecting with child parts inside you.

Tradition has it that late in life Epictetus retired from teaching introduction and withdrew to the peace and quiet of family life, under conditions imposed by old age: that is, he became a parent by adopting rather than fathering a child, and took into his home a female servant to serve as a kind of surrogate mother to the child and domestic servant for himself. That he had absented himself from family life for so long shows that he regarded philosophy as a jealous mistress who demanded practically all his time and attention, which family life would not allow. That this renunciation of family life represented a real sacrifice is suggested by the fact that he took to it immediately upon retiring. He evidently thought he had earned the comforts of home after devoting most of his life to improving the lives of others – the successive generations of students who had passed through his school. We have no more news of Epictetus beyond this. After creating this version of a family he was evidently content to settle into it and live out the balance of his years in obscurity.

generally speaking, there are two simplified categories that parenting falls into: intrusive or neglectful caretaking. Parents were either overinvolved—telling us what to do, think, and feel—or they were underinvolved—physically or emotionally absent. These challenges are across the spectrum from subtle to severe. As a response, we become anxious and self-absorbed, losing our capacity for empathy. We become the walking wounded in a battlefield of injured soldiers. For the child who experienced intrusive parents, in later years, she becomes an isolator, a person who unconsciously pushes others away. She keeps people at a distance because she needs to have “a lot of space” around her; she wants the freedom to come and go as she pleases; she thinks independently, speaks freely, processes her emotions internally, and proudly dons her self-reliant attitude. All the while underneath this cool exterior is a two-year-old girl who was not allowed to satisfy her natural need for independence. When she marries, her need to be a distinct “self” will be on the top of her hidden agenda.

These memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as sorrow - a vast, inapprehensible melancholy. Once we had such desires - but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us. In the barracks they called forth a rebellious, wild craving for their return; for then they were still bound to us, we belonged to them and they to us, even though we were already absent from them. They appeared in the soldiers' songs which we sang as we marched between the glow of the dawn and the black silhouettes of the forests to drill on the moor, they were a powerful remembrance that was in us and came from us. But here in the trenches they are completely lost to us. They arise no more; we are dead and they stand remote on the horizon, they are a mysterious reflection, an apparition, that haunts us, that we fear and love without hope. They are strong and our desire is strong - but they are unattainable, and we know it. And even if these scenes of our youth were given back to us we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might be amongst them and move in them; we might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in the memory; but the man himself it is not. We could never regain the old intimacy with those scenes. It was not any recognition of their beauty and their significance that attracted us, but the communion, the feeling of a comradeship with the things and events of our existence, which cut us off and made the world of our parents a thing incomprehensible to us--for then we surrendered ourselves to events and were lost in them, and the least little thing was enough to carry us down the stream of eternity. Perhaps it was only the privilege of our youth, but as yet we recognised no limits and saw nowhere an end. We had that thrill of expectation in the blood which united us with the course of our days. To-day we would pass through the scenes of our youth like travellers. We are burnt up by hard facts; like tradesmen we understand distinctions, and like butchers, necessities. We are no longer untroubled--we are indifferent. We might exist there; but should we really live there? We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial - I believe we are lost.

Their stillness is the reason why these memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as sorrow—a vast, inapprehensible melancholy. Once we had such desires—but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us. In the barracks they called forth a rebellious, wild craving for their return; for then they were still bound to us, we belonged to them and they to us, even though we were already absent from them. They appeared in the soldiers’ songs which we sang as we marched between the glow of the dawn and the black silhouettes of the forests to drill on the moor, they were a powerful remembrance that was in us and came from us. But here in the trenches they are completely lost to us. They arise no more; we are dead and they stand remote on the horizon, they are a mysterious reflection, an apparition, that haunts us, that we fear and love without hope. They are strong and our desire is strong—but they are unattainable, and we know it. And even if these scenes of our youth were given back to us we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might be amongst them and move in them; we might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in the memory; but the man himself it is not. We could never regain the old intimacy with those scenes. It was not any recognition of their beauty and their significance that attracted us, but the communion, the feeling of a comradeship with the things and events of our existence, which cut us off and made the world of our parents a thing incomprehensible to us—for then we surrendered ourselves to events and were lost in them, and the least little thing was enough to carry us down the stream of eternity.

The attempt to define free will is the granddaddy of these pointless quests. We understand what it is to be coerced. It is to be a prisoner frog-marched down a hill. Coercion is something tangible. Freedom is the absence of coercion, nothing more. Events from childhood do not coerce our personalities in adulthood. We are not frog-marched by parental spankings at age six into being guilt-ridden thirty-year-olds. Our genes do not coerce our adulthood. Unlike spankings, they have a substantial statistical effect on our personality, but we are not frog-marched into being alcoholics even if our biological parents are alcoholics. Even having the genetic predisposition, there are tactics we can adopt to avoid alcoholism. We can, for example, shun drinking altogether. There are many more teetotal people with alcoholic parents than you would expect there to be by chance alone. Absent coercion, we are free. Freedom of the will, choice, the possibility of change, mean nothing more-absolutely nothing more than the absence of coercion. This means simply that we are free to change many things about ourselves. Indeed, the main facts of this book—that depressives often become nondepressives, that lifelong panickers become panic free, that impotent men become potent again, that adults reject the sex role they were raised with, that alcoholics become abstainers—demonstrate this. None of this means that therapists, parents, genes, good advice, and even dyspepsia do not influence what we do. None of this denies that there are limits on how much we can change. It only means that we are not prisoners.

Perhaps 80 percent of enslaved children were born to two-parent families—though the mother and father might live on different plantations—but in extant slave-traders’ records of those sold, according to Michael Tadman’s analysis, “complete nuclear families were almost totally absent.” About a quarter of those trafficked southward were children between eight and fifteen, purchased away from their families. The majority of coffle prisoners were male: boys who would never again see their mothers, men who would never again see wives and children. But there were women and girls in the coffles, too—exposed, as were enslaved women everywhere, to the possibility of sexual violation from their captors. The only age bracket in which females outnumbered males in the trade was twelve to fifteen, when they were as able as the boys to do field labor, and could also bear children.

Before he went away, he had heard all about the self-made girl, and there was something in the picture that strongly impressed him. She was possible doutbless only in America; American life had smoothed the way for her. She was not fast, nor emancipated, nor crude, nor loud, and there wasn’t in her, of necessity at least, a grain of the stuff of which the adventuress is made. She was simply very successful, and her success was entirely personal. She hadn’t been born with the silver spoon of social opportunity, she had grasped it by honest exertion. You knew her by many different signs, but chiefly, infallibly, by the appearance of her parents. It was her parents who told her story; you always saw how little her parents could have made her. Her attitude with regard to them might vary in different ways. As the great fact on her own side was that she had lifted herself from a lower social plane, done it all herself, and done it by the simple lever of her personality, it was naturally to be expected that she would leave the authors of her mere material being in the shade. (…) But the general characteristic of the self-made girl was that, though it was frequently understood that she was privately devoted to her kindred, she never attempted to impose them on society, and it was striking that, though in some of her manifestations a bore, she was at her worst less of a bore than they. They were almost always solemn and portentous, and they were for the most part of a deathly respectability. She wasn’t necessarily snobbish, unless it was snobbish to want the best. She didn’t cringe, she didn’t make herself smaller than she was, she took on the contrary a stand of her own and attracted things to herself. Naturally she was possible only in America, only in a country where whole ranges of competition and comparison were absent.

I can't bear to look at the screen itself, the women in pastels, like so many Jordan almonds. The men in suits, wearing equally angelic expressions. Members just like men, ostensibly. Who have vowed to be obedient to God's laws, and to repent of their sins. They've promised to be honest, true, chaste, benevolent, and virtuous; they've promised to be hopeful, and to endure all things, to seek after what is lovely, of good report, or praiseworthy. Only then will God provide a lasting solution to their loneliness and frustration. I imagine they comfort themselves, like I do, with the game of "wouldn't it be worse." Wouldn't it be worse to have a sick child, ailing parents, or a flesh-eating virus? Wouldn't it be lonelier to be trapped in a dying marriage, scarier to have crippling financial problems or to spend one's retirement fund on failed in vitro treatments? Wouldn't it be worse to live a life absent of faith, absent of purpose, absent of the love of God? I imagine they tell themselves, like I do, that a soul-crushing loneliness is a small price to pay, given the big picture. Everyone suffers. Loneliness is the human condition. And after the tests of our faith, we will triumph.

Would you be willing to tell me how the ladies came to be here? I mean, who are they?” Ian drew a long, impatient breath, tipped his head back, and absently massaged the muscles at the back of his neck. “I met Elizabeth a year and a half ago at a party. She’d just made her debut, was already betrothed to some unfortunate nobleman, and was eager to test her wiles on me.” “Test her wiles on you? I thought you said she was engaged to another.” Sighing irritably at his friend’s naiveté, Ian said curtly, “Debutantes are a different breed from any women you’ve known. Twice a year their mamas bring them to London to make their debut. They’re paraded about during the Season like horses at an auction, then their parents sell them as wives to whoever bids the highest. The winning bidder is selected by the expedient measure of choosing whoever has the most important title and the most money.” “Barbaric!” said Jake indignantly. Ian shot him an ironic look. “Don’t waste your pity. It suits them perfectly. All they want from marriage is jewels, gowns, and the freedom to have discreet liaisons with whomever they please, once they produce the requisite heir. They’ve no notion of fidelity or honest human feeling.” Jake’s brows lifted at that.

When that happens, when you make 'eye contact', it kills you. It kills you and it kills anybody who thinks like you. Physical distance doesn't matter, it's about mental proximity. Anybody with the same ideas, anybody in the same head space. It kills your collaborators, your whole research team. It kills your parents; it kills your children. You become absent humans, human-shaped shells surrounding holes in reality. And when it's done, your project is a hole in the ground, and nobody knows what SCP-3125 is anymore. It is a black hole in antimemetic science, consuming unwary researchers and yielding no information, only detectable through indirect observation. A true description of what SCP-3125 is, or even an allusion to what it is, constitutes a containment breach and a lethal indirect cognitohazard. Do you see? It's a defense mechanism. This information-swallowing behaviour is just the outer layer, the poison coating. It protects the entity from discovery while it infests our reality. And as years pass, the manifestations will continue, growing denser and knitting together… until the whole world is drowning in them, and everybody will be screaming 'Why did nobody realise what was happening?' And nobody will answer, because everybody who realised was killed, by this system… Do you see it, Marion? See it now.

Be a Listener When words are many, sin is not absent, but he who holds his tongue is wise. —PROVERBS 10:19     I’ve heard it said that God gave us two ears and only one mouth because He wants us to listen twice as much as we speak. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never had to apologize for something I haven’t said. It’s much easier and really more natural for us to speak rather than listen. We have to learn to listen. It takes discipline to keep from talking. As a parent, spouse, sibling, or friend, we need to be known as good listeners. And while listening, we’d do well to remember that there are always two sides to every story. Postpone any judgment until you’ve heard all the evidence—then wait some more. Eleanor Roosevelt, in one of her many speeches, stated, “A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all-knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.” Our Scripture verse talks to us about being more of a listener than a talker. Too many words can lead to putting one’s foot in one’s mouth. The more we speak, the greater the chance of being offensive. The wise person will restrain her speech. Listening seldom gets us into trouble, but our mouths certainly cause transgressions. When others realize that you are a true listener, they will tell you important matters. They will open up about their lives and their dreams. They will entrust you with a bit of themselves and their hearts. Never violate that trust. You have the best model possible in your relationship with God. Without fail, He listens to your every need and hope. Prayer: Father God, thank You for giving me two good ears to hear. Hold my tongue when I want to lash out. I want to be a better hearer. Amen.  

You might expect that if you spent such an extended period in twelve different households, what you would gather is twelve different ideas about how to raise children: there would be the strict parents and the lax parents and the hyperinvolved parents and the mellow parents and on and on. What Lareau found, however, is something much different. There were only two parenting “philosophies,” and they divided almost perfectly along class lines. The wealthier parents raised their kids one way, and the poorer parents raised their kids another way. The wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children’s free time, shuttling them from one activity to the next, quizzing them about their teachers and coaches and teammates. One of the well-off children Lareau followed played on a baseball team, two soccer teams, a swim team, and a basketball team in the summer, as well as playing in an orchestra and taking piano lessons. That kind of intensive scheduling was almost entirely absent from the lives of the poor children. Play for them wasn’t soccer practice twice a week. It was making up games outside with their siblings and other kids in the neighborhood. What a child did was considered by his or her parents as something separate from the adult world and not particularly consequential. One girl from a working-class family—Katie Brindle—sang in a choir after school. But she signed up for it herself and walked to choir practice on her own. Lareau writes: What Mrs. Brindle doesn’t do that is routine for middle-class mothers is view her daughter’s interest in singing as a signal to look for other ways to help her develop that interest into a formal talent. Similarly Mrs. Brindle does not discuss Katie’s interest in drama or express regret that she cannot afford to cultivate her daughter’s talent. Instead she frames Katie’s skills and interests as character traits—singing and acting are part of what makes Katie “Katie.” She sees the shows her daughter puts on as “cute” and as a way for Katie to “get attention.

During the second half of the sixties, the center of the crisis shifted to the sprawling ghettos of the North. Here black experience was radically different from that in the South. The stability of institutional relationships was largely absent in Northern ghettos, especially among the poor. Over twenty years ago, the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier was able to see the brutalizing effect of urbanization upon lower class blacks : ". . . The bonds of sympathy and community of interests that held their parents together in the rural environment have been unable to withstand the disintegrating forces in the city." Southern blacks migrated North in search of work, seeking to become transformed from a peasantry into a working class. But instead of jobs they found only misery, and far from becoming a proletariat, they came to constitute a lumpenproletariat, an underclass of rejected people. Frazier's prophetic words resound today with terrifying precision: ". . . As long as the bankrupt system of Southern agriculture exists, Negro families will continue to seek a living in the towns and cities of the country. They will crowd the slum areas of Southern cities or make their way to Northern cities, where their family life will become disrupted and their poverty will force them to depend upon charity." Out of such conditions, social protest was to emerge in a form peculiar to the ghetto, a form which could never have taken root in the South except in such large cities as Atlanta or Houston. The evils in the North are not easy to understand and fight against, or at least not as easy as Jim Crow, and this has given the protest from the ghetto a special edge of frustration. There are few specific injustices, such as a segregated lunch counter, that offer both a clear object of protest and a good chance of victory. Indeed, the problem in the North is not one of social injustice so much as the results of institutional pathology. Each of the various institutions touching the lives of urban blacks—those relating to education, health, employment, housing, and crime—is in need of drastic reform. One might say that the Northern race problem has in good part become simply the problem of the American city—which is gradually becoming a reservation for the unwanted, most of whom are black.

In Separation, the second volume of his great trilogy on attachment, John Bowlby described what had been observed when ten small children in residential nurseries were reunited with their mothers after separations lasting from twelve days to twenty-one weeks. The separations were in every case due to family emergencies and the absence of other caregivers, and in no case due to any intent on the parents’ part to abandon the child. In the first few days following the mother's departure the children were anxious, looking everywhere for the missing parent. That phase was followed by apparent resignation, even depression on the part of the child, to be replaced by what seemed like the return of normalcy. The children would begin to play, react to caregivers, accept food and other nurturing. The true emotional cost of the trauma of loss became evident only when the mothers returned. On meeting the mother for the first time after the days or weeks away, every one of the ten children showed significant alienation. Two seemed not to recognize their mothers. The other eight turned away or even walked away from her. Most of them either cried or came close to tears; a number alternated between a tearful and an expressionless face. The withdrawal dynamic has been called “detachment” by John Bowlby. Such detachment has a defensive purpose. It has one meaning: so hurtful was it for me to experience your absence that to avoid such pain again, I will encase myself in a shell of hardened emotion, impervious to love — and therefore to pain. I never want to feel that hurt again. Bowlby also pointed out that the parent may be physically present but emotionally absent owing to stress, anxiety, depression, or preoccupation with other matters. From the point of view of the child, it hardly matters. His encoded reactions will be the same, because for him the real issue is not merely the parent's physical presence but her or his emotional accessibility. A child who suffers much insecurity in his relationship with his parents will adopt the invulnerability of defensive detachment as his primary way of being. When parents are the child's working attachment, their love and sense of responsibility will usually ensure that they do not force the child into adopting such desperate measures. Peers have no such awareness, no such compunctions, and no such responsibility. The threat of abandonment is ever present in peer-oriented interactions, and it is with emotional detachment that children automatically respond. No wonder, then, that cool is the governing ethic in peer culture, the ultimate virtue. Although the word cool has many meanings, it predominately connotes an air of invulnerability. Where peer orientation is intense, there is no sign of vulnerability in the talk, in the walk, in the dress, or in the attitudes.

A recent article about the return of wildlife to suburbia described snow-covered yards in which the footprints of animals are abundant and those of children are entirely absent. As far as the animals are concerned, the suburbs are an abandoned landscape, and so they roam with confidence. Children seldom roam, even in the safest places. Because of their parents’ fear of the monstrous things that might happen (and do happen, but rarely), the wonderful things that happen as a matter of course are stripped away from them. For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back. I wonder what will come of placing this generation under house arrest.

Because he is bereft of any coherent ideology and largely immune to any of the norms of good character, Donald Trump is, in many respects, a perfect example of how capitalism, absent the extra-rational dogmas of morality, creates creatures of pure appetite, guided only by the most rudimentary software of human nature. He cares about sex and power, dominating others, and having his status affirmed. He puts family above all other considerations, but defines the family’s interests in terms of wealth and dynastic glory. He views others as instruments of his will whose value is measured in their loyalty to him, a loyalty that is rarely reciprocated. When asked what sacrifices he made comparable to those of parents who lost a child in war, he couldn’t even name any sacrifice at all.42 He is a knight, in the Nietzschean sense, and he makes his own morality.

What is it that a child learns who is subjected to abuse? The answer is simple; lots of stuff, very little of which is helpful for later adaptive functioning. They learn that the world is dangerous, unpredictable, harsh, rejecting, and unresponsive. The punitive voices, to which they are exposed, get internalized as their own. They quickly learn that bad and painful things happen because they are “bad.” Therefore, if they were better, such things perhaps would not occur. They learn to blame themselves for the pain in their lives. A little kid will never have the following conversation in their head: “It’s a shame that Mom and Dad are bi-products of dysfunctional family conditions in their own childhoods. Their behavior towards me is a byproduct of their unconscious reactivity to unfortuitous conditioning events that took place in their own lives, and that I serve to reactivate painful conflicts and emotions stemming from their own early development!” I am quite certain that this conversation or its equivalent has never taken place in a child’s head. On the contrary, children blame themselves for the negative circumstances that occur in their lives. They learn to feel that “If I was bigger, stronger, smarter, prettier, or whatever, then such things would not occur.” The child learns that their lack of acceptance by their parents must be a function of their own unworthiness and thus strive to become something “better” in order to gain the love and security that is otherwise absent.

That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word “lost” comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private space conspire to make it so. A recent article about the return of wildlife to suburbia described snow-covered yards in which the footprints of animals are abundant and those of children are entirely absent. As far as the animals are concerned, the suburbs are an abandoned landscape, and so they roam with confidence. Children seldom roam, even in the safest places. Because of their parents’ fear of the monstrous things that might happen (and do happen, but rarely), the wonderful things that happen as a matter of course are stripped away from them. For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back. I wonder what will come of placing this generation under house arrest.

There are people─ in your home─ human beings─ drowning in their desire for you to look them in the eye. You made this family. And all you have to do is to show up and like them. It's called 'relating'. So get over whatever totally-absent-buying-your-affection parenting that you received and get here, man─ because this is your LIFE and you're just pissing it away.

They behave towards their therapists as they perceive themselves to have been treated by their absent parents. They make their therapists feel very fully what it is like to be discarded, ignored, despised, helpless or even unreal and non-existent. (...) What needs to be understood in such situations is not that the child is perceiving the therapist as the insufficiently caring parent of his past experiences and revenging himself. Beyond this the child is also reversing the original situation. This time the child is identifying himself as the cruel, rejecting but powerful person and it is the therapist who is to feel rejected, hurt, helpless and…to feel the pangs of betrayal of trust and affection. In such situations the therapist cannot become genuinely trustworthy in the child’s eyes until experience has shown that he has the strength to contain the projections of the feelings that the child finds intolerable.

Maturation in the psychological realm involves the differentiation of the elements of consciousness — thoughts, feelings, impulses, values, opinions, preferences, interests, intentions, aspirations. Differentiation needs to happen before these elements of consciousness can be mixed to produce tempered experience and expression. It is the same in the realm of relationships: maturation requires that the child first becomes unique and separate from other individuals. The better differentiated she becomes, the more she is able to mix with others without losing her sense of self. More fundamentally, a sense of self first needs to separate from inner experience, a capacity entirely absent in the young child. The child has to be able to know that she is not identical with whatever feeling happens to be active in her at any particular moment. She can feel something without her actions being necessarily dominated by that feeling. She can be aware of other, conflicting feelings, or of thoughts, values, commitments that might run counter to the feeling of the moment. She can choose. Both Peter and Sarah lacked a relationship with themselves because this prerequisite division had not yet occurred. They were not given to reflecting on their inner experience, agreeing or disagreeing with themselves, approving or disapproving of what they saw within. Because their feelings and thoughts were not differentiated enough to withstand mixing, they were capable of only one feeling or impulse at a time. Neither of them was given to statements like “Part of me feels this way and part of me feels that way.” Neither of them had “on the other hand” kind of experiences, nor felt ambivalent about erupting in frustration or about avoiding things. Without the capacity for reflection, they were defined by the inner experience of the moment. They immediately acted out whatever emotions arose in them. They could be their inner experience but they could not see it. This inability made them impulsive, egocentric, reactive, and impatient. Because frustration did not mix with caring, they had no patience. Because anger did not mix with love, they showed no forgiveness. Because frustration did not mix with either fear or affection, they lost their tempers. In short, they lacked maturity.

Where the parents are not 'good enough' the rest of the programme for life may be distorted and later stages in the archetypal sequence may fail to be realized. Thus, the boy whose father was inadequate or absent may fail to actualize his masculine potential sufficiently to establish the social or vocational role his talents equip him for, or he may be unable to sustain a relationship with a member of the opposite sex long enough for him to become an adequate husband or father himself.

When we are preoccupied with the past or worried about the future, we are physically present with our children but are mentally absent.

But of all the men in my life, it is my godfather, ‘Uncle Offs’, the man to whom this book is dedicated, who made the biggest impact on my upbringing. While he was technically just a family friend, he has played a greater role in my life than many parents do in the lives of their own children. He was so close to my parents, and loved me and my siblings so much, that when my mum got cancer he agreed to let us live with him if she died, despite the fact that he had three children of his own and lived on a council estate in Hackney. I often wonder where men like my Uncle Offs fit in to the stereotype of the supposedly ubiquitously absent black father.

You think of dead lakes overflowing with corpses, of police stations where the rich lock up the poor, of palaces where those who follow orders torture those who refuse to. You think of distraught lovers, abandoned friends and absent parents. Of lapsed treaties and photographs that are seen and forgotten, regardless of the walls they hang on.

We made it. As a group, my friends and I have endured parents who are abusive, absent, and drug-addicted. We’ve survived would-be rapists, devious cunts, homophobic assholes, jealous exes, dickheads, petty bitches, douche nuggets, and a disgusting pimp. We’ve braved being the scholarship kid, coming out, screwing up, and baring our truths. We’ve dealt with kidnappings, heinous trickery, a car accident, parents’ illnesses and death, assaults, and even murder. And we’re leaving this place stronger than ever, ready to take on the world outside of River Rock and Rosehaven Academy.

Kakugawa knew that Barry “was going through a tough time” that spring and was experiencing a lot of “inner turmoil,” but “it wasn’t a race thing . . . Barry’s biggest struggles then were missing his parents. His biggest struggles were his feelings of abandonment. The idea that his biggest struggle was race is bullshit.” The crux of what his friend was wrestling with was “the hurt he felt about being abandoned by his mother” on top of his long-absent father.

The concept of internalization helps us understand what kids need to separate successfully; kids literally have to “take in” something from a parent so they can hold on to the good feelings of the relationship even when a parent says goodbye. English pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott introduced the idea that children create a mental representation of the parent-child relationship so that they can access the feelings of the relationship even when a parent is absent. Transitional objects help children with this process; a blanket or stuffed animal or object from home becomes a physical representation of the parent-child bond, reminding a child that parents still exist and are “there” for you even when they are not right in front of you. I always recommend transitional objects to parents whose kids struggle with separation anxiety—they are a way to help make tricky transitions feel more manageable. After all, to ease separation anxiety, we have to help kids “hold on to us” in our absence.

On a cloudy day, the sun is not absent; it is merely obscured by the clouds. To experience the sun, we don’t need to manufacture a new sun in front of the clouds. When the clouds part, the sun will be there, shining brightly.

The notion of sharing attention and time is the most difficult for young children… involve your child as much as possible and activities that do not center around him. When a classmate is absent from school for an extended period of time, have your only child call to find out how he is feeling and send a get well card. Have your child offer to bring his assignments home to him or to call him each day after school to keep the homebound student up to date.

Your mother doesn't know these things,” he said, a note of pleading in his voice. "She has always been that way. She is an artist. Her feet barely touch the ground. I've been the one to keep her tethered to the earth. And now it's your job. And you're too young, and it's not fair, but there it is." He was right. It wasn't fair.

I know how he feels. My dad's alcoholism is the reason I haven't lived with him since I was eleven. It's the reason uncle Jim thought it would be better if I lived with him and Jane. Here's the thing about alcoholism. It's destructive on many levels and to many degrees. While Jane uses it to dampen her feelings, the depression, the inadequacy; my dad was a partier. He used it to turn himself into the person he wanted to be. The person he thought other people wanted him to be. The problem was he forgot who he was when he was sober and embraced the drunk version instead. And when that happened, I never saw my real dad again. He was absent. The drunk dad pursued people and a lifestyle and forgot to be a parent. It's not that he's forgotten about me altogether. I still talk to him about once a year. Does he love me? Sure. Is he good at showing it? Not at all. That's life. I've accepted it.

The Still-Face paradigm shows viscerally that within seconds of a child perceiving their parent to be disengaged and emotionally absent, they start to feel distress and attempt to reengage the parent. But when these efforts fail, the infant disengages and emotionally withdraws. Imagine the impact on a developing child if that is a continuous experience. A cold, disengaged, partially attentive caregiver can have immediate, and potentially lifelong, toxic effects on the developing child. This child may grow up feeling inadequate, unlovable. Even with many gifts and skills, they will feel they are “not enough” as an adult, and that can lead to a host of maladaptive behaviors including unhealthy forms of attention seeking, self-sabotaging, or even self-destructive behavior.

The Ballad of Robin Goodfellow is a rhymed version of this same life story, but adds a few additional details. From the outset, it admits that it is King Oberon, touring human houses for entertainment at night, who is attracted to the “comely lass.” He seduces this “lovely damsel… so courteous, meek and mild” but she does not know his identity. The midwife who attends her son’s birth suspects the truth, though, especially when the absent father supplies the new mother with “store of linen… With dainty cates and choised fare /He served her like a lady.” Robin learns of his father’s true nature when he awakes one day to find a scroll beside him which promises to teach him all his parent’s “mysterious skill.

Mom would take me to church and say, Can you feel it, baby girl? Isn't it glorious? I tried to feel it. I did, I swear. I reached for it, squeezed my eyes shut as tight as I could and begged for it. I pretended I was stretching my hands out into the darkness behind my eyelids, fingers splayed wide, trying to find even the barest touch of something out there in the abyss. To feel the warmth Mom always assured me was waiting once I accepted God into my heart. There was nothing. Always nothing. Maybe that's how it's supposed to be. Maybe you're not supposed to feel that touch-maybe it's always been a metaphor. God is an absent parent who demands loyalty despite never coming around, and I just have to keep throwing my prayers into nothing and trust He gets them. Or maybe I am just too broken to feel Him in the first place.

It was an act of God, many alleged, that the three Saltwood children were absent when assassins struck. They were trekking in the Great Karroo with a Hottentot family, gathering ostrich plumes for sale in Paris. When they returned, their parents were already buried, and there was heated discussion as to what should happen to them. Some said they should be freighted down to Grahamstown on the next wagon heading south, but word was received that they were not wanted there. So there was some talk of sending them along to LMS headquarters in Cape Town, but they already had a flood of Coloured orphans and abandoned children. It would be quite improper to ship them off to England, where their ancestry would damn them. Put simply, there was no place for them. No one felt any responsibility for the offspring of what from the start had been a disastrous marriage. So the children were left with the Hottentots with whom they had hunted ostrich plumes. For a few years they would be special, for the older ones could read and write, but as time passed and the necessity for marriage arrived, they would slide imperceptibly into that amorphous, undigestible mass of people called Coloured.

Like the market, conjugal society, consisting of marriage and family, is not the creation of the state. It is a pre-political institution, rooted in sex difference and procreation. Given the pre-political nature of conjugal society, the state regulates it rightly by recognizing it as a natural fact with its own norms and purposes. The state ought not treat conjugal society as its own creation. Where there is evidence that parents are failing in their duties to each other or to their children, the state may intervene. Absent this, however, the state ought to leave conjugal society, rooted in the union of one man and one woman, alone.

If you complain about how you spend your Saturdays taking your kid to birthday parties, that means you are taking your kid to birthday parties. If you complain about how hard it is to get your kid to read, it means you are trying to get your kid to read. If you are complaining about your kid not helping around the house, that means you have a fat, lazy kid. You joke about it. That’s how you deal. If parents don’t like being a parent, they don’t talk about being a parent. They are absent. And probably out having a great time somewhere. I have done extensive research and, almost universally, found that the people who view my blurbs and observations as “anti-family” are dicks. Failing and laughing at your own shortcomings are the hallmarks of a sane parent. When you are handed your screaming newborn for the first time, you are simultaneously handed a license for gallows humor. The guy who invented the phrase “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” probably had a baby. And, for a moment, probably contemplated throwing the baby out.

Shonsu, les dieux te sont reconnaissants ! Ta récompense sera fantastique : une vie longue et heureuse, du pouvoir et de grandes réalisations. (Il ricana.) Et de l'amour, évidemment ! Tu gouverneras lorsque Nnanji sera absent. Tu traceras la carte de ce monde et tu verras les cercles se refermer. Tu imposeras le sens de la justice à Katanji, la raison à Thana et la miséricorde à Nnanji. Tu voyageras à travers le Monde en tant qu'ambassadeur et tu chevaucheras au côté de l'empereur quand il retournera à Hann pour remercier la Déesse et saluer ses parents. » Les autres connaîtront gloire et honneur, mais tu gagneras l'amour du Peuple. Et quand l'heure de ta mort sonnera enfin, tes petits-enfants seront près de toi, une foule immense tiendra une veillée silencieuse aux portes de ton domaine et le Monde tout entier pleurera. En attendant ce moment, l'amour de Jja t'appartient et sa beauté ne se flétrira jamais. Elle se souciait peu d'être une esclave, mais toi, tu ne le supportais pas. Elle et son fils sont maintenant libres. Personne en dehors de vous deux ne remarquera le changement – un miracle rétroactif et le dernier. Je viens juste de le lui expliquer. Wallie

When dad is absent,” she explained, “it basically provides young girls with a cue about what the future holds in terms of the mating system they are born into.

Florida Adoption Step Parent Adoption Forms There is more blended families in Florida than any time in the past. There are also many more parents who are looking to do a stepparent adoption to unify their family. The sad fact is that many children who are in a new home environment don?t have relationship with their natural mother or father. This leaves children looking to their step parent to fill that role. In most cases, the step parent will take on the responsibility of raising and supporting his or her step child, and will develop a relationship with their step child which has the same bond as if the child was the stepparent?s biological child. In these situations, when the step child has been abandoned by an absent parent, a stepparent adoption can bring unity in the family, and provide many legal benefits for the child. A Florida adoption Step Parent Adoption Forms is a straight-forward process. If one of the child?s biological parents has either abandoned the child, or is willing to sign a consent to adoption, then the adoption can be completed fairly easy, even if that parent?s whereabouts are unknown. A stepparent adoption in Florida consists of filing the appropriate adoption documents with the court, serving the absent parent, and going through certain steps that are required to complete the adoption. In Florida, both the stepparent and the child?s biological parent will file a ?Joint Petition for Adoption by Stepparent?. The adoption petition will outline who the parties are, and will let the court know that the stepparent is desiring to adopt his or her step child. Who is required to consent to a Florida adoption Step Parent Adoption Forms? After the adoption paperwork has been filed with the Circuit Court in the county where you reside in Florida, the court will process the adoption forms. The adoption department at the Circuit Court will look to see if the consent from the absent parent can be waived due to abandonment, or if a signed consent is included in the forms. In addition, the court will look to see that the consent to adoption has been signed by any child being adopted who is at least 12 years of age. If the absent parent has abandoned the child, meaning that he has failed to maintain a reasonable degree of interest, concern or responsibility as to the child?s welfare, and has failed to support the financial needs of the child, then the consent of the absent parent will not be required. What happens when the Florida Stepparent Adoption is final? The court will have a final hearing where the Judge will review all the information that has been presented and finalize the adoption. When the Judge signs a ?Final Judgment of Stepparent Adoption?, then the adoption is final. When the adoption is final, the Judge will order the clerk of the court to have a new birth certificate issued, listing the stepparent as the child?s parent on the birth certificate, and also showing the child?s new name on the birth certificate. As far as the birth certificate is concerned, the child was born with the new name and that the adoptive parents were the child?s birth parents. How to start a stepparent adoption in Florida. For anyone who has spoken to an adoption attorney regarding completing a Florida stepparent adoption, they quickly realize how expensive the process can be if they go through an attorney. The good news is that people in Florida have been doing their own step parent adoptions for decades, with the help from an online company, StepparentAdoptionForms.com. Using an online adoption company like StepparentAdoptionForms.com allows you to complete your own Florida stepparent adoption, and save thousands over the cost of an attorney. Their experienced adoption specialists will prepare all your documents for you and send them to you ready to sign and file with the court. You can do your own Florida stepparent adoption

Thus, Paul establishes the exhortation for wifely submission, not simply as a cultural norm to uphold, but as an integral component of the Christian life. It is significant to observe that Paul uses the phrase “in the Lord” in verses 18 and 20, in connection with the instruction for wives to submit to their husbands and the instruction for children to obey their parents. But the phrase is absent in verse 22 where slaves are told to obey their earthly masters.282

A father stork and baby stork are sitting in their nest. The baby stork is crying and crying and father stork is trying to calm him. “Don’t worry, son. Your mother will come back. She’s just out bringing people babies and making them happy.” The next night, it’s the father’s turn to do the job. Mother and child are sitting in the nest and the baby stork is crying and crying. The mother stork says, “Son, don’t cry. Your father will be back soon. He’s just out bringing joy to new mommies and daddies.” A few days later, the stork parents are desperate: their son is absent from the nest all night! Shortly before dawn, the little chick returns and the parents ask him where he’s been all night. “Nowhere,” says the storklet. “Just out scaring the shit out of college students!

Here is a report by a parent who usually had good timing, so most drowsy cues were absent: Drowsy in this context doesn’t mean about to fall asleep (half closed eyes, barely able to keep open). When my son was a baby he would become very still about 10 minutes before he fell asleep—he is a wiggle worm, so it was noticeable. He would also gaze for long periods of time at something. This was the window when he needed to be put down for his nap. If I waited until it passed and he was really tired, he would fight sleep. So when “the stare” appeared, I would check his diaper, swaddle him, and put him down. He would gaze at his mobile for a while and then fall asleep. The baby should be awake when you put her down for her nap. You aren’t trying to ease her down and then sneak out—you want her to be able to fall asleep on her own, without rocking, patting, and so on. Try to catch her in that drowsy pre-sleep period—for many babies it is right around one to two hours after waking for the day. Start watching for signs at around thirty to ninety minutes, and I bet you will soon be able to tell when she is ready to go down. Good luck! DROWSY SIGNS Drowsy Cues or Sleepy Signs as He Becomes Drowsy: Moving into the Sleep Zone Decreased activity, less animated, becomes quieter Eyes less focused on surroundings, appears glazed over Eyelids drooping Pulling ears Slower motions, less social, less vocal Less interested in toys or people Sucking is weaker or slower Yawning Past Drowsy: Short on Sleep (SOS) Distress Signs Begin to Appear Fatigue Signs: Entering Overtired Zone. Becoming Overtired Mild fussiness, irritability, cranky Crying upon awakening Rubbing eyes Think of these symptoms of overtiredness as signaling the distress of being short on sleep (SOS): “Help me, I need sleep!

Kemmer is not always played by pairs. Pairing seems to be the commonest custom, but in the kemmerhouses of towns and cities, groups may form and intercourse take place promiscuously among the males and females of the group. The furthest extreme from this practice is the custom of vowing kemmering (Karh. oskyommer), which is to all intents and purposes monogamous marriage. It has no legal status, but socially and ethically is an ancient and vigorous institution. The whole structure of the Karhidish Clan-Hearths and Domains is indubitably based upon the institution of monogamous marriage. I am not sure of divorce rules in general; here in Osnoriner there is divorce, but no remarriage after either divorce or the partner’s death: one can only vow kemmering once. Descent of course is reckoned, all over Gethen, from the mother, the “parent in the flesh” (Karh. amha). Incest is permitted, with various restrictions, between siblings, even the full siblings of a vowed-kemmering pair. Siblings are not however allowed to vow kemmering, nor keep kemmering after the birth of a child to one of the pair. Incest between generations is strictly forbidden (In Karhide/Orgoreyn; but is said to be permitted among the tribesmen of Perunter, the Antarctic Continent. This may be slander.). What else have I learned for certain? That seems to sum it up. There is one feature of this anomalous arrangement that might have adaptive value. Since coitus takes place only during the period of fertility, the chance of conception is high, as with all mammals that have an estrous cycle. In harsh conditions where infant mortality is great, a race survival value may be indicated. At present neither infant mortality nor the birthrate runs high in the civilized areas of Gethen. Tinibossol estimates a population of not over 100 million on the Three Continents, and considers it to have been stable for at least a millennium. Ritual and ethical absention and the use of contraceptive drugs seem to have played the major part in maintaining this stability. There are aspects of ambisexuality that we have only glimpsed or guessed at, and which we may never grasp entirely. The kemmer phenomenon fascinates all of us Investigators, of course. It fascinates us, but it rules the Gethenians, dominates them. The structure of their societies, the management of their industry, agriculture, commerce, the size of their settlements, the subjects of their stories, everything is shaped to fit the somer-kemmer cycle. Everybody has his holiday once a month; no one, whatever his position, is obliged or forced to work when in kemmer. No one is barred from the kemmerhouse, however poor or strange. Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion. This is easy for us to understand. What is very hard for us to understand is that, four-fifths of the time, these people are not sexually motivated at all. Room is made for sex, plenty of room; but a room, as it were, apart. The society of Gethen, in its daily functioning and in its continuity, is without sex. Consider:

The next day we sat in Geir’s bedroom and wrote a love letter to Anne Lisbet. His parents’ house was identical to ours, it had exactly the same rooms, facing in exactly the same directions, but it was still unendingly different, because for them functionality reigned supreme, chairs were above all else comfortable to sit in, not attractive to look at, and the vacuumed, almost mathematically scrupulous, cleanliness that characterized our rooms was utterly absent in their house, with tables and the floor strewn with whatever they happened to be using at that moment. In a way, their lifestyle was integrated into the house. I suppose ours was, too, it was just that ours was different. For Geir’s father, sole control of his tools was unthinkable, quite the contrary, part of the point of how he brought up Geir and Gro was to involve them as much as possible in whatever he was doing. They had a workbench downstairs, where they hammered and planed, glued and sanded, and if we felt like making a soap-box cart, for example, or a go-kart, as we called it, he was our first port of call. Their garden wasn’t beautiful or symmetrical as ours had become after all the hours Dad had spent in it, but more haphazard, created on the functionality principle whereby the compost heap occupied a large space, despite its unappealing exterior, and likewise the stark, rather weed-like potato plants growing in a big patch behind the house where we had a ruler-straight lawn and curved beds of rhododendrons.

In addition to the issue of distracted supervision putting children at risk for injury, at some point distracted, tech-centered parenting can look and feel to a child like having a narcissistic parent or an emotionally absent, psychologically neglectful one. In nonclinical settings, most notably in focus groups in schools around the country, the take-home message I am hearing from children of all ages is this: They feel the disconnect. They can tell when their parents’ attention is on screens or calls and increasingly they are feeling that all the time. It feels “bad and sad” to be ignored. And they are tired of being the “call waiting” in their parents’ lives.

Coming back to the quality of our lives during that year. The invasion of privacy became more and more oppressive, as the teachers were watching whether Jewish students were absent during Jewish holidays. I remember on Yom Kippur, in October, 1940, the teachers were especially paying attention to the attendance. Some zealous communists were even trying to find out whether anybody was fasting. That Yom Kippur was the first time I fasted, although I had to go to school. When I returned home, by 3 o'clock, my parents were in the synagogue. It was cold and rainy and I was shivering from cold, hunger and terrible disappointment with this cruel, petty regime that had no humane standards, no notion of freedom, no respect for human beings - a cruel, oppressive, invasive regime - where power was everything and human life was dirt cheap.

Today, digital historians call Colossal Cave Adventure the “granddaddy” of text adventure games. A spelunker named Will Crowther made it for his daughters, to help show them his cave-crawling pastime as he endured a divorce with his wife. His work parented Charlotte and I all those summers, in a different era, when it felt like we children could lock ourselves away and go absent for hours without making our parents afraid.

Oliver is my son too,” I was afraid and rightly so. What if Alec banned me from seeing my boys? I was an absent parent, an absent mother. Somehow that seemed worse. I was fully prepared for the judgemental opinions of others which would no doubt be lobbied at me the moment everyone knew I was back. But I had refused to entertain the thought Alec would stop me from seeing our boys. I had abandoned them but I hadn’t stopped loving them. Not a day went by without them being the first thing on my mind when I woke up and the last thing I thought about before going to sleep. I was probably the worst mother alive but I bloody loved my boys, and heaven help anyone who called my love into question.

family background of someone with BPD is often marked by alcoholism, depression, and emotional disturbances. A borderline childhood is frequently a desolate battlefield, scarred with the debris of indifferent, rejecting, or absent parents, emotional deprivation, and chronic abuse.

No one tells you before you procreate that the hardest thing about being a good parent is that you never feel like one. If you’re absent you’re committing one big mistake, but if you’re present the whole time you commit a million tiny ones, and teenagers keep a count. Oh, how they keep a count.

Some parents give first priority to their friends than to their children. It's more severe when that parent is the mother.

Jimmy drags the report across the table and spends a minute reading it from beginning to end. “Same old story,” he says. “Dysfunctional or absent parents, no discipline, no supervision, lousy friends and worse acquaintances, drugs, and now death.” He pushes the folder away in disgust. “Remind me again why we’re killing ourselves to help people who couldn’t tell a good decision from a bad one if it slapped them in the face?” “Because life is a vast wilderness where it’s easy to get lost,” I suggest with a humble smile. “Yeah,” he snorts, “but it’s only a vast wilderness if you ignore the giant signs that say STAY ON PATH.” He flicks a wrist at me. “Aren’t you the one who always says we get what we deserve in life, good or bad?” “No, that’s my mom.” “Same difference,” Jimmy says,

The neglect and mistreatment that is part and parcel of poorly structured or even entirely absent disciplinary approaches can be deliberate—motivated by explicit, conscious (if misguided) parental motives. But more often than not, modern parents are simply paralyzed by the fear that they will no longer be liked or even loved by their children

Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth’s research shows that children develop attachment styles that are more secure or more insecure, depending on how well their parents are able to be a connected and responsive safe haven for them. If their caretakers are able to meet most of their needs enough of the time, children usually have a secure attachment. But if they experience their parents as inconsistent, inaccessible, unresponsive or even threatening and dangerous, they adapt by developing more insecure attachment styles. If our attachment figures were absent or scary to us as children, we didn’t develop our ability to freely explore and to learn about the world and about our own abilities. When this happens, we develop insecure strategies for engaging with others—we may become more vigilant and anxious or more avoidant and dismissive.

The call of fatherhood is in fact a call of sacrifice, not in some heroic sense where a father is lifted high on some glowing pedestal with all of his sacrifices held up to the awe of those around him. Rather, it is a call that will cost him all that he has, that will be absent of accolades, where rewards will be sparse, and where he will someday find himself having spent all, but in the spending have gained everything. And this is the glory of fatherhood.

The people she used to have, with whom she might have discussed losing her parents, were the parents she’d lost. But the larger truth was that she couldn’t have talked to them about it anyway. Martin and Vivian had died that night, but they had been largely absent forever.

Absent parents might be gone for months at a time due to work, have a mental health challenge that has them checked out of life and parenting, have started a new family and committed themselves to their new partner and the children they have together more than to you, or just not want to be bothered.

Dear God, I commit to remember that the absence of a parent never means the absence of you.

These images, of faith as a hangover, of religion as struggling with God's shadow, of an absent God whose calling card we still possess, describe in a general way our everyday struggle with faith and agnosticism. We still have some experience of God, though rarely is it a vital one in which we actually drink, first-hand, from living waters. Insofar as God does enter our everyday experience, most often He is not experienced as a living person to whom we actually talk, from who we seek ultimate consolation and comfort, and to whom we relate person to person, friend to friend, lover to lover, child to parent.

Oak seedlings to plant in earth that has been mixed with the ashes of their parents. We do this in memory of our own dead, present and absent.

Our national epidemic of “missing fathers” is not simply a problem of single mothers struggling without a husband. It’s also that of intact two-parent homes in which the father is morally absent from his children’s lives.

She halted before her father, the hero of her short life. He would do anything for her, wrest her from the grip of death. She would return home... or something would. Something would sit like a doll in his drawing room, saying nothing and smiling a painted smile forever. Her father's eyes flitted this way and that. He could not see her, she realized. Perhaps he never had.

Olga had never had many friends, in part because she loved to spend time with Abuelita, their minds so much alike. Her mother was so black-and-white—rigid with her principles. Her father, a dreamer, lost in impossible ideals. But to Olga, her grandmother was a hustler who actually got things done. She understood the dance, which they did together, often. Both literally, as Abuelita, glamorous and towering in her heels, loved to dance with young Olga, and also figuratively. With her parents absent for such critical years of her life, Abuelita was never afraid to bend the truth, make someone dead of another person missing, in order to procure special tutoring, or a scholarship, or whatever her grandchildren needed. The truth, Abuelita would say, is so much harder to believe than our lie, no? And it's not like we have bad intentions, si? Yes! Olga would agree. She loved it all. The high heels, the prayer, the laissez-faire relationship with rules and regulations. Whether born that way or formed into shape from necessity, the two women mirrored each other.

I gather my grub and sit behind my desk. He moves a chair, situated too far for his liking, and presses it very close to the front of my desk. He extricates a long envelope, squished in his side pocket, and proudly slaps it in front of me on my desk. “My grades,” he announces, “from camp.” His voice has moved to a preadolescent octave of excitement, and I scurry to join him at the parade. “De veeeras,” as I relieve the transcript from its container. Looney straightens his back and hops a little in the chair. “Straight A’s,” he says. “Seeeerrriioo?” I say. “Me la rallo,” he says. “Straight A’s.” Like a kid fumbling with wrapping on a present, I get the transcript out and extend it open. And, sure enough, right there before my eyes: 2 Cs; 2 Bs; 1 A. And I think, Close enough. Not the straightest A’s I’ve ever seen. I decide not to tell Looney he’s an “unreliable reporter” here. “Wow, mijo,” I tell him, “Bien hecho. Nice goin’.” I carefully refold the transcript and put it back in the envelope. “On everything I love, mijo,” I say to him, “if you were my son, I’d be the proudest man alive.” In a flash, Looney situates his thumb and first finger in his eye sockets, trembling, and wanting to stem the flow of tears, which seem to be inevitable at this point. Like the kid with the fingers in the dike, he’s shaking now and desperate not to cry. I look at this little guy and know that he has been returned to a situation largely unchanged. Parents are either absent at any given time or plagued by mental illness. Chaos and dysfunction is what will now surround him as before. His grandmother, a good woman, whose task it is now to raise this kid, is not quite up to the task. I know that one month before this moment I buried Looney’s best friend, killed in our streets for no reason at all. So I lead with my gut. “I bet you’re afraid to be out, aren’t you?” This seems to push the Play button on Looney’s tear ducts, and quickly he folds his arms on the front of my desk and rests his sobbing head on his folded arms. I let him cry it out. Finally, I reach across the desk and place my hand on his shoulder. “You’re gonna be okay.” Looney sits up with what is almost defiance and tends to the wiping of his tears. “I . . . just . . . want . . . to have a life.” I am taken aback by the determination with which he says this. “Well, mijo,” I say to him, “who told you that you wouldn’t have one?