Gardner Mother Quotes

You are going to love the sports here. Snow skiing and water-skiing and rock climbing and all kinds of extreme sports. I give you full permission to hurl yourself off stuff.

Once, I was my mother's daughter. Now I am my daughter's mother.

Whoa," Connor Stoll said. "Back up. Zoom in right there." "What?" Annabeth said nervously. "You see invaders?" "No, right there—Dylan's Candy Bar." Connor grinned at his brother. "Dude, it's open. And everyone is asleep. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" "Connor!" Katie Gardner scolded. She sounded like her mother, Demeter. "This is serious. You are not going to loot a candy store in the middle of a war!" "Sorry," Connor muttered, but he didn't sound very ashamed.

No one ever laid out the sequence of events that led to my mother being prosecuted and imprisoned for alleged welfare fraud.

Mothers hold close, fathers let go. Maybe that’s the way of the world.

What?” Annabeth said nervously. “You see invaders?” “No, right there—Dylan’s Candy Bar.” Connor grinned at his brother. “Dude, it’s open. And everyone is asleep. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” “Connor!” Katie Gardner scolded. She sounded like her mother, Demeter. “This is serious. You are not going to loot a candy store in the middle of a war!” “Sorry,” Connor muttered, but he didn’t sound very ashamed.

A child’s bonds with his or her mother are extremely powerful, so any negativity in the mother is being communicated to the child.

Andy: Andrew Makepeace Ladd, the Third, accepts with pleasure the kind invitation of Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Channing Gardner for a birthday party in honor of their daughter Melissa on April 19th, 1937 at half past three o'clock. Melissa: Dear Andy: Thank you for the birthday present. I have a lot of Oz books, but not 'The Lost Princess of Oz.' What made you give me that one? Sincerely yours, Melissa. Andy: I'm answering your letter about the book. When you came into second grade with that stuck-up nurse, you looked like a lost princess. Melissa: I don't believe what you wrote. I think my mother told your mother to get that book. I like the pictures more than the words. Now let's stop writing letters.

believe what we hear repeated over and over to us. Your mother told you that you were evil and worthless. You just need to retrain yourself to believe something different.

What is it about returning to my mother’s house that immediately turns me into a five-year-old?

Man can progress as much as we want. Mother Nature still owns our ass.

My whole life, I’ve watched my mother let the winds of circumstance blow her south of happy, and she never sees the bright side of anything.

I could stay in every night for the rest of my life and my mother still wouldn't be happy. In fact, maybe she'd be better off if I finally did go out and meet a grand demise. Get the waiting game over with. Because, as my mother will tell you, there are worse things than having your daughter abducted. There's getting her back and realizing you've lost her after all.

My mother would watch him and sigh. He's a young soul, she would say, with a tender heart. She worried for him. But never for me. I was the happy one. At least, that's how the story goes.

She loved me, in some mysterious sense I understood without her speaking it. I was her creation. We were one thing, like the wall and the rock growing out from it. -- Or so I ardently, desperately affirmed. When her strange eyes burned into me, it did not seem quite sure. I was intensely aware of where I sat, the volume of darkness I displaced, the shiny-smooth span of packed dirt between us, and the shocking separateness from me in my mama's eyes. I would feel, all at once, alone and ugly, almost - as if I'd dirtied myself - obscene.

My family's loud. Not big, but definitely demonstrative. My father still grabs my mother around the waist and tries to lure her into dark corners. As an adult, I appreciate their relationship. As a kid...Hell, we were scared to death not to announce ourselves before walking down a darkened hall.

That summer, in the wilderness of crumbling bricks and mortar, white roses had appeared in those derelict suburbs. Gramps said that if man was mad enough to destroy itself, at least the rats and cockroaches would have front-row seats, be able to enjoy the sight of Mother Nature reclaiming the earth. Outside

And it occurred to me, over a bowl of soggy cereal, that I could live like this. Compartmentalized. There, but separate. Together, but alone. Loving, but isolated. This is how I had been living most of my life, after all. In a household where my mother might appear in the middle of the night to do unspeakable things with a hairbrush. Then hours later, we’d sit across from one another sharing a platter of buttermilk biscuits for breakfast. My mother had prepared me well for this life. I glanced over at my husband, crunching away on Cheerios. I wondered who had prepared him.

She’d wanted to die, and one night when he’d been kinder than ever before to her, more gentle than anyone had ever been, so that the moment when the climax came was like fire exploding through all the room (it was September; she smelled burning leaves and there was a taste of winter in everything: the time of year when her mother would sit at the window, depressed, looking out without hope as though winter were all that remained for her—and rightly, yes, because all her life she must live in September or the memory of it or the fear of September) she, Esther, got up quietly when he was asleep, and put her clothes on, full of sweet pity for herself, and walked out on the lawn of the house they had lived in then, by the creek, and walked quiet and unseen as a druid to the footbridge and stood there believing she would drown herself, free him, but not yet, in a minute or two, not yet.

Sometimes it’s easy to say, ‘Yes! I want Christ to enter in me.’ But this doesn’t occur in five minutes. You can’t just go in front of the Tabernacle and say, ‘Now!’ and it’s done and over with. And He’s there inside you. In my experience, it’s a fairly painful process. In order for Christ to live in me, in order for Him to dwell inside and take complete possession of my soul, He has to step on and crush the serpent, the old nature,[106] my ego of Clare Crockett. This hurts a lot, a lot; sometimes, a ton. He has to ‘get rid of’ everything that isn’t Him—and there’s a lot, by the way! And sometimes my despicable self runs after things that He is trying to rid my soul of: my will, my likes, my attachments, my ideas, my plans… and that hurts, even though I know it’s for my own good. It stings! It doesn’t mean that when I say, ‘Let me die so you can live!’, I’m just kidding! No! I’m serious when I say it, but please give me your strength, your grace, your love, your saints, your mother, your heart… so I can lose all fear. So I can ‘open wide the doors’ to you.”[107]

In contrast, I’m trying to get you to look inward. Focus on steady breathing, slowing your heart rate and lowering your blood pressure, which in turn, eases your nervous system and increases your threshold for pain. Hence, the deep-breathing techniques used for centuries by laboring mothers and yoga devotees.

We can walk his last steps. We can retrieve his bones to be laid to rest next to his mother’s. But we’ll still never know everything that happened to Tim. Sooner or later, his father and his friends will have to come to terms with that. That the quality of their future sleep won’t be determined by a visit to his grave, but by their ability to let go.

Kind of guy who’d sell out his own mother to get ahead, that’s for sure. Maybe he did.

shower in five days. “Are you serious?” His smile grew wider, literally ear to ear, making his face look like one big blob of silly putty. “Feeling a little cranky?” “You cannot be for real, you fucking asshole.” He shook his head at her as if she were five. “You haven’t read the pamphlets I left for you, have you?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “If you don’t eat at least five small well-balanced meals with plenty of protein and healthy fats, your hormones will get out of whack, and one of the symptoms is crankiness.” “Fuck you.” He went to the kitchen. She could hear cupboards being opened and closed. She could already smell Lysol. The man was cleaning the kitchen. She couldn’t believe he expected her to pay him fifteen thousand dollars to be restrained, deprived, and tortured. Unlike others who might think this a grand plan, she had come to terms with her weight long ago. All she wanted to do was lose a few pounds. She had put down five thousand dollars as a deposit, promising to pay the rest upon reaching her goal weight. She had only spent the money in hopes of finding Diane. Sure, it was a lot of money, but she knew that Diane would have done the same for her had the situation been reversed. She slid off the bed and went to stand just outside the kitchen. He was on his hands and knees scrubbing the floor just like her mother used to do. “I want out,” she said. “I will sign anything you want me to, declaring to all of your lawyers and the world that the decision was mine. I don’t want a refund. I don’t want anything from you. I just want you to unlock me and let me go.” He kept scrubbing, didn’t even bother to look at her when he answered. “Sorry. Can’t do.” “Why not?” “What you’re experiencing right now is just part of the process. Everybody goes through it. You just happened to get to stage three faster than most. In fact, you skipped stages one and two altogether.” Vivian didn’t care about stage one or two, or even three. She only cared about getting out of here. “You’ve done your job. I’ve lost over sixty pounds. I want to go home.” That got his attention and he looked at her, his eyes narrowing as he scanned her body from head to toes. She hated him—hated him more than she’d ever hated anyone in her life. “I’m impressed.” “Great. So can you unlock this cuff around my ankle?” “No. Sorry.” “Why not?” He stood, put the rag and bottle of cleanser under the sink, and then walked past her. In the top drawer of her bedside table, he pulled out a ledger

Perita is the dog,” Gracie said, in a tone which implied Rosalind was a dimwit for having not immediately understood this. “You packed for a dog. Yes, I see.” The young dog was a lovely chocolate brown with the typical black mastiff mask. “She has quite a big head,” Rosalind observed. “Of course, she does.” Gracie sounded affronted by her sister’s ignorance. “That’s the breed. Her mother, Medea, was even bigger than Hercules, you know.” Rosalind was impressed. Hercules was the size of a small pony. At least, that’s how it seemed when he was flying through the halls of Sweetbriar and came barreling unexpectedly around a corner. “Why Perita? Don’t you mean Perdita?” “Not Shakespeare, silly. Alexander the Great.” Gracie was looking disgusted once more. “Well, his was Peritas as it was male. I’ve feminized it. Did you know Peritas bit off an elephant’s face when it tried to charge Alexander once?” “Bit it off?” “Probably not completely off. At least, I hope not. But I suppose it would have been justified if Peritas was protecting his master from being trampled to death,” Gracie said, looking thoughtful. “I’m sure Perita would do the very same for me. Or you.” She rubbed the pup’s head affectionately. “Yes. How lovely.” Rosalind decided not to imagine what a faceless elephant would look like.

The passing of years had made him indifferent to feminine beauty, and long association with the police had utterly calloused him to human misery. His manner indicated that he had detached himself from the scene of which he was a part. His body hulked between the prisoners and the door, which constituted a discharge of his duty. His mind was far away, occupied with the mathematical percentages of his prospects for winning on the races the next afternoon; daydreaming what he would do when he became eligible for pension; and rehashing in his mind an argument he had had with his wife that morning, thinking somewhat ruefully of her natural aptitude for delivering an extemporaneous tongue lashing, whereas he hadn’t thought of his best retorts until long afterward. His wife had a gift that way. No, damn it, she’d inherited it from her mother—that must be it. He remembered some of the scenes with his mother-in-law before she’d died some ten years ago. At that time, Mabel had been all worked up over the way the old lady used to have tantrums. That was before Mabel had got fat. She certainly had a good figure in those days. Well, come to think of it, he’d put on a little weight himself.

Most days I drive my mother’s three-colored car (all different shades of blue) to Gardner, Massachusetts, the closest town with any downtown to speak of, where I have a job at a Friendly’s washing dishes.

My mother was a wonderful woman. She had a loyalty which was unsurpassed, and a complete lack of nervousness. During all her married life, there was literally never an unkind word spoken, simply because she never allowed herself to develop any of those emotional reflexes, which so frequently make people want to bicker with those whom they love, or with whom they come in constant association.

Her eyes narrowed. “Then why did you leave me?” Her words cut deeply. “Because I knew if I stayed, if I kept coming around, you would spend so much time worrying about me that you wouldn’t stand half a chance at getting better. You never put yourself first, Lizzy. You never did, you never will. But you should. That’s why you’ve struggled with the demons inside you for so long. You always put everybody else first. You’ve taken full responsibility for your mother and father’s divorce, your sister’s problems, and your father’s inability to cope. Now you’re trying to figure out how to balance the rest of the world on your shoulders.” “Ridiculous.

So you've studied psychobabble and you've attended half of the FBI Academy. What does that make you? Someone who also lost her sister. And her mother, too, for that matter. Trump. In the contest of who has gotten dumped on more by life, I believe I just won.

No doubt about it: Mac would make an excellent mother.

The losses felt by those of us raised in a country that was different from that indicated on our passports can be heavy. To be sure, the gains are also real: the way we look at the world, the wonder of travel, our love of passports and places, our wish to defend parts of the world that we feel are misunderstood by those around us. But along with these come profound losses of people and place. For many of us, the only thing we feel we have left are our memories. We cannot go back to the place that was home. Either it does not exist, will not let us in, or danger and cost prohibit a casual trip to indulge the times of homesickness. In its place is memory. Our memories may be biased, or relayed in a way that would make our mothers say, “That’s not quite the way it happened,” but it is inalienably ours.

This family is goin’ to hell in a handbasket!” Lily shouted, then pointed her finger at her mother. “And you’re in the driver’s seat!

a woman like Mother, a part of a marriage, a family, a church, a community, never known or seen for herself, always cut up into little outside pieces; getting used to letting her house, her daily duties, stand for her, when she might be something very different inside. And now Mother was frightened because you didn't see her house; you saw her.

Do you believe now? Do you understand our story? The lessons we had to learn? Perfect families don't just happen. But they can be made. Mistakes, regrets, repair. Our mother loves us. Even when she hurts us. And we love her. Even when we hurt her. Mistakes, regret, repair.