Arranged By Parents Quotes

In a culture which holds the two-parent patriarchal family in higher esteem than any other arrangement, all children feel emotionally insecure when their family does not measure up to the standard. A utopian vision of the patriarchal family remains intact despite all the evidence which proves that the well-being of children is no more secure in the dysfunctional male-headed household than in the dysfunctional female-headed household. Children need to be raised in loving environments. Whenever domination is present love is lacking. Loving parents, be they single or coupled, gay or straight, headed by females or males, are more likely to raise healthy, happy children with sound self-esteem. In future feminist movement we need to work harder to show parents the ways ending sexism positively changes family life. Feminist movement is pro-family. Ending patriarchal domination of children, by men or women, is the only way to make the family a place where children can be safe, where they can be free, where they can know love

Why are men afraid of women?" "If your strength is only the other's weakness, you live in fear," Ged said. "Yes; but women seem to fear their own strength, to be afraid of themselves." "Are they ever taught to trust themselves?" Ged asked, and as he spoke Therru came in on her work again. His eyes and Tenar's met. "No," she said. "Trust is not what we're taught." She watched the child stack the wood in the box. "If power were trust," she said. "I like that word. If it weren't all these arrangements - one above the other - kings and masters and mages and owners - It all seems so unnecessary. Real power, real freedom, would lie in trust, not force." "As children trust their parents," he said.

It's important for survival that children have their own experiences, the kind they learn from. The kind their parents arrange for are not as useful. Good parents are the hardest to get rid of.

There were intervals in which she could sit perfectly still, enjoying the outer stillness and the subdued light. The red fire with its gently audible movement seemed like a solemn existence calmly independent of the petty passions, the imbecile desires, the straining after worthless uncertainties, which were daily moving her contempt. Mary was fond of her own thoughts, and could amuse herself well sitting in the twilight with her hands in her lap; for, having early had strong reason to believe that things were not likely to be arranged for her peculiar satisfaction, she wasted no time in astonishment and annoyance at that fact. And she had already come to take life very much as a comedy in which she had a proud, nay, a generous resolution not to act the mean or treacherous part. Mary might have become cynical if she had not had parents whom she honoured, and a well of affectionate gratitude within her, which was all the fuller because she had learned to make no unreasonable claims. She sat to-night revolving, as she was wont, the scenes of the day, her lips often curling with amusement at the oddities to which her fancy added fresh drollery: people were so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fools' caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's were transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone were rosy.

So it’s really not true, after all, that the government has spared children from toil and instead lets them romp on the playgrounds. No, the government instead buses them into mass worker-training programs and is very resentful indeed when parents try to opt out of this arrangement, as in homeschooling.

Marriage is difficult, perhaps the most difficult thing you can ever do, besides being a parent, but I think these two fine young people are up to the challenge. Here are two steady, responsible people who, I believe, understand the dire commitment they are about to make and will choose to keep that commitment. Because it turns out to be a choice, commitment-not some done deal. When you leave the alter tomorrow, there will still be a lifetime of choice and temptation and doubt and uncertainty in front of you. I didn't know that at my wedding. Getting married doesn't change you. Marriage changes you.

daughter of the servants.” “Gee, you must have been lonely, Judge, having nobody to play with.” “I played with Sam Westing—chess. Hour after hour I sat staring down at that chessboard. He lectured me, he insulted me, and he won every game.” The judge thought of their last game: She had been so excited about taking his queen, only to have the master checkmate her in the next move. Sam Westing had deliberately sacrificed his queen and she had fallen for it. “Stupid child, you can’t have a brain in that frizzy head to make a move like that.” Those were the last words he ever said to her. The judge continued: “I was sent to boarding school when I was twelve. My parents visited me at school when they could, but I never set foot in the Westing house again, not until two weeks ago.” “Your folks must have really worked hard,” Sandy said. “An education like that costs a fortune.” “Sam Westing paid for my education. He saw that I was accepted into the best schools, probably arranged for my first job, perhaps more, I don’t know.” “That’s the first decent thing I’ve heard about the old man.” “Hardly decent, Mr. McSouthers. It was to Sam Westing’s advantage to have a judge in his debt. Needless to say, I have excused myself from every case remotely connected with

That's right. Carrington didn't want to marry the likes of me. He had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the negotiation table.” “Did you enjoy the dragging?” He glanced down at her. “Yes, I rather did,” she confessed. “It was amusing threatening to strip his house bare to the last plank on the floor and the last spoon in the kitchen.” “My parents are convinced of your grief.” She heard the smile in his voice. “They said tears streamed down your face at his funeral.” “For nearly three years of hard work down the drain, I cried like a bereaved mother.

She wrote, in the last pages, of feeling all the evil of the neighborhood around her. Rather, she wrote obscurely, good and evil are mixed together and reinforce each other in turn. Marcello, if you thought about it, was really a good arrangement, but the good tasted of the bad and the bad tasted of the good, it was a mixture that took your breath away. A few evenings earlier, something had happened that had really scared her. Marcello had left, the television was off, the house was empty, Rino was out, her parents were going to bed. She was alone in the kitchen washing the dishes and was tired, really without energy, when there was an explosion. She had turned suddenly and realized that the big copper pot had exploded. Like that, by itself. It was hanging on the nail where it normally hung, but in the middle there was a large hole and the rim was lifted and twisted and the pot itself was all deformed, as if it could no longer maintain its appearance as a pot. Her mother had hurried in in her nightgown and blamed her for dropping it and ruining it. But a copper pot, even if you drop it, doesn't break and doesn't become misshapen like that. "It's this sort of thing," Lila concluded, "that frightens me. More than Marcello, more than anyone. And I feel that I have to find a solution, otherwise, everything, one thing after another, will break, everything, everything.

Let’s not name it. Once you name something, you have to define it: say what it is and isn’t. Not to mention maintenance. All the relationships with names – parent, sister, husband, lover – come with maintenance. All that effort keeping it to what it’s supposed to be. Shouldn’t we allow ourselves at least one unnamed, undefined close relationship in our lives? A free-standing, wild-card arrangement. How about it, Joseph? How about you just try to make me happy, and I’ll try and do the same for you?

Adam, we hear, walked in easy fellowship with God in the cool of the evening and spoke to him as to a friend. This ordering of Adam to God meant that our first parent was effortlessly caught up in adoration. The term "adoration" comes from the Latin ado ratio, which in turn is derived from "ad ora" (to the mouth). To adore, therefore, is to be mouth to mouth with God, properly aligned to the divine source, breathing in God's life. When one is in the stance of adoration, the whole of one's life - mind, will, emotions, imagination, sexuality - becomes ordered and harmonized, much as the elements of a rose window arrange themselves musically around a central point.

Do you need anything?" she asks. A mom A dad. Someone. Anyone. Can you arrange for that? "Nah, I'm good.

It's time to undo Rahim.

I call it Dewey’s rule, and it stands for the idea that parents should try to arrange things so that, on average, their children end up in the 30th percentile of stuff.

Miss Edi: My brother Bertrand is the laziest person in the world. David: Oh yeah? And how lazy is that? Miss Edi: When he was three and saw all his gifts under the Christmas tree, he said, 'Who's going to open them for me?' David: I've heard worse. Miss Edi: When he was six, my father bought him a bicycle and took him out to teach him to ride it. David: And? Miss Edi: Bertrand did very well. My father ran along behind him, holding on, and my brother balanced perfectly. But when my father let go and the bicycle stopped, Bertrand asked why. When my father said he had to push on the pedals, my brother left it lying there in the street, and he never got on a bicycle again. David: Not bad, but I've heard worse. Miss Edi: When he was twelve, my parents took us out to a restaurant, the first one we'd ever been to, and my father ordered steaks for each of us. When my brother's came, he looked at it and asked how he was to eat it. My father showed him how to cut the steak, then how to chew it. My brother called the waiter back and ordered a bowl of mashed potatoes. David: Okay, that's getting up there, but I have heard a few worse. Miss Edi: When he was sixteen, my mother arranged for her beloved son to go to a dance with a very nice young girl. He was to pick her up at six pm. At six-thirty Bertrand was sitting in the living room and my father asked him why he hadn't gone on his date. My brother said, 'Because she hasn't come to get me yet.

As different as Emily Dickinson’s parents’ life in America seems from that of Sitaram Gawande’s in India, both relied on systems that shared the advantage of easily resolving the question of care for the elderly. There was no need to save up for a spot in a nursing home or arrange for meals-on-wheels. It was understood that parents would just keep living in their home, assisted by one or more of the children they’d raised. In contemporary societies, by contrast, old age and infirmity have gone from being a shared, multigenerational responsibility to a more or less private state—something experienced largely alone or with the aid of doctors and institutions. How did this happen? How did we go from Sitaram Gawande’s life to Alice Hobson’s?

Unfortunately, parents are increasingly opting for digital companions over living, breathing ones, but I beg you, put the tablets, game consoles, and televisions away, and arrange play dates with a variety of real, live children.

Your parents bring you into this world, and then they move on without you and leave you behind. I know that that's the natural order of things, Z., and yet the pain of that whole arrangement is incredible, isn't it? We're all staggering around brokenhearted. By "arrangement" I mean "mortality", I guess. The grief fades with time but we stay abandoned.

The imagination circuit is taught to respond to the most minimal of cues. A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo. But it's no longer necessary for teachers and parents to build these circuits. Now there are professionally produced shows with great actors, very convincing sets, sound, music. Now there's the information highway. We don't need the circuits any more than we need to know how to ride horses. Those of us who had imagination circuits built can look in someone's face and see stories there; to everyone else, a face will just be a face.

But what about a person's anger? What about her voice? Her laughter? Her arrogance? Her irreverence? Her humor, her ego, her honor, her character? Do these fingerprints of an individual life simply evaporate and disappear with the last exhale? And if that is so, what use all this struggle, misery and strife? What difference whether a woman ever lived or not? Whether she was loved or unloved, educated or illiterate, wanted or unwanted by her parents, whether or not she suffered hurt and betrayal, or whether she still managed to retain her humanity and nobility? In the end, Bhima thinks, it doesn't matter. It is all ash and dust. This is what it means to be human, she thinks: Grains of dust arranged in human form - some dark, some light, some tall, some short, some male, some female. And in the end, the same gust of wind breaks them all down.

There is a quest, but ever more hopeless, for arrangements and ways of putting the broken pieces back together. The task is equivalent to squaring the circle, because everyone loves himself most but wants others to love him more than they love themselves. Such is particularly the demand of children, against which parents are now rebelling.

Had I been less firmly resolved upon settling down definitively to work, I should perhaps have made an effort to begin at once. But since my resolution was explicit, since within twenty-four hours, in the empty frame of the following day where everything was so well-arranged because I myself was not yet in it, my good intention would be realized without difficulty, it was better not to start on an evening when I felt ill-prepared. The following days were not, alas, to prove more propitious. But I was reasonable. It would have been puerile, on the part of one who had waited now for years, not to put up with a postponement of two or three days. Confident that by the day after tomorrow I should have written several pages, I said not a word more to my parents of my decision; I preferred to remain patient and then to bring to a convinced and comforted grandmother a sample of work that was already under way. Unfortunately the next day was not that vast, extraneous expanse of time to which I had feverishly looked forward. When it drew to a close, my laziness and my painful struggle to overcome certain internal obstacles had simply lasted twenty-four hours longer. And at the end of several days, my plans not having matured, I had no longer the same hope that they would be realized at once, and hence no longer the heart to subordinate everything else to their realization: I began once again to keep late hours...

I dislike arranged marriages. There are some mistakes for which one should not be able to blame one's poor parents.

Zero deaths” war, “zero risks” love, nothing random, no chance encounters. Backed as it is, with all the resources of a wide-scale advertising campaign, I see it as the first threat to love, what I would call the safety threat. After all, it’s not so very different to an arranged marriage. Not done in the name of family order and hierarchy by despotic parents, but in the name of safety for the individuals involved, through advance agreements that avoid randomness, chance encounters and in the end any existential poetry, due to the categorical absence of risks.

It took me a good thirty minutes to find Cal. That was actually a good thing, because it gave me plenty of time to come up with something to say to him that wasn't just a string of four-letter words. There are a lot of freaky things witches and warlocks do, obviously, but the arranged marriage thing was one of the grossest. When a witch is thirteen, her parents hook her up with an available warlock, based on things like compatible powers and family alliances. The entire thing is so eighteenth century. As I stomped across school grounds, all I could see was Cal sitting with my dad in some manly room with leather chairs and dead animals on the wall, chomping on cigars as Dad formally signed me away to him.They probably even high-fived. Okay,so it's not like either of them are exactly the cigar-and-high-fives type, but still.

They were arranged by their original numbers, the numbers they had been given at birth. The numbers were rarely used after the Naming. But each child knew his number, of course. Sometimes parents used them in irritation at a child's misbehavior, indicating that mischief made one unworthy of a name. Jonas always chuckled when he heard a parent, exasperated, call sharply to a whining toddler, ''That's enough, Twenty-three!

This happened back east of course. I've heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I never think of the term as a marker of geography. It's a reference to time, a statement about time, about all the densities of being and experience, it's time disguised, it's light-up time, shifting smoky time tricked out as some locus of stable arrangement. When people use that term they're talking about the way things used to be before they moved out here, the way the world used to be, not just New Jersey or South Philly, or before their parents moved, or grandparents, and about the way things still exist in some private relativity theory, some smoky shifting mind dimension, or before the other men and women came this way, the ones in Conestoga wagons, a term we learned in grade school, a back-east term, stemming from the place where the wagons were made.

At least if it is an arranged marriage, you can fault your parents, otherwise you will have only yourself to blame. And, believe me, it is always harder to bear something if you cannot blame somebody else for it. -Mr. Ali-

A white woman and a black man in the early ’80s, neither of their families being particularly thrilled with the arrangement. We moved around a lot before my father died, trying to find a neighborhood where my parents felt at ease, at home.

First 25 years, parents preach continuously not to trust anybody. And one fine day, they bring someone and convince us to trust him/her unconditionally. Still, I am trying to understand the mysterious concept of Indian arranged marriages..

My wife's name was Mala. The marriage had been arranged by my older brother and his wife. I regarded the proposition with neither objection nor enthusiasm. It was a duty expected of me, as it was expected of every man. She was the daughter of a schoolteacher in Beleghata. I was told that she could cook, knit, embroider, sketch landscapes, and recite poems by Tagore, but these talents could not make up for the fact that she did not possess a fair complexion, and so a string of men had rejected her to her face. She was twenty-seven, an age when her parents had begun to fear that she would never marry, and so they were willing to ship their only child halfway across the world in order to save her from spinsterhood.

Wary of being caught unawares, we planned our parenthood, committed to trial marriages with pre-nuptials, and pre-arranged our parents’ funerals—convinced we could pre-feel the feelings that we have heard attend new life, true love, and death.

Another sister had worked at Tulane Hospital in downtown New Orleans. Tulane was also dark, hot, and surrounded by water, but officials at its parent corporation, HCA, had been proactive about arranging for private helicopters and buses to rescue patients, employees, and their families, betting correctly that government assets would prove insufficient. The process of an orderly if slow evacuation had kept panic at bay. She knew of no patients who had died at Tulane. This sister was able to laugh and joke about her experiences.

Do you come from a culture where women wear veils but your friends wear thongs? Does at least one of your parents speak English with an incomprehensible accent? Did your parents have an arranged marriage … are they cousins? Well folks, you’ve come to the right place. You are literally holding in your hands the coveted answers to every question you ever had about your insane existence – herein lies all the information you need to understand about why you’re crazy! And trust me, you are crazy! That’s right. It’s true. You can’t deny it. " -From Veils to Thongs

But that day never arrived. Danny was steady and unwavering in his affection for me. He called me on the phone just to see how I was doing and sent me flowers and gifts on special occasions. Unlike many of his counterparts, he loved my independent nature. And instead of being horrified by my interests, dreams, and aspirations, he found humor in my warding off my parents’ attempts at arranging a marriage. He thought all these qualities of mine were endearing. He was genuinely interested in me for who I was, and this feeling of acceptance was so new and refreshing for me.

Unfortunately, some men are a little hard-of-hearing. This is why about a quarter of them are completely surprised when their wives file for divorce.9 If you’re talking to your husband about your feelings, you may have to make it very, very plain how unhappy you are with the current arrangement.

Narcissists consistently disregard court orders, whether related to divorce, parenting arrangements, or restraining orders, fueled by their sense of entitlement that leads them to believe they’re above the law. This leaves victims in a relentless battle for enforcement, often with little success.

Her name was Rebecca, or Becky, or Bex. She'd been wearing a white hooded top with a navy-blue body-warmer. She would be twenty-three years old by now. She had been seen in the beech wood, climbing a tree. She had been seen at the railway station. She had been seen by the side of the road. She had been looked for, everywhere. She could have arranged to meet somebody, and been driven safely away.She could have fallen down a hole. She could have been hurt by her parents in some terrible mistake. She could have gone away because she'd chosen to, or because she had no choice. People still wanted to know.

Looking at this picture, I am struck by how beautiful my parents were together. James and Angela. I know what it cost them to build a life, to have me. A white woman and a black man in the early ’80s, neither of their families being particularly thrilled with the arrangement. We moved around a lot before my father died, trying to find a neighborhood where my parents felt at ease, at home. My mother didn’t feel welcome in Baldwin Hills. My father didn’t feel comfortable in Brentwood. I was in school before I met another person who looked like me. Her name was Yael. Her father was Dominican, and her mother was from Israel. She liked to play soccer. I liked to play dress-up. We could rarely agree on anything. But I liked that when someone asked her if she was Jewish, she said, “I’m half Jewish.” No one else I knew was half something. For so long, I felt like two halves. And then my father died, and I felt like I was one-half my mother and one-half lost. A half that I feel so torn from, so incomplete without. But looking at this picture now, the three of us together in 1986, me in overalls, my father in a polo, my mother in a denim jacket, we look like we belong together. I don’t look like I am half of one thing and half of another but rather one whole thing, theirs. Loved.

The middle-class parents talked things through with their children, reasoning with them. They didn’t just issue commands. They expected their children to talk back to them, to negotiate, to question adults in positions of authority. If their children were doing poorly at school, the wealthier parents challenged their teachers. They intervened on behalf of their kids. One child Lareau follows just misses qualifying for a gifted program. Her mother arranges for her to be retested privately, petitions the school, and gets her daughter admitted. The poor parents, by contrast, are intimidated by authority. They react passively and stay in the background.

The creature was very young. He was alone in a dread universe. I crept on my knees and crouched beside him. It was a small fox pup from a den under the timbers who looked up at me. God knows what had become of his brothers and sisters. His parents must not have been home from hunting. He innocently selected what I think was a chicken bone from an untidy pile of splintered rubbish and shook it at me invitingly... the universe was swinging in some fantastic fashion around to present its face and the face was so small that the universe itself was laughing. It was not a time for human dignity. It was a time only for the careful observance of amenities written behind the stars. Gravely I arranged my forepaws while the puppy whimpered with ill-concealed excitement. I drew the breath of a fox's den into my nostrils. On impulse, I picked up clumsily a whiter bone and shook it in teeth that had not entirely forgotten their original purpose. Round and round we tumbled and for just one ecstatic moment I held the universe at bay by the simple expedient of sitting on my haunches before a fox den and tumbling about with a chicken bone. It is the gravest, most meaningful act I shall ever accomplish, but, as Thoreau once remarked of some peculiar errand of his own, there is no use reporting it to the Royal Society.

When I traveled, I planned carefully for minimal disruption to his schedule. I arranged playdates for after school or asked my parents for help. But I couldn’t pack lunches ahead, give baths ahead, make breakfasts ahead, get the kids dressed ahead, anticipate fevers or stomach flus ahead. Some things would have to be done in real time.

Be bigger presence at work. Race up ladder (joyfully, w/smile on face), get raise. Get in best shape of life, start dressing nicer. Learn guitar? Make point of noticing beauty of world? Why not educate self re. birds, flowers, trees, constellations, become true citizen of natural world, walk around neighborhood w/kids, patiently teaching kids names of birds, flowers, etc. etc.? Why not take kids to Europe? Kids have never been. Have never, in Alps, had hot chocolate in mountain café, served by kindly white- haired innkeeper, who finds them so sophisticated/friendly relative to usual snotty/rich American kids (who always ignore his pretty but crippled daughter w/braids) that he shows them secret hiking path to incredible glade, kids frolic in glade, sit with crippled pretty girl on grass, later say it was most beautiful day of their lives, keep in touch with crippled girl via email, we arrange surgery here for her, surgeon so touched he agrees to do surgery for free, she is on front page of our paper, we are on front page of their paper in Alps? Ha ha.

But he was sometimes willing to sacrifice financial profit to scholastic prestige. Occasionally, by special arrangement, he would take at greatly reduced fees some boy who seemed likely to win scholarships and thus bring credit on the school. It was on these terms that I was at Crossgates myself: otherwise my parents could not have afforded to send me to so expensive a school.

During her time at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington she had often become depressed and was hobbled by fatigue. In 1887, when she was twenty, she wrote in her diary, “Tears come without any provocation. Headache all day.” The school’s headmistress and founder, Sarah Porter, offered therapeutic counsel. “Cheer up,” she told Theodate. “Always be happy.” It did not work. The next year, in March 1888, her parents sent her to Philadelphia, to be examined and cared for by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, a physician famous for treating patients, mainly women, suffering from neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion. Mitchell’s solution for Theodate was his then-famous “Rest Cure,” a period of forced inactivity lasting up to two months. “At first, and in some cases for four or five weeks, I do not permit the patient to sit up or to sew or write or read,” Mitchell wrote, in his book Fat and Blood. “The only action allowed is that needed to clean the teeth.” He forbade some patients from rolling over on their own, insisting they do so only with the help of a nurse. “In such cases I arrange to have the bowels and water passed while lying down, and the patient is lifted on to a lounge at bedtime and sponged, and then lifted back again into the newly-made bed.” For stubborn cases, he reserved mild electrical shock, delivered while the patient was in a filled bathtub. His method reflected his own dim view of women. In his book Wear and Tear; or, Hints for the Overworked, he wrote that women “would do far better if the brain were very lightly tasked.

The man whose public spirit is prompted altogether by humanity and benevolence, will respect the established powers and privileges even of individuals, and still more those of the great orders and societies, into which the state is divided. Though he should consider some of them as in some measure abusive, he will content himself with moderating what he often cannot annihilate without great violence. When he cannot conquer the rooted prejudices of the people by reason and persuasion, he will not attempt to subdue them by force; but will religiously observe what, by Cicero, is justly called the divine maxim of Plato, never to use violence to his country no more than to his parents. He will accommodate, as well as he can, his public arrangements to the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people; and will remedy, as well as he can, the inconveniencies which may flow from the want of those regulations which the people are averse to submit to. When he cannot establish the right, he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong; but like Solon, when he cannot establish the best system of laws, he will try to establish the best that the people can bear.

Elevens, so that they sat in the very front, immediately before the stage. They were arranged by their original numbers, the numbers they had been given at birth. The numbers were rarely used after the Naming. But each child knew his number, of course. Sometimes parents used them in irritation at a child’s misbehavior, indicating that mischief made one unworthy of a name. Jonas always chuckled when he

I have important things to tell you, but who can concentrate with all that racket?" That "racket" turned out to be because of flowers, hundreds of them, arriving by the cartful. Roses, orchids, lilies, daffodils, irises, and a dozen other varieties that she could not name. Heavy porcelain vases were mounted all around the grand ballroom and the royal gardens, displaying the arrangements in all their grandeur. But one arrangement stood out from the rest. From the duchess's window, Cinderella watched the gardeners erect a trellis studded with roses. When the palace staff wheeled out a barrow of flowers, white pearlescent roses intertwined with pink ones as flushed as the height of sunrise, she nearly gasped. Her parents' favorite flowers. White and pink roses, with a touch of myrtle. Charles had been listening.

Jay showed up after school with a bouquet of flowers and an armful of DVDs, although Violet couldn’t have cared less about either . . . he was all she wanted. She couldn’t help the electric thrill of excitement she felt when he came strolling in, grinning at her foolishly as if he hadn’t seen her in weeks rather than hours. He scooped her up from the couch and dropped her onto his lap as he sat down where she had been just a moment before. He was careful to arrange her ankle on a neatly stacked pile of pillows beside him. He stubbornly refused to hide his affection for her, and if Violet hadn’t known better she would have sword that he was going out of his way to make her self-conscious in her own home. Fortunately her parents were giving them some space for the time being, and they were left by themselves most of the time. “Did you miss me?” he asked arrogantly as he gently brushed his lips over hers, not bothering to wait for an answer. She smiled while she kissed him back, loving the topsy-turvy feeling that her stomach always got when he was so close to her. She wound her arms around his neck, forgetting that she was in the middle of the family room and not hidden away in the privacy of her bedroom. He pulled away from her, suddenly serious. “You know, we didn’t get much time alone yesterday. And I didn’t get a chance to tell you . . .” Violet was mesmerized by the thick timbre of his deep voice. She barely heard his words but rather concentrated on the fluid masculinity of his tone. “I feel like I’ve waited too long to finally have you, and then yesterday . . . when . . .” He stopped, seemingly at a loss, and he tried another approach. His hand stroked her cheek, igniting a response from deep within her. “I can’t imagine living without you,” he said, tenderly kissing her forehead, his warm breath fanning her brow. He paused thoughtfully for a moment before speaking again. “I love you, Violet. More than I ever could have imagined. And I don’t want to lose you . . . I can’t lose you.” It was her turn to look arrogant as she glanced up at him. “I know,” she stated smugly, shrugging her shoulder. He shoved her playfully but held on to her tightly so that she never really went anywhere. “What do you mean, ‘I know’? What kind of response is that?” His righteous indignation bordered on comical. He pulled her down into his arms so that his face was directly above hers. “Say it!” he commanded. She shook her head, pretending not to understand him. “What? What do you want me to say?” But then she giggled and ruined her baffled façade. He teased her with his mouth, leaning down to kiss her and then pulling away before his lips ever reached hers. He nuzzled her neck tantalizingly, only to stop once she responded. She wrapped her arms around his neck, trying to pull him closer, frustrated by his mocking ambush of her senses. “Sat it,” he whispered, his breath warm against her neck. She groaned, wanting him to put her out of her misery. “I love you too,” she rasped as she clung to him. “I love you so much . . .” His mouth moved to cover hers in an exhausting kiss that left them both breathless and craving more than they could have. Violet collapsed into his arms, gathering her wits and hoping that no one walking in on them anytime soon.

Twelve men. A virgin queen. One arranged marriage. The first time I met the boys of the Zodiac Brotherhood, I was forced to my knees for the introduction. Still grieving the death of my parents, I was a child queen, a pawn in my uncle’s agenda for wealth and gain. As my guardian, he had the authority to arrange a marriage upon my eighteenth birthday. That meeting took place six years ago. Now those boys are powerful men.

Now imagine that we offer you a highly subsidized daycare program. What exactly are you getting for it? Surely, we are saving you time shuttling your kids back and forth. We might be saving you money as well...But we would be giving you something else, even more precious. Something you could spend on many things. We would be giving you back all that mental bandwidth that you currently use to fret, worry, and juggle these arrangements. We'd be taking a cognitive load off. As we've seen, this would help your executive control, your self-control more broadly, even your parenting. It would increase your general cognitive capacity, your ability to focus, the quality of your work, or whatever else you chose to turn your mind to. From this perspective, help with child care is much more than that. It is a way to build human capital of the deepest kind: it creates bandwidth.

You will need to stay calm as you witness the candy floss in your daughter’s smile harden into brittle bitchiness. You will need to muster a new resolve as your son’s fascination with Pokémon shifts to porn. You will have to recalibrate your mothering instinct to accommodate the notion that not only do your children poop and burp, they also masturbate, drink and smoke. As their bodies, brains and worlds rearrange themselves, you will need to do your own reshuffling. You will come to see that, though you gave them life, they’re the ones who’ve got a life. They’ve got 1700 friends on Facebook. They’ve got YouTube accounts (with hundreds of sub- scribers), endless social arrangements, concerts, Valentine’s Day dances and Halloween parties. What we have – if we’re lucky – is a ‘Thanks for the ride, Mum, don’t call me, I’ll call you,’ as they slam the car door and indicate we can run along now.

unloved, educated or illiterate, wanted or unwanted by her parents, whether or not she suffered hurt and betrayal, or whether she still managed to retain her humanity and nobility? In the end, Bhima thinks, it doesn’t matter. It is all ash and dust. This is what it means to be human, she thinks: grains of dust arranged in human form—some dark, some light, some tall, some short, some male, some female. And in the end, the same gust of wind breaks them all down.

What about Sandridge?" McKenna asked. "Do you love him?" "Yes," Aline whispered. She loved Adam dearly- just not in the way he meant. "And yet you're here with me," he murmured. "Adam-" She stopped and cleared her throat. "Whatever I choose to do... he doesn't mind. This has nothing to do with him... you and I..." "No, it doesn't," he said with sudden anger. "My God, he should be trying to tear my throat out, instead of letting you go somewhere alone with me. He should be willing to do anything short of murder- hell, I wouldn't even stop at that- to keep other men away from you." Disgust thickened his voice. "You're lying to yourself, if you think that you'll ever be satisfied with the kind of bloodless arrangement your parents had. You need a man who will match your will, own you, occupy every part of your body, and every corner of your soul. In the eyes of the world, Sandridge is your equal- but you and I know better. He's as different from you as ice from fire." He leaned over her, his body forming a hard, living cage around her. "I'm your equal," he said harshly, "though my blood is red instead of blue, though I was condemned by my very birth never to have you... inside, we're the same. And I would break every law of God and man if-" McKenna stopped suddenly, biting back the words as he realized that he was revealing too much, allowing his rampaging emotions to get the better of him.

Looking at this picture, I am struck by how beautiful my parents were together. James and Angela. I know what it cost them to build a life, to have me. A white woman and a black man in the early ’80s, neither of their families being particularly thrilled with the arrangement. We moved around a lot before my father died, trying to find a neighborhood where my parents felt at ease, at home. My mother didn’t feel welcome in Baldwin Hills. My father didn’t feel comfortable in Brentwood

most mothers carry this emotional burden as she buries herself under all the tasks that she must do. In love with her children but having a constant feeling that she has to ask permission, make a multitude of micro arrangements, and decisions every time she wants to do something for herself. Most of the time it doesn’t occur to her to ask, ‘This is what my mother did, her grandmother, and her great grandmother before her…’ with the well-worn track playing in the background of her subconscious.

I am reminded of my parents playing, my father sitting cross-legged and my mother with her legs tucked to her side, her eyes hidden behind dark round lenses. I would peer over my father’s shoulder as he arranged his fanned cards by suit, guarding them dramatically from my mother’s eyes. Padar, if you’re not careful, you’ll lose to her again! Sitara, I’m prepared for it. She’s won me over a thousand times already, my father would reply. He had a way of looking at my mother that made her look away and blush.

Its “object” was the physical education, the moral training, the mental discipline and instruction, and the spiritual growth, of the child. Its constitution, parents of whatever class, and others interested in education. Its plan of work included arrangements for business meetings, lectures, field excursions, schoolroom and cottage lectures, cottage field excursions, the dissemination of literature, occasional lectures by well-known educationists, an examination scheme, a magazine for the UNION, a training college, and lectures on education under the headings of the ‘Objects.

The next year, in March 1888, her parents sent her to Philadelphia, to be examined and cared for by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, a physician famous for treating patients, mainly women, suffering from neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion. Mitchell’s solution for Theodate was his then-famous “Rest Cure,” a period of forced inactivity lasting up to two months. “At first, and in some cases for four or five weeks, I do not permit the patient to sit up or to sew or write or read,” Mitchell wrote, in his book Fat and Blood. “The only action allowed is that needed to clean the teeth.” He forbade some patients from rolling over on their own, insisting they do so only with the help of a nurse. “In such cases I arrange to have the bowels and water passed while lying down, and the patient is lifted on to a lounge at bedtime and sponged, and then lifted back again into the newly-made bed.” For stubborn cases, he reserved mild electrical shock, delivered while the patient was in a filled bathtub. His method reflected his own dim view of women. In his book Wear and Tear; or, Hints for the Overworked, he wrote that women “would do far better if the brain were very lightly tasked.

They will grow up in a cultural cocoon watching TV and movies from overseas, and vacations—if they have them—will be spent in their parents’ country of origin. They will go to the local mosque. When their parents decide it is time, they will be pushed into an arranged marriage, often with a distant cousin sourced from their country of origin, using a marriage certificate to enable the cousin to immigrate. Marrying outside their ethnic or religious community is proscribed. This cultural isolation creates what has been called in one UK report a “first generation in every generation.”41

When he thought I was ready, my father inducted me into the quantum universe. It seemed to contradict all the science I had learned so far: nothing was really held in place. The essential stuff of the universe was nonmatter, pulses of energy and information, flickering in and out of existence. Everything was up for grabs. A table, a chair was a fluid arrangement of probabilities. Sometimes I expected the uncertainty principle to kick in and find strangers masquerading as my parents, or that our house had been razed by some great atomic upheaval. It was about this time I started sleeping with the light on. MANY

Paco Fuentes," Mrs. Peterson says, pointing to the table behind Mary. The handsome young man with pale blue eyes like his mother's and smoky black hair like his father's takes his assigned seat. Mrs. Peterson regards her new student over the glasses perched on her nose. "Mr. Fuentes, don't think this class will be a piece of cake because your parents got lucky and developed a medication to halt the progression of Alzheimer's. Your father never did finish my class and he flunked one of my tests, although I have a feeling your mother was the one who should have failed. But that just means I'll expect extra from you.

So far from a political ideology being the quasi-divine parent of political activity, it turns out to be its earthly stepchild. Instead of an independently premeditated scheme of ends to be pursued, it is a system of ideas abstracted from the manner in which people have been accustomed to go about the business of attending to the arrangements of their societies. The pedigree of every political ideology shows it to be the creature, not of premeditation in advance of political activity, but of meditation upon a manner of politics. In short, political activity comes first and a political ideology follows after; and the understanding of politics we are investigating has the disadvantage of being, in the strict sense, preposterous. Let us consider the matter first in relation to scientific hypothesis, which I have taken to play a role in scientific activity in some respects similar to that of an ideology in politics. If a scientific hypothesis were a self-generated bright idea which owed nothing to scientific activity, then empiricism governed by hypothesis could be considered to compose a self-contained manner of activity; but this certainly is not its character. The truth is that only a man who is already a scientist can formulate a scientific hypothesis; that is, an hypothesis is not an independent invention capable of guiding scientific inquiry, but a dependent supposition which arises as an abstraction from within already existing scientific activity. Moreover, even when the specific hypothesis has in this manner been formulated, it is inoperative as a guide to research without constant reference to the traditions of scientific inquiry from which it was abstracted. The concrete situation does not appear until the specific hypothesis, which is the occasion of empiricism being set to work, is recognized as itself the creature of owing how to conduct a scientific inquiry. Or consider the example of cookery. It might be supposed that an ignorant man, some edible materials, and a cookery book compose together the necessities of a self-moved (or concrete) activity called cooking. But nothing is further from the truth. The cookery book is not an independently generated beginning from which cooking can spring; it is nothing more than an abstract of somebody's knowledge of how to cook: it is the stepchild, not the parent of the activity. The book, in its tum, may help to set a man on to dressing a dinner, but if it were his sole guide he could never, in fact, begin: the book speaks only to those who know already the kind of thing to expect from it and consequently bow to interpret it. Now, just as a cookery book presupposes somebody who knows how to cook, and its use presupposes somebody who already knows how to use it, and just as a scientific hypothesis springs from a knowledge of how to conduct a scientific investigation and separated from that knowledge is powerless to set empiricism profitably to work, so a political ideology must be understood, not as an independently premeditated beginning for political activity, but as knowledge (abstract and generalized) of a concrete manner of attending to the arrangements of a society. The catechism which sets out the purposes to be pursued merely abridges a concrete manner of behaviour in which those purposes are already hidden. It does not exist in advance of political activity, and by itself it is always an insufficient guide. Political enterprises, the ends to be pursued, the arrangements to be established (all the normal ingredients of a political ideology), cannot be premeditated in advance of a manner of attending to the arrangements of a society; what we do, and moreover what we want to do, is the creature of how we are accustomed to conduct our affairs. Indeed, it often reflects no more than a dis­covered ability to do something which is then translated into an authority to do it.

All they could do was flutter their fans and bat their eyes. The matchmaker Mother hired bragged that they were perfect porcelain dolls. What she didn't say was they had no minds of their own." Shang grimaced at the memory without looking at her. "They'd say anything to make me like them." How familiar that sounds. Mulan put her hands on her hips. "Not all girls are like that. You have to look at it from their perspective, too. Girls are raised to be pretty and graceful, and quiet." She made a face. "They aren't allowed to speak their minds, and they don't have a choice in who they marry. My parents were lucky that they fell in love, but their marriage was arranged, too. And my mother, she doesn't even belong to her family anymore after they got married. It wasn't my mother's decision, but her family's. They told her that a woman's only role in life is to bear sons." Shang leaned forward. "You sound quite passionate about this." His closeness made Mulan hunch back. Remembering who she was pretending to be, she felt her cheeks burn. "I just... I mean, I bet there are some girls who'd make better soldiers than boys. If they were given the chance." "A female soldier? That's the craziest thing I've heard." "Girls can be strong, too." "Not like us, Ping." Mulan hid a smile. "You'd be surprised.

We celebrate the dedication of Olympic athletes who diet and train and exercise daily for years in order to prepare for the games. They give up not only physical comfort but also any hope of a normal social and family life. When police officers or firefighters die, often thousands turn out for their funerals. We honor our children who die in military service in much the same way—often arranging public ceremonies and holidays. We expect television celebrities such as actors, news correspondents and musicians to sacrifice any kind of normal life in order to entertain us around the clock—and they are paid millions of dollars to do so. The names of astronauts become household words because they risk their lives in order to forward the conquest of space. But the minute a Christian young person starts to fast and pray, consider the mission field or give up career or romance for Christ—concerned counselors, family and friends will spend hours trying to keep him or her from “going off the deep end on this religious stuff.” Even devout Christian parents will oppose Christian service when their own son or daughter is about to give up all for Christ. Discipline, pain, sacrifice and suffering are rewarded with fame and fortune in the world. Why then do we refuse to accept it as a normal part of giving spiritual birth in the kingdom of our Lord?

The U.S. Census Bureau considers mothers the "designated parent," even when both parents are present in the home. When mothers care for their children, it's "parenting," but when fathers care for their children, the government deems it a "child care arrangement." I have even heard a few men say that they are heading home to "babysit" for their children. I have never heard a woman refer to taking care of her own children as "babysitting." A friend of mine ran a team-building exercise during a company retreat where people were asked to fill in their hobbies. Half of the men in the group listed "their children" as hobbies. A hobby? For most mothers, kids are not a hobby. Showering is a hobby.

(1) The church-state issue. If parents could use their vouchers to pay tuition at parochial schools, would that violate the First Amendment? Whether it does or not, is it desirable to adopt a policy that might strengthen the role of religious institutions in schooling? The Supreme Court has generally ruled against state laws providing assistance to parents who send their children to parochial schools, although it has never had occasion to rule on a full-fledged voucher plan covering both public and nonpublic schools. However it might rule on such a plan, it seems clear that the Court would accept a plan that excluded church-connected schools but applied to all other private and public schools. Such a restricted plan would be far superior to the present system, and might not be much inferior to a wholly unrestricted plan. Schools now connected with churches could qualify by subdividing themselves into two parts: a secular part reorganized as an independent school eligible for vouchers, and a religious part reorganized as an after-school or Sunday activity paid for directly by parents or church funds. The constitutional issue will have to be settled by the courts. But it is worth emphasizing that vouchers would go to parents, not to schools. Under the GI bills, veterans have been free to attend Catholic or other colleges and, so far as we know, no First Amendment issue has ever been raised. Recipients of Social Security and welfare payments are free to buy food at church bazaars and even to contribute to the collection plate from their government subsidies, with no First Amendment question being asked. Indeed, we believe that the penalty that is now imposed on parents who do not send their children to public schools violates the spirit of the First Amendment, whatever lawyers and judges may decide about the letter. Public schools teach religion, too—not a formal, theistic religion, but a set of values and beliefs that constitute a religion in all but name. The present arrangements abridge the religious freedom of parents who do not accept the religion taught by the public schools yet are forced to pay to have their children indoctrinated with it, and to pay still more to have their children escape indoctrination.

On one occasion, the principal sent me a message that a British girl would be sitting behind me, and that I should be helpful to her during the exam. Ironically, that girl had been sent back to Peshawar by expat parents for an arranged marriage. She was finding it hard to adjust to the conservative environment of Peshawar. The man she ended up marrying had put in a proposal to my family for me a year earlier. I had thought this man from Charsadda would not let me continue my education or have a career. Seeing him as a backward Pashtun, I had refused. A few years later, I bumped into the same girl. She had become a judge, and was madly in love with her rather progressive Pashtun husband, while I had found myself under lock-and-key in good old England.

With the organization and brevity of a drill sergeant, she began arranging them to her liking. "Alan here..." She took him by the arm and stood him between his parents' chairs. "And Shelby." She nudged Shelby beside him. "Caine,you sit in the foor." She tugged on his hand, until grinning, he obliged her. "And Diana-" Caine pulled his wife down on his lap before Gennie could finish. "Yes, that'll do. Justin over here with Rena.And Grant-" "I'm not-" he began. "Do as you're told,boy," Daniel bellowed at him,then spoke directly to his grandson. "Leave it to a Campbell to make trouble." Grumbling,Grant strolled over behind Daniel's chair and scowled down at him. "A fine thing when a Campbell's in a MacGregor family portrait." "Two Campbells," Shelby reminded her brother with alacrity.

That exactly is how my father and mother met and became man and wife. There were no home ceremonials, such as the seeking and obtaining of parental consent, because there were no parent; no conferences by uncles and grand-uncles, or exhortations by grandmothers and aunts; no male relatives to arrange the marriage knot, nor female relations to herald the family union, and no uncles of the bride to divide the bogadi (dowry) cattle as, of course, there were no cattle. It was a simple matter of taking each other for good and or ill with the blessing of the ‘God of Rain’. The forest was their home, the rustling trees their relations, the sky their guardian and the birds, who sealed the marriage contract with the songs, the only guests. Here they stablished their home and names it Re-Nosi (We-are-alone). [41]

and even if I remembered them, whom could they interest?’ ‘Then how’s it to be?’ began the master of the house. ‘There was nothing much of interest about my first love either; I never fell in love with any one till I met Anna Nikolaevna, now my wife, – and everything went as smoothly as possible with us; our parents arranged the match, we were very soon in love with each other, and got married without loss of time. My story can be told in a couple of words. I must confess, gentlemen, in bringing up the subject of first love, I reckoned upon you, I won’t say old, but no longer young, bachelors. Can’t you enliven us with something, Vladimir Petrovitch?’ ‘My first love, certainly, was not quite an ordinary one,’ responded, with some reluctance, Vladimir Petrovitch, a man of forty, with black hair turning grey. ‘Ah!’ said

As these remarks indicate, the Social Security program involves a transfer from the young to the old. To some extent such a transfer has occurred throughout history—the young supporting their parents, or other relatives, in old age. Indeed, in many poor countries with high infant death rates, like India, the desire to assure oneself of progeny who can provide support in old age is a major reason for high birth rates and large families. The difference between Social Security and earlier arrangements is that Social Security is compulsory and impersonal—earlier arrangements were voluntary and personal. Moral responsibility is an individual matter, not a social matter. Children helped their parents out of love or duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else’s parents out of compulsion and fear. The earlier transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken them.

As these remarks indicate, the Social Security program involves a transfer from the young to the old. To some extent such a transfer has occurred throughout history—the young supporting their parents, or other relatives, in old age. Indeed, in many poor countries with high infant death rates, like India, the desire to assure oneself of progeny who can provide support in old age is a major reason for high birth rates and large families. The difference between Social Security and earlier arrangements is that Social Security is compulsory and impersonal—earlier arrangements were voluntary and personal. Moral responsibility is an individual matter, not a social matter. Children helped their parents out of love or duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else's parents out of compulsion and fear. The earlier transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken them.

PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. (Comm. in Matt. Prolog.) Matthew has arranged his narrative in a regular series of events. First, the birth, secondly, the baptism, thirdly, the temptation, fourthly, the teachings, fifthly, the miracles, sixthly, the passion, seventhly, the resurrection, and lastly, the ascension of Christ; desiring by this not only to set forth the history of Christ, but to teach the order of evangelic life. It is nought that we are born of our parents, if we be not reborn again of God by water and the Spirit. After baptism we must resist the Devil. Then being as it were superior to all temptation, he is made fit to teach, and if he be a priest let him teach, and commend his teaching, as it were, by the miracles of a good life; if he be lay, let him teach faith by his works. In the end we must take our departure from the stage of this world, and there remains that the reward of resurrection and glory follow the victory over temptation.

Anti-voting lawmakers perhaps weren’t intending to make it harder for married white women to vote, but that’s exactly what they did by requiring an exact name match across all forms of identification in many states in recent years. Birth certificates list people’s original surnames, but if they change their names upon marriage, their more recent forms of ID usually show their married names. Sandra Watts is a married white judge in the state of Texas who was forced to use a provisional ballot in 2013 under the state’s voter ID law. She was outraged at the imposition: “Why would I want to vote provisional ballot when I’ve been voting regular ballot for the last forty-nine years?” Like many women, she included her maiden name as her middle name when she took her husband’s last name—and that’s what her driver’s license showed. But on the voter rolls, her middle name was the one her parents gave her at birth, which she no longer used. And like that, she lost her vote—all because of a law intended to suppress people like Judge Watts’s fellow Texan Anthony Settles, a Black septuagenarian and retired engineer. Anthony Settles was in possession of his Social Security card, an expired Texas identification card, and his old University of Houston student ID, but he couldn’t get a new photo ID to vote in 2016 because his mother had changed his name when she remarried in 1964. Several lawyers tried to help him track down the name-change certificate in courthouses, to no avail; his only recourse was to go to court for a new one, at a cost of $250. Elderly, rural, and low-income voters are more likely not to have birth certificates or to have documents containing clerical errors. Hargie Randell, a legally blind Black Texan who couldn’t drive but who had a current voter registration card used before the new Texas law, had to arrange for people to drive him to the Department of Public Safety office three times, and once to the county clerk’s office an hour away, only to end up with a birth certificate that spelled his name wrong by one letter.

A note of caution: epigenetics is also on the verge of transforming into a dangerous idea. Epigenetic modifications of genes can potentially superpose historical and environmental information on cells and genomes—but this capacity is speculative, limited, idiosyncratic, and unpredictable: a parent with an experience of starvation produces children with obesity and overnourishment, while a father with the experience of tuberculosis, say, does not produce a child with an altered response to tuberculosis. Most epigenetic “memories” are the consequence of ancient evolutionary pathways, and cannot be confused with our longing to affix desirable legacies on our children. As with genetics in the early twentieth century, epigenetics is now being used to justify junk science and enforce stifling definitions of normalcy. Diets, exposures, memories, and therapies that purport to alter heredity are eerily reminiscent of Lysenko’s attempt to “reeducate” wheat using shock therapy. Mothers are being asked to minimize anxiety during their pregnancy—lest they taint all their children, and their children, with traumatized mitochondria. Lamarck is being rehabilitated into the new Mendel. These glib notions about epigenetics should invite skepticism. Environmental information can certainly be etched on the genome. But most of these imprints are recorded as “genetic memories” in the cells and genomes of individual organisms—not carried forward across generations. A man who loses a leg in an accident bears the imprint of that accident in his cells, wounds, and scars—but does not bear children with shortened legs. Nor has the uprooted life of my family seem to have burdened me, or my children, with any wrenching sense of estrangement. Despite Menelaus’s admonitions, the blood of our fathers is lost in us—and so, fortunately, are their foibles and sins. It is an arrangement that we should celebrate more than rue. Genomes and epigenomes exist to record and transmit likeness, legacy, memory, and history across cells and generations. Mutations, the reassortment of genes, and the erasure of memories counterbalance these forces, enabling unlikeness, variation, monstrosity, genius, and reinvention—and the refulgent possibility of new beginnings, generation upon generation.

Parents like Jennifer, Susan, and Rae express desires that are quite modest. Full-time hours come first. That is a prize that can be astonishingly hard to wrest from a low-wage employer who wants to avoid added costs associated with full-time employment, such as health insurance and paid time off. A predictable schedule, so parents can arrange for safe, reliable child care, comes next. A few say they would be happy if they could get just those two things. Yet finding a job with even those basic attributes is something Susan Brown feels she can only dream of, not expect. Most parents, like Jennifer and Rae, hope for a little more. If they could just make $12 or $13 per hour, they say, they could make it; $15 per hour is really shooting the moon. Safe working conditions, and some sick or personal days, would be a real plus. The other “extras” that once came routinely with a full-time job—health insurance, vacation days, and retirement benefits—don’t often come up in conversations with the $2-a-day poor. These perks are so uncommon among the jobs available to low-wage workers that they seem all but outside the bounds of reality.

She had several books she'd been wanting to read, but instead she sprawled out on the couch surrounded by pillows and blankets, and spent the hours flipping channels between Judge Judy, The People's Court, Maury, and Jerry Springer, and rounded out her afternoon with Dr. Phil and Oprah. All in all, it was a complete waste of a day. At least until school got out. Jay showed up after school with a bouquet of flowers and an armful of DVDs, although Violet couldn't have card less about either...he was all she wanted. She couldn't help the electric thrill of excitement she felt when he came strolling in, grinning at her foolishly as if he hadn't seen her in weeks rather than hours. He scooped her up from the couch and dropped her onto his lap as he sat down where she had been just a moment before. He was careful to arrange her ankle on a neatly stacked pile of pillows beside him. He stubbornly refused to hide his affection for her, and if Violet hadn't known better she would have sworn that he was going out of his way to make her self-conscious in her own home. Fortunately her parents were giving them some space for the time being, and they were left by themselves most of the time. "Did you miss me?" he asked arrogantly as he gently brushed his lips over hers, not bothering to wait for an answer. She smiled while she kissed him back, loving the topsy-turvy feeling that her stomach always got when he was so close to her. She wound her arms around his neck, forgetting that she was in the middle of the family room and not hidden away in the privacy of her bedroom. He pulled away from her, suddenly serious. "You know, we didn't get much time alone yesterday. And I didn't get a chance to tell you..." Violet was mesmerized by the thick timbre of his deep voice. She barely heard his words but rather concentrated on the fluid masculinity of his tone. "I feel like I've waited too long to finally have you, and then yesterday...when..." He stopped, seemingly at a loss, and then he tried another approach. His hand stroked her cheek, igniting a response from deep within her. "I can't imagine living without you," he said, tenderly kissing her forehead, his warm breath fanning her brow. He paused thoughtfully for a moment before speaking again. "I love you, Violet. More than I ever could have imagined. And I don't want to lose you...I can't lose you." It was her turn to look arrogant as she glanced up at him. "I know," she stated smugly, shrugging her shoulder. He shoved her playfully but held on to her tightly so that she never really went anywhere. "What do you mean, 'I know'? What kind of response is that?" His righteous indignation bordered on comical. He pulled her down into his arms so that his face was directly above hers. "Say it!" he commanded. She shook her head, pretending not to understand him. "What? What do you want me to say?" But then she giggled and ruined her baffled façade. He teased her with his mouth, leaning down to kiss her and then pulling away before his lips ever reached hers. He nuzzled her neck tantalizingly, only to stop once she responded. She wrapped her arms around his neck, trying to pull him closer, frustrated by his mocking ambush of her senses. "Say it," he whispered, his breath warm against her neck. She groaned, wanting him to put her out of her misery. "I love you too," she rasped as she clung to him. "I love you so much..." His mouth moved to cover hers in an exhausting kiss that left them broth breathless and craving more than they could have. Violet collapsed into his arms, gathering her wits and hoping that no one walked in on them anytime soon.

While there are deeper regularities in the Universe than the simple circumstances we generally describe as orderly, all that order, simple and complex, seems to derive from laws of Nature established at the Big Bang (or earlier), rather than as a consequence of belated intervention by an imperfect deity. “God is to be found in the details” is the famous dictum of the German scholar Aby Warburg. But, amid much elegance and precision, the details of life and the Universe also exhibit haphazard, jury-rigged arrangements and much poor planning. What shall we make of this: an edifice abandoned early in construction by the architect? The evidence, so far at least and laws of Nature aside, does not require a Designer. Maybe there is one hiding, maddeningly unwilling to be revealed. Sometimes it seems a very slender hope. The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal. --Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

I hope you don’t mind that we’re crashing,” Wes says. “I’m trying to escape a hunting expedition. No joke. Dad thinks I’ll be more of a man if I can blow a rabbit’s head off. And my response? ‘Sorry, Dad, but as tempting as it is to obliterate Peter Cottontail first thing on a Sunday morning, I promised Camelia I’d swing by her house, because she’s been begging to abuse my body for weeks.’” “And speaking of being delusional,” Kimmie segues, “did I mention that my plan to reunite my parents was totally dumb?” She leads us into my bedroom and then closes the door behind her. “They could smell the setup before their water glasses were even filled.” “How’s that?” I ask, taking a seat on my bed. “The violinist I arranged to serenade them at the table might have been a tip-off,” she begins. “Either that, or the wrist corsage I ordered for my mom. I handpicked the begonias and had the florist deliver it right to the table.” “Don’t forget about the oyster appetizer you preordered for the occasion,” Wes adds. “Because, you know what they say about oysters, right?” An evil grin breaks out across her face. ‘I know, I know.” She sighs, before I can even say anything. “I may have gone a little overboard, but what can I say? I’m a dorkus extremus. Hence my outit du jour.” She’s wearing a Catholic schoolgirl’s uniform, a pair of clunky black glasses (with the requisite amount of tape on the bridge), and a cone-shaped dunce cap. “Yes, but you’re a dorkus extremus with a nice set of begonias,” Wes teases.

Stefan wasn’t sure if it had been watching them and realizing how deep Adrian and Madeleine’s attachment ran, or if it was the fact he was already half in love with Adrian, but he found himself talking before he could stop himself. “I know we’ve only known each other for a year or so, so it’s not really my place to offer my opinions, and I have no concept of what it’s like to be a Royal—the expectations, everything involved,” he started, and Adrian looked up at him. “But my parents were Diplomats, and I did learn a few things from them about how to get what you want.” “Yes?” Adrian asked guardedly. “I’ve been to many courts, and seen many Lord’s daughters. None of them are like Madeleine. No, wait, I’m not insulting her,” he added quickly as Adrian opened his mouth to speak. “What I’m saying is, those girls are being groomed for the traditional roles your father intimated she was to take when she’s older. Now you find out what she really wants—at least at nine years old—to be a Healer and to marry who she wants to. She wants the independence she sees we have.” “Brion’s marriage was arranged when he was thirteen,” Adrian told him. “He seems happy enough, and so does Gwyne, for that matter, but she’d been preparing to be his wife since she was—since she was younger than Maddy.” “But the rest of you haven’t been,” Stefan pointed out, and Adrian nodded in agreement. “One of the basic ideas I grew up with was compromise, giving up just enough to make both sides happy. What if there was no compromise with your sister? If she became so unmarriageable, such an unlikely prospect as a complacent wife, that no one wanted to marry her?” he paused to let his words sink in.

Last night, as I was sleeping, I dreamt—marvellous error!— that I had a beehive here inside my heart. And the golden bees were making white cones and sweet honey from my old failures. Antonio Machado, “Last Night” (translated by Robert Bly) I once heard someone ask for the definition of adult. I can’t remember where I was, or who the speaker was who answered the question, but I’ll never forget the answer: “Adult means choice.” As children, most of us had little or no say in most matters. My generation was taught that children should be seen and not heard. We were told to “do as I say, not as I do.” We didn’t have a “vote” in family matters because we were “just children.” Picture this scenario if you will. Five-year-old Jerry has just received his umpteenth whipping or scolding. He turns to his parents and says, “You know, Mom and Dad, I choose not to be abused anymore. I’ll be taking the car keys, withdrawing some money from our joint account, and moving to Florida to live with Grandma and Grandpa. When you both start acting like adults, give me a call, and we’ll discuss the conditions of my return. We’ll see if we can settle on a mutual arrangement where you two stay adult as much of the time as possible, and I’ll be a kid who learns how to make healthy choices by being disciplined instead of punished. We’ll negotiate how you will set healthy boundaries so I can learn to do the same. For now, I’ll be seeing you. Don’t forget to write. And don’t forget to read John Lee’s book on regression. I’m too young, but you’re not.” As children, we did not have the choice of laying down the law for our frequently regressing parents. But as adults we can certainly choose to draw our boundaries and express our needs in all of our relationships as adults—not only with our parents, but also with our spouses, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances.

Soon after I arrived on the island I had a run-in with my son’s first grade teacher due to my irreverent PJ sense of humor. When Billy lost a baby tooth I arranged the traditional parentchild Tooth Fairy ritual. Only six years old, Billy already suspected I was really the Tooth Fairy and schemed to catch me in the act. With each lost tooth, he was getting harder and harder to trick. To defeat my precocious youngster I decided on a bold plan of action. When I tucked him in I made an exaggerated show of placing the tooth under his pillow. I conspicuously displayed his tooth between my thumb and forefinger and slid my hand slowly beneath his pillow. Unbeknownst to him, I hid a crumpled dollar bill in the palm of my hand. With a flourish I pretended to place the tooth under Billy’s pillow, but with expert parental sleight of hand, I kept the tooth and deposited the dollar bill instead. I issued a stern warning not to try and stay awake to see the fairy and left Billy’s room grinning slyly. I assured him I would guard against the tricky fairy creature. I knew Billy would not be able to resist checking under his pillow. Sure enough, only a few minutes later he burst from his room wide-eyed with excitement. He clutched a dollar bill tightly in his fist and bounced around the room, “Dad! Dad! The fairy took my tooth and left a dollar!” I said, “I know son. I used my ninja skills and caught that thieving fairy leaving your room. I trapped her in a plastic bag and put her in the freezer.” Billy was even more excited and begged to see the captured fairy. I opened the freezer and gave him a quick glimpse of a large shrimp I had wrapped in plastic. Viewed through multiple layers of wrap, the shrimp kind of looked like a frozen fairy. I stressed the magnitude of the occasion, “Tooth fairies are magical, elusive little things with their wings and all. I think we are the first family ever to capture one!” Billy was hopping all over the house and it took me quite awhile to finally calm him down and get him to sleep. The next day I got an unexpected phone call at work. My son’s teacher wanted to talk to me about Billy, “Now what?” I thought. When I arrived at the school, Billy’s teacher met me at the door. Once we settled into her office, she explained she was worried about him. Earlier that day, Billy told his first grade class his father had killed the tooth fairy and had her in a plastic bag in the freezer. He was very convincing. Some little kids started to cry. I explained the previous night’s fairy drama to the teacher. I was chuckling—she was not. She looked at me as if I had a giant booger hanging out of a nostril. Despite the look, I could tell she was attracted to me so I told her no thanks, I already had a girlfriend. Her sputtering red face made me uncomfortable and I quickly left. Later I swore Billy to secrecy about our fairy hunting activities. For dinner that evening, we breaded and fried up a couple dozen fairies and ate them with cocktail sauce and fava beans.

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:

Justice, solidarity, freedom, equal rights—these are all ideas that come straight out of the Enlightenment. In fact, out of classical liberalism. Classical liberalism is very anti-capitalist, contrary to what everybody says. And classical liberal and Enlightenment ideals lead in a very direct path, I think, to what was called libertarian socialism, or anarchism, or something like that. The idea is that people have a fundamental core right and need to be free and creative, not under external constraints. Any form of authority requires legitimation. The burden of proof is always on an authoritarian structure, whatever it may be, whether it's owning people, sex-linked, or even child-parent relationships. Any form of authority has to be challenged. Sometimes they can be justified, and maybe in that case, okay, you live with them. But for the most part, not. That would then lead quite directly to what were kind of truisms about a century ago. I mean, now they sound really crazy because there's been such a deterioration of values. But if you look at the thinking of just ordinary people, like say the working-class press in the mid-19th century, which grew where the ideas just grew out of the same soil—Enlightenment, classical liberal soil—the ideas are clear. Obviously, people should not be machines. They shouldn't be tools of production. They shouldn't be ordered around. We don't want chattel slavery, you know, like black slaves in the South, but we also don't want what was called, since the 18th century, wage slavery, which is not very different. Namely, where you have to rent yourself to survive. In a way, it was argued with some plausibility that you're worse off than a slave in that scenario. Actually, slave owners argued that. When slave owners were defending slavery, there was a kind of a moral debate that went on. It had shared moral turf, as a lot of moral debate did. The slave owners made a plausible point. They said, "Look, we own our workers. You just rent your workers. When you own something, you take much better care of it than when you rent it." To put it a little anachronistically, if you rent a car, you're not going to pay as much attention to taking care of it as if you own the car, for obvious reasons. Similarly, if you own people, you're going to take more care of them than if you rent people. If you rent people and you don't want them anymore, you throw them out. If you own people, well, you've got a sort of an investment in them, so you make them healthier and so on. So, the slave owners, in fact, argued, "Look, we're a lot more moral than you guys with your capitalist, wage slave system." Ordinary working people understood that. After the Civil War, you find in the American working-class press bitter complaints over the fact that, "Look, we fought to end chattel slavery, and now you're driving us into wage slavery, which is the same sort of thing." This is one core institution in society where people are forced to become tools of others, to be cast out if they're not necessary. It's a grotesque arrangement, totally contrary to the ideals of classical liberalism or Enlightenment values or anything else. It's now become sort of standard doctrine, but that's just a victory of absolutism, and we should dismantle all that stuff. Culturally, it starts with changes. You've got to change your minds and your spirit, and recover what was a common understanding in a more civilized period, let's say a century ago, in the shop floors of Lowell, Massachusetts. Recover that understanding, and then we work to simply democratize all institutions, free them up, and eliminate authoritarian structures. As I say, you find them everywhere. From families up to corporations, there are all kinds of authoritarian structures in the world. They all ought to be challenged. Very few of them can resist that challenge. They survive mainly because they're not challenged.

for given he had not yet returned the betrothal agreement to her father, there seemed to be no eagerness on his part to do so or to proceed with their engagement. Mayhap, now that he was of a great and high title, he might find himself a little more interested in the young ladies of the ton and would not feel the need to sign the betrothal agreement at all. It might all come to a very satisfactory close, and she could have the freedom she had always expected. “Augusta!” Lady Elmsworth’s voice was sharp, as though she knew precisely what it was Augusta was thinking. “You will make sure that all of your attention is on your betrothed this evening. Do you understand me?” “We are not betrothed yet, Mama,” Augusta replied a little tartly. “Therefore, I cannot show him any specific attention for fear of what others might say.” She arched one eyebrow and looked at her mother as she turned around, aware she was irritating her parent but finding a dull sense of satisfaction in her chest. “Once the agreement has been sent to Papa, then, of course, I shall do my duty.” She dropped into a quick curtsy, her eyes low and her expression demure, but it did not fool Lady Elmsworth. “You had best be very careful with your behavior this evening, Augusta,” she exclaimed, practically throwing herself from her chair as she rose to her feet, her cheeks a little pink and her eyes blazing with an unexpressed frustration.

When Charles Kent started coming to call on me, too rich and too important for war—even a Great one—my father had my mother order a dozen new dresses for me, and three painrs of handmade leather shoes. I needed to play my part, too—the beautiful, dutiful daughter, soon to be a richer man’s wide. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t yet eighteen. I didn’t matter. Once upon a time, a banker and a banker arranged a merger, traded a girl for a stake in a corporation, agreed over a handshake and a scotch. And on a chilly afternoon, while my parents were out, Charles Kent tore one of those lovely new gowns off my back because I didn’t want to play. He laughed as I shivered in the sudden cold, he laughed as I gathered myself by the fire. He stopped laughing when I hit him with the poker. He cried when I hit him again. War is hell.

I’m going to tell you a really important lesson I learned after Emily died. I thought I knew what it was to be part of a team. I was in the army, joined Delta, I trusted my team with everything, and knew they had my back no matter what. Then I lost my wife and was the sole parent to a newborn. Lolly was my responsibility, and I took that seriously. I tried to juggle everything myself. Funeral arrangements, caring for Lolly, taking care of the house, laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping, midnight feeds, and a colicky baby. I thought I had to do it all and didn’t want to accept help from anyone. You know what eventually happened?” “What?” “I crashed. Two months after Lolly was born, I was cooking dinner, lay down for just a moment, and woke up an hour later to someone hammering on my apartment door. Dinner burned which set off the smoke detectors, the fire department came, and I realized that raising my daughter wasn’t a mission I could undertake without my team. I needed my parents, needed Bear and the rest of Alpha team, needed Prey and the Oswalds. So, I reached out for help.

Trust our body and our instincts. • Make care arrangements for our other children that allow us to truly relax and labor for as long as needed. • Find caregivers (midwives/doctors) who share our values and mutual trust. • Make sure our pillars of support are present. • Contrary to popular belief, sometimes the labor for a second or third child is much longer than the labor for the first or previous child. Knowing and accepting this can make a difference in our endurance. • Sometimes, a drive or a walk around the block can change things up for our labor and trigger transition.

And yet, at the end of the story nothing has been said about what prostitution is, why it exists, or how it works. Instead, we have heard a contemporary saga of progress, a romantic tale of how an old, decaying tradition long tried to keep people down and tell them how they should live - until some brave individuals rebelled in order to gain the right to live as they wanted, standing up for freedom and sexuality! It is a story we know all too well. It fits into an even larger story: the revolt of sexuality against morality, Romeo and Juliet against their parents' narrow-mindedness, romantic love against arranged marriage, lust against the church, and also the sexual revolution, the 1968 revolt, anti-establishment rock and hippie cultures and their accompanying promotion of freedom and sex. In just a few quick rhetorical turns, prostitution became a contemporary story. Voilà, the total makeover of prostitution: once considered the world's oldest profession, prostitution is now the world's most modern one.

On a snow-covered hill high in Transylvania, Solomon Macaroni lay in a coffin. Heart beating rapidly, he was very much alive. And the snow-covered hill happened to be inside the largest, most famous and oldest family home in all of Romania – the home of Solomon’s uncle, Dracula. Uncle Dracula, a five-thousand-year-old vampire, lived there with his six children. And, for the next ninety-nine years, while his parents were on a round-the-world cruise, so did Solomon. He’d been quite put out by this arrangement at first. For starters, Solomon was only five hundred and fifty-three, the equivalent of about eleven in human years. And second of all, his prankster cousins weren’t the easiest vampires to live with. But, after a rocky start, Solomon had stopped missing his parents so much and had decided to embrace his time in Uncle Dracula’s weird and wonderful home. ‘Ve have the indoor beach,’ Uncle Dracula had declared

Eva was rather impressed that we had made all the necessary arrangements. I did not tell her that I would shortly be leaving my job, because already she had said that penniless people had no right to have children. She didn’t seem to think it was Charles’s baby — only mine, because later on, when I was upstairs putting on my coat, she kissed me quite kindly, but spoilt it by saying, ‘I shall never forgive you, Sophia, for making my son a father at twenty-one.’ I almost added, ‘And you a grandmother at forty-six.

I spent half an hour telling him things I’d learned in therapy. Things I wished someone had told me in my twenties. Things I’d learned from my mistakes. Mistakes I made because I was acting like him. “You’re right,” he said in astonishment. “Of course you’re right about it all. How did you become the parent and I became the child?” How did he not understand that this had always been the arrangement?

One day as I sat and drank, I saw this young Asian male. He was a little younger than I would have liked, but he was eager and willing. I offered him fifty bucks to come home with me and let me take some nude photographs of him. We drank some rum and Cokes and I took some Polaroids, but he was very young and not that developed sexually, so I didn’t kill him. He must have told his parents because about two hours after he left, the police were at my door, found the photos I took, and arrested me. I thought this was it, that everything would come out, but the cops were only interested in the photos I took of the Asian kid and nothing else. I remember that my father was upset when I called from jail, but he got me a lawyer. I made a plea arrangement in court and was put on work release for about a year.

I don’t think it’s only physical things or fortunate circumstances. I think cozy is a deeper beat, derived from a parent, a friend, a teacher, or your own good instincts.

Miss Jones was the sort of person who is concealed, like the nun in the foundation, in every organisation which does Good Works. Patient, dogged, meticulous, vastly overworked, unpaid and completely unappreciated, she finds, files, calls, arranges, soothes and ameliorates papers, contracts, tradesmen, repairs, hurt feelings and Very Important People. No one notices her until God finally calls her home or she quits to look after her aged parents, when the whole edifice instantly falls astonished to the ground.

child wearing you down, it might mean a couple of things. First, you may be in a state of deprivation, either because you are isolated from supportive relationships or you lack time to yourself. We can’t keep boundaries in a vacuum. Get into regular, helpful relationships, or arrange for some time to yourself to fill up your tank. Remember that parenting is a temporary job, not an identity. Kids with parents who have a life learn both that they aren’t the center of the universe and that they can be free to pursue their own dreams.

only person watching them. She’d noticed that before with Colin. At large dinners, people a few seats down would stop eating and lean over to listen to him. Colin left James, and a moment later he appeared beside her with a bottle of wine and glasses for her and her father. He kissed Faye, checked his watch, and said, “When can we ask them all to leave?” “Well,” said Deborah, once the guests were gone. “That was a success.” She had arranged for them to borrow her friend’s house in Provence for their honeymoon. “Actually,” Faye had said, “we’re going to India.” And on their honeymoon a week later, in a coracle spinning on a river in Hampi, Faye gripped the straw edges of the boat and she laughed and laughed and laughed. — AFTER THEY WERE MARRIED, my parents often went on trips abroad with his friends, to rented villas in France, Sardinia, Mallorca. I visited the one in Mallorca when I was twenty-two, after saving for months to buy the ticket. I went in September, when the villa where they’d stayed was empty. A sign for a security system was posted

To the left was a parlor with an arrangement of tufted chairs. No bookcase, Anna noticed. She supposed bookcases were not necessarily requirements of good parents.

Not surprisingly, an arranged marriage coupled with a culture that didn’t accept divorce did not result in many romantic gestures between my parents.