Mess With My Children Quotes

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '97: Wear sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now. Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine. Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 pm on some idle Tuesday. Do one thing everyday that scares you. Sing. Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours. Floss. Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself. Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how. Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements. Stretch. Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't. Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone. Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's. Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own. Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room. Read the directions, even if you don't follow them. Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly. Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future. Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young. Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel. Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders. Respect your elders. Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out. Don't mess too much with your hair or by the time you're 40 it will look 85. Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth. But trust me on the sunscreen.

Fairy tales are such evil little stories for young children. Every time I’m in a mess I expect a long-haired posh-speaking man to come trotting into my life (on a horse of course, literally trotting himself . . . ) Then you realize you don’t want a long-haired posh-speaking man trotting into your life because he’s the one who put you in the bloody mess in the first place.

And then everything went on very quietly for a fortnight, says Dr. Jordan. He is reading aloud from my confession. Yes Sir, it did, I say. More or less quietly. What is everything? How did it go on? I beg your pardon, Sir? What did you do everyday? Oh, the usual, Sir, I say. I performed my duties. You will forgive me, says Dr. Jordan. Of what did those duties consist? I look at him. He is wearing a yellow cravat with small white squares, he is not making a joke. He really does not know. Men such as him do not have to clean up the messes they make, but we have to clean up our own messes, and theirs into the bargain. In that way they are like children, they do not have to think ahead, or worry about the consequences of what they do. But it's not their fault, it is only how they are brought up.

Fairy tales are such evil stories for young children. Every time I'm in a mess I expect a long-haired posh-speaking man to come trotting into my life (on a horse of course, literally trotting himself...) Then you realize you don't want a long-haired posh-speaking man trotting into your life because he's the one who put you in the bloody mess in the first place.

Then I remember what my most important parenting job is, and that is to teach my children how to deal with being human. Because most likely, that’s where they’re headed. No matter what I do, they’re headed toward being messed-up humans faster than three brakeless railroad cars. There is really only one way to deal gracefully with being human, and that is this: Forgive yourself.

Women of color declaring to white women, I'm not here to clean up your mess, carry your spear, hold your hand, or cheer you on while I suffer in silence. I'm not here to raise your children, assuage your guilt, build your platforms, or fight your battles. I'm here for my community because no one else will stand up for us but us

I realized my grief was richer and more nuanced than what lay on the surface. This was about more than the burden of the apothecary. More than James' infidelity. Intermingled in the mess was another subtler secret that James and I had hid from each other for years. We were happy, yet unfulfilled. It was possible, I understood now, to be both at the same time. I was happy with the stability of working for my family yet unfulfilled by my job and burdened by the things I hadn't pursued. I was happy with our desire to someday have children yet unfulfilled by my achievements apart from family life. How had I only just learned that happiness and fulfillment were entirely distinct things?

Audrey, you’ve been in my head since the moment I met you and you never left. Baby, I sure as hell don’t deserve you but I can’t imagine anyone else being the mother of my children or being the hand I hold at the end of every day. You’re my lucky penny, remember?

A FATHER’S GREATEST FEAR is usually that he won’t be able to provide for his family. A mom’s greatest fear is typically that something will happen to one of her children. Fear is a funny thing. It sometimes provides healthy caution, but more times than not it seems to produce undue stress and anxiety regarding things over which we have little to no control.

The…destructive…message is that the parents don’t trust their children to do what they are supposed to do whether it be learning to fall asleep on their own, figuring out how to safely climb a tree, or remembering to do the homework assignment. This message is especially harmful. Children cannot believe in themselves if the most important people in their lives don’t believe in them.

Stop. You can’t love me because you’re lonely, or because I am the only one who doesn’t piss you off. I want to piss you off, I want to get on your fucking nerves. I don’t want the responsibility of always being your rock. I will try, but I’m a mess, too. I lie, I sleep too much and I don’t like children under the age of 6, really. I don’t even know if I want kids because I’m selfish, and mothers can’t be selfish once they decide to carry another life. I’m always looking for the rain to come so I trip over my own feet. I know exactly what the air smells like before a storm. Before you fall in love with me, I want you to know that I cry a lot because it feels good, and I masturbate at least 4 times a week, and you might fall out of love with me before either of us are ready for it. I have no experience with this. I’m trying to be brave and smart but its almost impossible to be both at the same time. You can’t love me like a fire escape. Sometimes I will be the match, or the smoke under the door. I don’t know what I’m doing, all I know is that we all catch fire sometimes, before we even get warm. Before you fall in love with me, I want you to know that there’s a 50% chance that this won’t work, that one of us will wind up hating the other. I will try to keep your head above water, but sometimes I’ll need help, too. I can’t be your savior, and I don’t expect you to be mine. Just watch me unfold and I’ll watch you unfold, too. We’ll get drunk and tell each other everything. I know that’s cheating but maybe it’ll be alright. Maybe we won’t wake up embarrassed. I am going to fall in love with you, too, feet first. Maybe we’ll slow dance off a building together, maybe we’ll have forgotten each other’s names by this time next year. I don’t care, the sky is gray with or without you, so I’m not going to look up anymore, I’m going to look ahead .

At that time in my personal life, I was coming to grips with the end of the world. The familiar world, anyway. Many of us were. Scientists said it was ending now, philosophers said it had always been ending. Historians said there’d been dark ages before. It all came out in the wash, because eventually, if you were patient, enlightenment arrived and then a wide array of Apple devices. Politicians claimed everything would be fine. Adjustments were being made. Much as our human ingenuity had got us into this fine mess, so would it neatly get us out. Maybe more cars would switch to electric. That was how we could tell it was serious. Because they were obviously lying.

This time I could not argue with her logic. Despite my fervour to rush into the woods and save my children, I had to proceed cautiously. I could not mess up this rescue.

You are exactly the mom God knew your children needed.

Don Conroy is not the only man who knew he’d messed up with his own children and looked at the next generation as a chance to make amends.

The devil messing with you doesn’t break My heart as much you messing with each other. In those moments, you become like devils. You! My precious children! (The cry of a weeping Father — GOD)

You see, my parents never cut off my head physically...But maybe emotionally...Most parents love their children and try to take care of them the best that they can. But parents mess up, all the time.

I realized my grief was richer and more nuanced than what lay on the surface. This was about more than the burden of the apothecary. More than James' infidelity. Intermingled in the mess was another subtler secret that James and I had hid from each other for years. We were happy, yet unfulfilled. It was possible, I understood now, to be both at the same time. I was happy with the stability of working for my family yet unfulfilled by my job and burdened by the things I hadn't pursued. I was happy with our desire to someday have children yet unfulfilled by my achievements apart from family life. How had I only just learned that happiness and fulfillment were entirely distinct things?

Why, there’d be soldiers riding guard in the back of potato lorries going to the army’s mess hall—children would follow them, hoping potatoes would fall off into the street. Soldiers would look straight ahead, grim-like, and then flick potatoes off the pile—on purpose. “They did the same thing with oranges. Same with lumps of coal—my, those were precious when we didn’t have no fuel left. There was many such incidents. Just ask Mrs. Godfray about her boy. He had the pneumonia and she was worried half to death because she couldn’t keep him warm nor give him good food to eat. One day there’s a knock on her door and when she opens up, she sees an orderly from the German hospital on the step. Without a peep, he hands her a vial of that sulfonamide, tips his cap, and walks away. He had stolen it from their dispensary for her. They caught him later, trying to steal some again, and they sent him off to prison in Germany—maybe hung him. We’d not be knowing which.

But my parents understood that the world that they made within the walls of our house was what constituted home. So I grew up in spaces framed by art and color, filled with candlelight, marked by beauty. I grew up within a rhythm of time made sacred by family devotions in the morning and long conversations in the evening. I grew up with the sense of our daily life as a feast and delight; a soup-and-bread dinner by the fire, Celtic music lilting in the shadows, and the laughter of my siblings gave me a sense of the blessedness of love, of God's life made tangible in the food and touch and air of our home. It was a fight for my parents, I know. Every day was a battle to bring order to mess, peace to stressful situations, beauty to the chaos wrought by four young children. But that's the reality of incarnation as it invades a fallen world....What my parents-bless them-knew...is that to make a home right in the midst of the fallen world is to craft out a space of human flesh and existence in which eternity rises up in time, in which the kingdom comes, in which we may taste and see the goodness of God.

There was nothing you could be sure about, it was all lies, and it was all done to mess with minds because the control and the power trip was so important to them, as well as it being necessary in terms of screwing up anything you might remember from an evidential perspective. They would also build up your hopes, in terms of any tiny thing you did like or were less scared of, so I'd be told that it would be a nice night because Uncle Andrew would be coming, but then it wouldn't be him. There would be someone else There would be someone else who I was told was my Uncle Andrew as he was raping me. Sometimes, this other person would have a mask on but I would know that it wasn't really him. They would be the wrong height or the wrong weight or, sometimes, even obviously a woman. There were occasions when I would be told to call the person Uncle Andrew and then when I did, they would ask me why I was doing that. Sometimes he would be there, too, but that was rare. Was it Satanic? I don't know. Personally I don't believe in God or Satan or any of those things, but abusers use whatever they can to silence children because if you go to the police and say something about Satan, you are so much less likely to be believed. I personally think they were just a group of likeminded people who had no beliefs other than that they wanted to get satisfaction out of abusing children and it's as simple and horrible as that. My uncle certainly doesn't have any satanic beliefs — he just thinks that he loves children and is allowed to get sexual satisfaction from them. Why is there sex involved if it is just about Satan? Why does it always come down to them getting off? No matter what they do that's all it is, whether masturbation or penetration or humiliation, that's what it's about. I encountered people who just liked to humiliate — they wouldn't allow you to go to the bathroom, you would be given drink after drink, fizzy drinks, whatever, so you ended up absolutely desperate and that's where they got off — that's when they started to masturbate themselves, as you stood there peeing yourself. That was just awful, so humiliating. Where is God or Satan in that? (her Uncle was convicted for abusing her and jailed)

Over the years I have read many, many books about the future, my ‘we’re all doomed’ books, as Connie liked to call them. ‘All the books you read are either about how grim the past was or how gruesome the future will be. It might not be that way, Douglas. Things might turn out all right.’ But these were well-researched, plausible studies, their conclusions highly persuasive, and I could become quite voluble on the subject. Take, for instance, the fate of the middle-class, into which Albie and I were born and to which Connie now belongs, albeit with some protest. In book after book I read that the middle-class are doomed. Globalisation and technology have already cut a swathe through previously secure professions, and 3D printing technology will soon wipe out the last of the manufacturing industries. The internet won’t replace those jobs, and what place for the middle-classes if twelve people can run a giant corporation? I’m no communist firebrand, but even the most rabid free-marketeer would concede that market-forces capitalism, instead of spreading wealth and security throughout the population, has grotesquely magnified the gulf between rich and poor, forcing a global workforce into dangerous, unregulated, insecure low-paid labour while rewarding only a tiny elite of businessmen and technocrats. So-called ‘secure’ professions seem less and less so; first it was the miners and the ship- and steel-workers, soon it will be the bank clerks, the librarians, the teachers, the shop-owners, the supermarket check-out staff. The scientists might survive if it’s the right type of science, but where do all the taxi-drivers in the world go when the taxis drive themselves? How do they feed their children or heat their homes and what happens when frustration turns to anger? Throw in terrorism, the seemingly insoluble problem of religious fundamentalism, the rise of the extreme right-wing, under-employed youth and the under-pensioned elderly, fragile and corrupt banking systems, the inadequacy of the health and care systems to cope with vast numbers of the sick and old, the environmental repercussions of unprecedented factory-farming, the battle for finite resources of food, water, gas and oil, the changing course of the Gulf Stream, destruction of the biosphere and the statistical probability of a global pandemic, and there really is no reason why anyone should sleep soundly ever again. By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, overcrowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to barely be remarked upon. Meanwhile, in literally gilded towers miles above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepreneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept cocktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.

Cleaning up the breakfast mess may only take ten minutes, but in that time my oldest has taken her pajamas off on the kitchen floor, pulled out a box of LEGOs, and fallen and scraped her knee. Cleaning up breakfast, picking up floor pj’s, tidying LEGOs, and getting a Band-Aid cannot physically happen all at once. Just as I get done kissing boo-boos and putting clothes on the oldest, the youngest has asked for more milk and shat her pants. The list of things that needs to be cleaned simply grows faster than any one person can move. Not to mention I must get these children out the door in the next five minutes or we won’t have time to go to the park before nap time.

Squeezing the most out of life takes a little executive planning. I used to say to the children when they were growing up, “If you have twelve things to do, and twelve hours to do them in, don’t spend the first ten hours doing just one thing or you’ll find yourself in an awful mess at the end of the day. Plan. And everything will get done.

You learned Thereni.” He looked away, a shade of embarrassed. “Poorly. Mostly in books. I’m sure my pronunciation is a mess. I just thought…” His gaze slid back to me. When he spoke next, it was in fractured, heavily accented Thereni. “Always, you listen to words that are not belonging of you. I want…” He stumbled, struggling. “I want to give you, to speak of you, in your words. Your… voice.

When it came to my turn in the super spelling bee everyone had already been given really easy words. “Ryan,” Mr H said, “I want you to spell the word icup.” “Icup?” I thought.  I clammed up and my face went all warm and prickly, that feeling you get when you know you’re going to get the answer wrong. It’s a bit like the feeling you get when you walk up on stage to collect an award and you trip going up the stairs in front of everyone, or worse still, your pants fall down. It’s called embarrassment and I was feeling it big time. Actually it was worse than big time. It was humongous, mammoth, big time. All those long, boring afternoons sitting with Mom on the couch spelling word after word meant nothing anymore. I’d never heard of the word ‘icup’. “Oh no,” I thought. If I got this wrong I might not make the necessary criteria to get a raffle ticket before the big draw. Panic stations set in. This was going to be disastrous. ​Mom always said that if you get nervous or frightened, just imagine everyone around you is only in their underwear. It will make you laugh and you’ll forget your nerves. So I did, but it wasn’t a pretty sight. ​ “Ok get a grip of yourself Rino,” I said in my head. “Think about it and just sound the word out.” I could hear my Mom’s words bleating in my head as she so often did when I got stuck on a word. I began slowly, deep in thought and not willing to put one foot wrong sounding out each letter, “I … c.. u .. pee.”  There was silence and then the whole class erupted into hysterics, laughing their heads off, followed by Mr Higginbottom. Then I realised what I had just said when I sounded out the word; “I see you pee,” and I burst out into an embarrassed sort of laughter too. Mr Higginbottom came over and gave me a friendly pat on my head and ruffled my hair. It didn’t worry me that I’d combed it just the right way and put gel in it that morning. It was ok for Mr H to mess it up, but if my sister ever did it, she’d be dead meat. “Well

...a final word to "the children": do you want to get suckered like your big brothers and sisters? Those saps who spent 2008 standing behind the Obamessiah swaying and chanting, "We are the dawning of the Hopeychange" like brainwashed cult extras? Sooner or later you guys have to crawl out from under the social engineering and rediscover the contrarian spirit for which youth was once known...This will be the great battle of the next generation--to reclaim your birthright from those who spent it. If you don't, the entire global order will teeter and fall. But, if you do, you will have won a great victory. Every time a politician proposes new spending, tell him he's already spent your money, get his hand out of your pocket. Every time a politician says you can stay a child until your twenty-seventh birthday, tell him, "No, you're the big baby, not me--you've spent irresponsibly, and me and my pals are the ones who are gonna have to be the adults and clean up your mess. Don't treat met like a kid when your immaturity got us into this hole." This is a battle for the American idea, and it's an epic one, but--to reprise the lamest of lame-o-lines--you can do anything you want to do. So do it.

Sevro, swarmed by his daughters, makes faces at them as they eat. But when the air cracks with a sonic boom, he bolts upright, looks at the sky, and runs off into the house, urging his children to stay put. He returns a whole half an hour later arm in arm with his wife, hair a mess, two jacket buttons missing, touching a white napkin to a bloodied, split lip. My old friend Victra, immaculate in a high-collared green jacket threaded with gemstones, beams devilishly across the patio at me. She’s seven months pregnant with their fourth daughter. “Well, if it isn’t the Reaper in the leathery flesh. Apologies, my goodman. I’m dreadfully late.” Her long legs cover the distance in three strides. I greet her with a hug. She squeezes my butt hard enough to make me jump. She kisses Mustang on the head and slides into a chair, dominating the table. “Hello, gloomy one,” she says to Electra.

December 8, 1986 Hello John: Thanks for the good letter. I don’t think it hurts, sometimes, to remember where you came from. You know the places where I came from. Even the people who try to write about that or make films about it, they don’t get it right. They call it “9 to 5.” It’s never 9 to 5, there’s no free lunch break at those places, in fact, at many of them in order to keep your job you don’t take lunch. Then there’s OVERTIME and the books never seem to get the overtime right and if you complain about that, there’s another sucker to take your place. You know my old saying, “Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.” And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does. As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can’t believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did? Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: “Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?” They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds. Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are layed off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned: “I put in 35 years…” “It ain’t right…” “I don’t know what to do…” They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn’t they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait? I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the shit out of my system. And now that I’m here, a so-called professional writer, after giving the first 50 years away, I’ve found out that there are other disgusts beyond the system. I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said: “I’ll never be free!” One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life. So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I’m gone) how I’ve come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die. To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself. Your boy, Hank

For years of mornings, I have woken wanting to die. Life itself twists into nightmare. For years, I have pulled the covers up over my head, dreading to begin another day I’d be bound to just wreck. Years, I lie listening to the taunt of names ringing off my interior walls, ones from the past that never drifted far and away: Loser. Mess. Failure. They are signs nailed overhead, nailed through me, naming me. The stars are blinking out. Funny, this. Yesterday morning, the morning before, all these mornings, I wake to the discontent of life in my skin. I wake to self-hatred. To the wrestle to get it all done, the relentless anxiety that I am failing. Always, the failing. I yell at children, fester with bitterness, forget doctor appointments, lose library books, live selfishly, skip prayer, complain, go to bed too late, neglect cleaning the toilets. I live tired. Afraid. Anxious. Weary. Years, I feel it in the veins, the pulsing of ruptured hopes. Would I ever be enough, find enough, do enough?

No human being was ever meant to be the source of personal joy and contentment for someone else. And surely, no sinner is ever going to be able to pull that off day after day in the all-encompassing relationship of marriage! Your spouse, your friends, and your children cannot be the sources of your identity. When you seek to define who you are through those relationships, you are actually asking another sinner to be your personal messiah, to give you the inward rest of soul that only God can give. Only when I have sought my identity in the proper place (in my relationship with God) am I able to put you in the proper place as well. When I relate to you knowing that I am God’s child and the recipient of his grace, I am able to serve and love you. I have the hope and courage to get my hands dirty with the hard work involved when two sinners live together. And you are able to do the same with me! However, if I am seeking to get identity from you, I will watch you too closely, listen to you too intently, and need you too fundamentally. I will ride the roller coaster of your best and worst moments and everything in between. And because I am watching you too closely, I will become acutely aware of your weaknesses and failures. I will become overly critical, frustrated, disappointed, hopeless, and angry. I will be angry not because you are a sinner, but because you have failed to deliver the one thing I seek from you: identity. But none of us will ever get the well-being that comes from knowing who we are from our relationships. Instead, we will be left with damaged relationships filled with hurt, frustration, and anger. Matt

Did you ever hear what happened to Oliver Cromwell’s head? It was originally lashed to the roof of Westminster Hall as a potent warning not to mess with the government of the day, but in 1685 a violent storm blew it off its perch and a captain of the guard had it away and hid it up his chimney, where it stayed until he admitted the crime on his death bed. So can you picture the scene? Cromwell died in 1658. 27 years later this geezer nicks his head and shoves it up his chimney. He’s about to croak it, the whole family’s gathered around his death bed, everybody’s in tears and they’re all wondering if he’ll come out with any famous last words. Perhaps, “Farewell, my children, forever. I go to your father,” or maybe, “Let us pass over the river and rest under the shade of the trees,” or even, “Don’t let it end like this, tell them I said something.” Not this fucking joker! No! What does he say? He says, “Here Jackie, the sausages tasted a bit off tonight. Did I ever tell you I nicked Oliver Cromwell’s head and shoved it up the chimney? It’s still there,” and he draws back the veil of his earthly life and succumbs to eternal peace. They all look at each other, “What did he fucking say?” “He said he nicked Oliver Cromwell’s head.” “What do you mean; he nicked Oliver Cromwell’s head?” “That’s what he said, don’t blame me!” “Fuck’s sake!” “Well, do you think we should look?” “Don’t talk bollocks! You honestly want to look up the chimney to see if Oliver Cromwell’s head’s up there?” “I’m just saying …..” Anyway, one of them had a look up the chimney, found the head and by 1710 it was appearing in a freak show under the banner, ‘The Monster’s Head.’ True story

As far as responsibility goes, no one really wants it - but all of us are responsible to the community we live in & its laws. When the time comes to assume the responsibility of a home and children or business, this is the seeding of the boys from the Men - for surely you can realize what a mess the world would be if everyone in it said, "I want to be an individual, without responsibilities, & able to speak my mind freely & do as I alone will." We are all free to speak & do as we individually will - providing this "freedom" of Speech & Deed are not injurious to our fellow-man.

I have known my whole life that I wanted you. You and no one else. I have loved you from the first moment I saw you." "We were children," she said. "But don't you remember being a child?" he said. "How much simpler and clearer everything was? Sometimes I think they're smarter than any of us when it comes to love. They don't doubt it. Not for a second. And they don't doubt that they're loved in return. Something happens when we grow up. Misfortune tramples us. We forget how it feels to simply love without throwing the whole mess of life into the stew. We trade love for fear. I'm not willing to do that anymore.

There's no such thing as witches. But there used to be. It used to be the air was so thick with magic you could taste it on your tongue like ash. Witches lurked in every tangled wood and waited at every midnight-crossroad with sharp-toothed smiles. They conversed with dragons on lonely mountaintops and rode rowan-wood brooms across full moons; they charmed the stars to dance beside them on the summer solstice and rode to battle with familiars at their heels. It used to be witches were wild as crows and fearless as foxes, because magic blazed bright and the night was theirs. But then came the plague and the purges. The dragons were slain and the witches were burned and the night belonged to men with torches and crosses. Witching isn’t all gone, of course. My grandmother, Mama Mags, says they can’t ever kill magic because it beats like a great red heartbeat on the other side of everything, that if you close your eyes you can feel it thrumming beneath the soles of your feet, thumpthumpthump. It’s just a lot better-behaved than it used to be. Most respectable folk can’t even light a candle with witching, these days, but us poor folk still dabble here and there. Witch-blood runs thick in the sewers, the saying goes. Back home every mama teaches her daughters a few little charms to keep the soup-pot from boiling over or make the peonies bloom out of season. Every daddy teaches his sons how to spell ax-handles against breaking and rooftops against leaking. Our daddy never taught us shit, except what a fox teaches chickens — how to run, how to tremble, how to outlive the bastard — and our mama died before she could teach us much of anything. But we had Mama Mags, our mother’s mother, and she didn’t fool around with soup-pots and flowers. The preacher back home says it was God’s will that purged the witches from the world. He says women are sinful by nature and that magic in their hands turns naturally to rot and ruin, like the first witch Eve who poisoned the Garden and doomed mankind, like her daughter’s daughters who poisoned the world with the plague. He says the purges purified the earth and shepherded us into the modern era of Gatling guns and steamboats, and the Indians and Africans ought to be thanking us on their knees for freeing them from their own savage magics. Mama Mags said that was horseshit, and that wickedness was like beauty: in the eye of the beholder. She said proper witching is just a conversation with that red heartbeat, which only ever takes three things: the will to listen to it, the words to speak with it, and the way to let it into the world. The will, the words, and the way. She taught us everything important comes in threes: little pigs, bill goats gruff, chances to guess unguessable names. Sisters. There wer ethree of us Eastwood sisters, me and Agnes and Bella, so maybe they'll tell our story like a witch-tale. Once upon a time there were three sisters. Mags would like that, I think — she always said nobody paid enough attention to witch-tales and whatnot, the stories grannies tell their babies, the secret rhymes children chant among themselves, the songs women sing as they work. Or maybe they won't tell our story at all, because it isn't finished yet. Maybe we're just the very beginning, and all the fuss and mess we made was nothing but the first strike of the flint, the first shower of sparks. There's still no such thing as witches. But there will be.

I have talked to many people about this and it seems to be a kind of mystical experience. The preparation is unconscious, the realization happens in a flaming second. It was on Third Avenue. The trains were grinding over my head. The snow was nearly waist-high in the gutters and uncollected garbage was scattered in a dirty mess. The wind was cold, and frozen pieces of paper went scraping along the pavement. I stopped to look in a drug-store window where a latex cooch dancer was undulating by a concealed motor–and something burst in my head, a kind of light and a kind of feeling blended into an emotion which if it had spoken would have said, “My God! I belong here. Isn’t this wonderful?” Everything fell into place. I saw every face I passed. I noticed every doorway and the stairways to apartments. I looked across the street at the windows, lace curtains and potted geraniums through sooty glass. It was beautiful–but most important, I was part of it. I was no longer a stranger. I had become a New Yorker. Now there may be people who move easily into New York without travail, but most I have talked to about it have had some kind of trial by torture before acceptance. And the acceptance is a double thing. It seems to me that the city finally accepts you just as you finally accept the city. A young man in a small town, a frog in a small puddle, if he kicks his feet is able to make waves, get mud in his neighbor’s eyes–make some impression. He is known. His family is known. People watch him with some interest, whether kindly or maliciously. He comes to New York and no matter what he does, no one is impressed. He challenges the city to fight and it licks him without being aware of him. This is a dreadful blow to a small-town ego. He hates the organism that ignores him. He hates the people who look through him. And then one day he falls into place, accepts the city and does not fight it any more. It is too huge to notice him and suddenly the fact that it doesn’t notice him becomes the most delightful thing in the world. His self-consciousness evaporates. If he is dressed superbly well–there are half a million people dressed equally well. If he is in rags–there are a million ragged people. If he is tall, it is a city of tall people. If he is short the streets are full of dwarfs; if ugly, ten perfect horrors pass him in one block; if beautiful, the competition is overwhelming. If he is talented, talent is a dime a dozen. If he tries to make an impression by wearing a toga–there’s a man down the street in a leopard skin. Whatever he does or says or wears or thinks he is not unique. Once accepted this gives him perfect freedom to be himself, but unaccepted it horrifies him. I don’t think New York City is like other cities. It does not have character like Los Angeles or New Orleans. It is all characters–in fact, it is everything. It can destroy a man, but if his eyes are open it cannot bore him. New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it–once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough. All of everything is concentrated here, population, theatre, art, writing, publishing, importing, business, murder, mugging, luxury, poverty. It is all of everything. It goes all right. It is tireless and its air is charged with energy. I can work longer and harder without weariness in New York than anyplace else….

Motherhood often feels like a game of guilt management. Sometimes the guilt is overwhelming and debilitating. Sometimes just a low simmer, but it always feels right there. There is never any shortage of fuel to feed the beast, so the whole mechanism is constantly nourished to administer shame and a general feeling of incompetency. Add our carefully curated social media world, which not only affects our sense of success and failure, but also furnishes our children with an unprecedented brand of expectations, and BOOM – we’re the generation that does more for our kids than ever in history, yet feels the guiltiest. Virtually every one of my friends provides more than they had growing up, and still the mantra we buy into is ‘not enough, not enough, not enough.’ Meanwhile, if we developed the chops to tune out the ordinary complaints of children, we’d see mostly happy kids, loved and nurtured, cared for and treasured.

He whirled,almost violently,and stared at her accusingly. "Damn it, Gennie, I've had my head lopped off." It was her turn to stare.Her fingers went numb against the stoneware. Her pulse seemed to stop long enough to make her head swim before it began to race. The color drained from her face until it was like porcelain against the glowing green of her eyes.On another oath, Grant dragged a hand through his hair. "You're spilling the coffee," he muttered, then stuck his hands in his pockets. "Oh." Gennie looked down foolishly at the tiny twin puddles that were forming on the floor,then set down the mugs. "I'll-I'll wipe it up." "Leave it." Grant grabbed her arm before she could reach for a towel. "Listen,I feel like someone's just given me a solid right straight to the gut-the kind that doubles you over and makes your head ring at the same time.I feel that way too often when I look at you." When she said nothing, he took her other arm and shook. "In the first place I never asked to have you walk into my life and mess up my head. The last thing I wanted was for you to get in my way,but you did.So now I'm in love with you, and I can tell you,I'm not crazy about the idea." Gennie found her voice, though she wasn't quite certain what to do with it. "Well," she managed after a moment, "that certainly puts me in my place." "Oh,she wants to make jokes." Disgusted, Grant released her to storm over to the coffee. Lifting a mug, he drained half the contents, perversely pleased that it scalded his throat. "Well, laugh this off," he suggested as he slammed the mug down again and glared. "You're not going anywhere until I figure out what the hell I'm going to do about you." Struggling against conflicting emotions of amusement,annoyance,and simple wonder, she put her hands on her hips. The movement shifted the too-big robe so that it threatened to slip off one shoulder. "Oh,really? So you're going to figure out what to do about me, like I was an inconvenient head cold." "Damned inconvenient," he muttered. "You may not have noticed, but I'm a grown woman with a mind of my own, accustomed to making my own decisions. You're not going to do anything about me," she told him as her temper began to overtake everything else. She jabbed a finger at him,and the gap in the robe widened. "If you're in love with me, that's your problem. I have one of my own because I'm in love with you." "Terrific!" he shouted at her. "That's just terrific.We'd both have been better off if you'd waited out that storm in a ditch instead of coming here." "You're not telling me anything I don't already know," Gennie retorted, then spun around to leave the room. "Just a minute." Grant had her arm again and backed her into the wall. "You're not going anywhere until this is settled." "It's settled!" Tossing her hair out of her face, she glared at him. "We're in love with each other and I wish you'd go jump off that cliff.If you had any finesse-" "I don't." "Any sensitivty," she continued, "you wouldn't announce that you were in love with someone in the same tone you'd use to frighten small children.

There are people in this country who will argue that because of the demise of morals in general, and Sunday school in particular, kids today are losing their innocence before they should, that because of cartoons and Ken Starr and curricula about their classmates who have two mommies, youth learn too soon about sex and death. Well, like practically everyone else in the Western world who came of age since Gutenberg, I lost my innocence the old-time-religion way, by reading the nursery rhyme of fornication that is the Old Testament and the fairy tale bloodbath that is the New. Job taught me Hey! Life's not fair! Lot's wife taught me that I'm probably going to come across a few weird sleazy things I won't be able to resist looking into. And the book of Revelation taught me to live in the moment, if only because the future's so grim. Being a fundamentalist means going straight to the source. I was asked to not only read the Bible, but to memorize Bible verses. If it wasn't for the easy access to the sordid Word of God I might have had an innocent childhood. Instead, I was a worrywart before my time, shivering in constant fear of a god who, from what I could tell, huffed and puffed around the cosmos looking like my dad did when my sister refused to take her vitamins that one time. God wasn't exactly a children's rights advocate. The first thing a child reading the Bible notices is that you're supposed to honor your mother and father but they're not necessarily required to reciprocate. This was a god who told Abraham to knife his boy Isaac and then at the last minute, when the dagger's poised above Isaac's heart, God tells Abraham that He's just kidding. This was a god who let a child lose his birthright because of some screwball mix-up involving fake fur hands and a bowl of soup. This was a god who saw to it that his own son had his hands and feet nailed onto pieces of wood. God, for me, was not in the details. I still set store by the big Judeo-Christian messages. Who can argue with the Ten Commandments? Don't kill anybody: don't mess around with other people's spouses: be nice to your mom and dad. Fine advice. It was the minutiae that nagged me.

Being a mother is NOT a job. Stop throwing things at me. I'm sorry but it is not. I find it offensive to motherhood to call being a mother a job. Being a mother isn't a job. It's who someone is. It's who I am. You can quit a job. I can't quit being a mother. I'm a mother forever. Mothers are never off the clock, mothers are never on vacation. Being a mother redefines us, reinvents us, destroys and rebuilds us. Being a mother brings us face-to-face with ourselves as children, with our mothers as human beings, with our darkest fears of who we really are. being a mother requires us to get it together or risk messing up another person forever. Being a mother yanks our hearts out of our bodies and attaches them to our tiny humans and sends tem out into the world, forever hostages. If all of that happened at work, I'd have quit fifty times already. Because there isn't enough money in the world. And my job does not pay me in the smell of baby head and the soft weight of snuggly sleepy toddler on my shoulder. Being a mother is incredibly important. To the naysayers, I growl, do not diminish it by calling it a job.

Too late to cry, Miss Eleanor Jane, say Sofia. All us can do now is laugh. Look at him, she say. And she do laugh. He can't even walk and already he in my house messing it up. Did I ast him to com? Do I care whether he sweet or not? Will it make any difference in the way he grow up to treat me what I think? You just don't like him cause he look like daddy, say Miss Eleanor Jane. *You* don't like him cause he look like daddy, say Sofia. I don't feel nothing about him at all. I don't love him, I don't hate him. I just wish he couldn't run loose all the time messing up folks stuff. All the time! All the time! say Miss Eleanor Jane. Sofia, he just a baby. Not even a year old. He only been here five or six times. I feel like he been here forever, say Sofia. I just don't understand, say Miss Eleanor Jane. All the other colored women I know love children. The way you feel is something unnatural. I love children, say Sofia. But all the colored women that say they love yours is lying. They don't love Reynolds Stanley any more than I do. But if you so badly raise as to ast 'em, what you expect them to say? Some colored people so scared of whitefolks they claim to love the cotton gin.

I had a letter from a fourteen-year-old the other day who was in a juvenile detention center. She wrote, ‘My life was a mess and I was on drugs, and I came here and I hated it. And then in the library I found a copy of My Life with the Chimpanzees. I never had a supportive mother, but when I read that book, I thought Jane can be my mother.’ “Her mother had never told her she could succeed. But when she read how my mother had supported me, and the difference that had made, she started to realize that she, too, could follow her dreams. I would be her role model—that’s what she meant by saying I could be her mother. She started behaving well, working hard—she turned her life around.” I thought about this young woman, about the power of books and stories and role models to change a child’s life. And I thought about what Jane had said about how important our environment is and that our human nature is adaptable enough to fit into the world in which we must survive. How we can nurture our children is so very dependent on the larger community in which we live. There can be little doubt that the poverty, addiction, and hopelessness surrounding Robert White Mountain’s son contributed to his dying by suicide at sixteen.

 “You like me, though. You want to go on a date with me.” It wasn’t a question. “Cocky much?” “Confident. Don’t be mistaken.” “Why do you want to take me out so badly?” “Fishing for more compliments, are we?” He’d caught me, but went on anyway. “Obviously you’re beautiful. You have nice, you know, legs and . . . stuff.” “You’re laughing. I don’t think I’m really your type. I think you’re messing with me. I’m not at all like Charlize Theron.” We pulled up to my car but he let Charlize idle before getting out. “You are so my type. Charlize—at least the actress—is not. I mean, she’s gorgeous, in a blond, Amazonian, I-might-kill-and-eat-my-own-young kind of way, but I like your look better.” “Oh yeah? What’s my look?” “There’s something dark about you . . . and interesting. Your creamy skin, your black hair. The way you move. Your mouth.” He reached out to touch my cheek but I jerked away, breaking the seriousness of the moment. “What do you mean I’m dark?” He smiled and shrugged. “I don’t know. Like I want to get naked with you and a Ouija board.” I burst out laughing. “And your laugh . . . it’s like the sound of someone squeezing the life out of a miniature trumpet. It’s really cute.” “That is not a compliment. I have a nice laugh. And by the way, your voice is nasally when you’re not trying to impress people.” He held his hand to his chest like he was offended, except he was still smiling. “I’m crushed. Penny, whatever your last name is—” “Piper.” “Ha! Penny Piper? You’ve got to be kidding! That’s either a children’s book character or a porn star’s name. Penny Piper picked a peck of pickled pep—” “Stop! I know, trust me. I have to live with this name. My poor sister’s name is Kiki Piper. Like we’re fucking hobbits or something.” “Penny Piper is worse than Kiki Piper, hands down.” I cocked my head to the side. “Thanks.” “Just sayin’. What’s your middle name?” “Isabelle.” “I’m gonna call you PIP Squeak.” “Thank you. I can’t wait.” “And by the way, I happen to have a deviated septum. That’s why my voice sounds like this sometimes, you asshole. Now get out and help me with your car.” As we stepped out, he pointed to my Honda and said, “Try and start it when I tell you.” I stopped and turned to him. “What’s your middle and last name?” “Gavin Augusta Berninger.” “Regal,” I said with a wink. “I know, right?” He shrugged one arm like he was royalty or something. “Is that French?” “Yeah, my dad’s family is French . . . sort of. Like, his great-great-grandfather came from France. No one in our family even speaks French.” “Hmm, not so regal anymore,” I said. “Whatever, Penny Piper.

A couple of years ago, I was driving in Cincinnati with Usha, when somebody cut me off. I honked, the guy flipped me off, and when we stopped at a red light (with this guy in front of me), I unbuckled my seat belt and opened the car door. I planned to demand an apology (and fight the guy if necessary), but my common sense prevailed and I shut the door before I got out of the car. Usha was delighted that I’d changed my mind before she yelled at me to stop acting like a lunatic (which has happened in the past), and she told me that she was proud of me for resisting my natural instinct. The other driver’s sin was to insult my honor, and it was on that honor that nearly every element of my happiness depended as a child—it kept the school bully from messing with me, connected me to my mother when some man or his children insulted her (even if I agreed with the substance of the insult), and gave me something, however small, over which I exercised complete control. For the first eighteen or so years of my life, standing down would have earned me a verbal lashing as a “pussy” or a “wimp” or a “girl.” The objectively correct course of action was something that the majority of my life had taught me was repulsive to an upstanding young man. For a few hours after I did the right thing, I silently criticized myself. But that’s progress, right? Better that than sitting in a jail cell for teaching that asshole a lesson about defensive driving.

how difficult it is to say, “Boy, did I mess up,” without the protective postscript of self-justification—to say “I dropped a routine fly ball with the bases loaded” rather than “I dropped the ball because the sun was in my eyes” or “because a bird flew by” or “because it was windy” or “because a fan called me a jerk.” A friend returning from a day in traffic school told us that as participants went around the room, reporting the violations that had brought them there, a miraculous coincidence had occurred: Not one of them had broken the law! They all had justifications for speeding, ignoring a stop sign, running a red light, or making an illegal U-turn. He became so dismayed (and amused) by the litany of flimsy excuses that, when his turn came, he was embarrassed to give in to the same impulse. He said, “I didn’t stop at a stop sign. I was entirely wrong and I got caught.” There was a moment’s silence, and then the room erupted in cheers for his candor. There are plenty of good reasons for admitting mistakes, starting with the simple fact that you will probably be found out anyway—by your family, your company, your colleagues, your enemies, your biographer. But there are more positive reasons for owning up. Other people will like you more. Someone else may be able to pick up your fumble and run with it; your error might inspire someone else’s solution. Children will realize that everyone screws up on occasion and that even adults have to say “I’m sorry.” And if you can admit a mistake when it is the size of an acorn, it will be easier to repair than if you wait until it becomes the size of a tree, with deep, wide-ranging roots.

A loud crash came from somewhere off screen. “Sorry, man. Hold on a second. I swear to me, don’t ever have children. They drive you up the wall.” God stood from his chair and stepped away off screen. “Jesus! Jesus Christ, you better not be making a mess in the kitchen. We just had it cleaned!” A surly response came crackling through the monitor. “I’m not! And don’t tell me what to do! You’re not even my real dad. Joseph is! When he and Mom get back from their vacation, I’m going to tell them you never let me do anything.” “You do that,” God said. “See how far it gets you. And you know I’m your real dad. Your mom was a virgin when I put my seed of light inside of—” “Gross! Stop it! And that’s not how pregnancy works. You made sure of that!” “Just…I’m making a very important call right now. Please keep it down. I promise when I finish, we’ll go ride unicorns or something. We’ll make a day of it.” “I hate unicorns!” “Jesus, I’m warning you. Lose the tone.” “Or what, you’ll send me to Earth and let me die for more sins again that aren’t even my own? Real original. Oh, hey, guys, of course you can nail me to a piece of wood. I’m here for you, after all!” “That’s it. You’re grounded!” “You can’t ground me! I’m calling Mom!” “Do it, then! And you tell her that you think she wasn’t a virgin. See how that goes.” “I’m going to hang out with my friends. At least beggars and whores understand me!” Somewhere deep inside the cloud castle God lived in, a door slammed. God sighed as he reappeared on screen, sitting back down in his chair. “Sorry about that, man. Sharing custody is hard. Joseph and Mary have been gone for a week. It feels like a year.

served as CEO of two public companies, even temporarily, and I wasn’t even sure it was legal. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was enjoying spending more time with my family. I was torn. I knew Apple was a mess, so I wondered: Do I want to give up this nice lifestyle that I have? What are all the Pixar shareholders going to think? I talked to people I respected. I finally called Andy Grove at about eight one Saturday morning—too early. I gave him the pros and the cons, and in the middle he stopped me and said, “Steve, I don’t give a shit about Apple.” I was stunned. It was then I realized that I do give a shit about Apple—I started it and it is a good thing to have in the world. That was when I decided to go back on a temporary basis to help them hire a CEO. The claim that he was enjoying spending more time with his family was not convincing. He was never destined to win a Father of the Year trophy, even when he had spare time on his hands. He was getting better at paying heed to his children, especially Reed, but his primary focus was on his work. He was frequently aloof from his two younger daughters, estranged again from Lisa, and often prickly as a husband. So what was the real reason for his hesitancy in taking over at Apple? For all of his willfulness and insatiable desire to control things, Jobs was indecisive and reticent when he felt unsure about something. He craved perfection, and he was not always good at figuring out how to settle for something less. He did not like to wrestle with complexity or make accommodations. This was true in products, design, and furnishings for the house. It was also true when it came to personal commitments. If he knew

Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” Ladies and Gentlemen of the class of '99: Wear sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now. Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth; oh never mind; you will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine. Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4:00 pm on some idle Tuesday. Do one thing everyday that scares you. Sing. Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts; don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours. Floss. Don’t waste your time on jealousy; sometimes you’re ahead; sometimes you’re behind; the race is long, and in the end it’s only with yourself. Remember compliments you receive; forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how. Keep your old love letters; throw away your old bank statements. Stretch. Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you wanna do with your life; the most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives; some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don’t. Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees; you’ll miss them when they’re gone. Maybe you’ll marry -- maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll have children -- maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll divorce at 40 -- maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either -- your choices are half chance; so are everybody else’s. Enjoy your body; use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it. It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own. Dance. even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own living room. Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them. Do not read beauty magazines; they will only make you feel ugly. Get to know your parents; you never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings; they're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future. Understand that friends come and go, but for the precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography, in lifestyle, because the older you get the more you need the people you knew when you were young. Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel. Accept certain inalienable truths: prices will rise; politicians will philander; you too will get old, and when you do you’ll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders. Respect your elders. Don’t expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund; maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse; but you never know when either one might run out. Don’t mess too much with your hair, or by the time you're 40, it will look 85. Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia: dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it’s worth. But trust me on the sunscreen. Baz Luhrmannk, William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet (1996)

We’d just taken Pixar public, and I was happy being CEO there. I never knew of anyone who served as CEO of two public companies, even temporarily, and I wasn’t even sure it was legal. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was enjoying spending more time with my family. I was torn. I knew Apple was a mess, so I wondered: Do I want to give up this nice lifestyle that I have? What are all the Pixar shareholders going to think? I talked to people I respected. I finally called Andy Grove at about eight one Saturday morning—too early. I gave him the pros and the cons, and in the middle he stopped me and said, “Steve, I don’t give a shit about Apple.” I was stunned. It was then I realized that I do give a shit about Apple—I started it and it is a good thing to have in the world. That was when I decided to go back on a temporary basis to help them hire a CEO. The claim that he was enjoying spending more time with his family was not convincing. He was never destined to win a Father of the Year trophy, even when he had spare time on his hands. He was getting better at paying heed to his children, especially Reed, but his primary focus was on his work. He was frequently aloof from his two younger daughters, estranged again from Lisa, and often prickly as a husband. So what was the real reason for his hesitancy in taking over at Apple? For all of his willfulness and insatiable desire to control things, Jobs was indecisive and reticent when he felt unsure about something. He craved perfection, and he was not always good at figuring out how to settle for something less. He did not like to wrestle with complexity or make accommodations. This was true in products, design, and furnishings for the house. It was also true when it came to personal commitments. If he knew for sure a course of action was right, he was unstoppable. But if he had doubts, he sometimes withdrew, preferring not to think about things that did not perfectly suit him. As happened when Amelio had asked him what role he wanted to play, Jobs would go silent and ignore situations that made him uncomfortable.

Your womb can’t never bear fruit.” Miss Ethel Fordham told her that. Without sorrow or alarm, she had passed along the news as though she’d examined a Burpee seedling overcome by marauding rabbits. Cee didn’t know then what to feel about that news, no more than what she felt about Dr. Beau. Anger wasn’t available to her—she had been so stupid, so eager to please. As usual she blamed being dumb on her lack of schooling, but that excuse fell apart the second she thought about the skilled women who had cared for her, healed her. Some of them had to have Bible verses read to them because they could not decipher print themselves, so they had sharpened the skills of the illiterate: perfect memory, photographic minds, keen senses of smell and hearing. And they knew how to repair what an educated bandit doctor had plundered. If not schooling, then what? Branded early as an unlovable, barely tolerated “gutter child” by Lenore, the only one whose opinion mattered to her parents, exactly like what Miss Ethel said, she had agreed with the label and believed herself worthless. Ida never said, “You my child. I dote on you. You wasn’t born in no gutter. You born into my arms. Come on over here and let me give you a hug.” If not her mother, somebody somewhere should have said those words and meant them. Frank alone valued her. While his devotion shielded her, it did not strengthen her. Should it have? Why was that his job and not her own? Cee didn’t know any soft, silly women. Not Thelma, or Sarah, or Ida, and certainly not the women who had healed her. Even Mrs. K., who let the boys play nasty with her, did hair and slapped anybody who messed with her, in or outside her hairdressing kitchen. So it was just herself. In this world with these people she wanted to be the person who would never again need rescue. Not from Lenore through the lies of the Rat, not from Dr. Beau through the courage of Sarah and her brother. Sun-smacked or not, she wanted to be the one who rescued her own self. Did she have a mind, or not? Wishing would not make it so, nor would blame, but thinking might. If she did not respect herself, why should anybody else? Okay. She would never have children to care about and give her the status of motherhood. Okay. She didn’t have and probably would never have a mate. Why should that matter? Love? Please. Protection? Yeah, sure. Golden eggs? Don’t make me laugh. Okay. She was penniless. But not for long. She would have to invent a way to earn a living. What else?

In Classical mythology, righteous wrath was the province of old women. Three very specific old women, in fact: the Furies (or the Erinyes, in Greek). Fragments of myth featuring the Furies are found in the earliest records of ancient Greek culture. These sisters were much more ancient than any of the Olympian deities, indicating the persistence of an older, female-dominated tradition which endured here and there even when later, more patriarchal, mythologies set in. The role of the Furies was to preside over complaints brought to them by humans about behavior that was thought to be intolerable: from lesser misdemeanors such as the insolence of the young to the aged, of children to parents, of hosts to guests — to crimes that were very much worse. It was their role to punish such crimes by relentlessly hounding their perpetrators. The Greek poet Hesiod names the three sisters as Alecto — “unceasing in anger,” the punisher of moral crimes; Megaera — “jealous one,” the punisher of infidelity, oath-breaking, and theft; and Tisiphone — “avenger of murder.” They were, he said, the daughters of Gaea (the goddess who personified the Earth), who conceived them from the blood of her spouse, Uranus, after he had been castrated by his son, Cronos. They lived in the Underworld, and like other chthonic deities, like seeds that lie buried beneath the Earth, they were also identified with its fertility. The wrath of the Furies manifested itself in a number of ways: a tormenting madness would be inflicted on the perpetrator of a patricide or matricide; murderers usually suffered a dire disease, and nations which harbored such criminals could be stricken with famine and plague. The Furies could only be placated with ritual purification, and the completion of a task specifically assigned by them for atonement. It’s important to understand that although the Furies were feared, they were also respected and perceived to be necessary: they represented justice, and were seen to be defenders of moral and legal order. The Furies were portrayed as the foul-smelling, decidedly haggish possessors of bat-like wings, with black snakes adorning their hair, arms, and waists, and blood dripping from their eyes. And they carried brass-studded scourges in their hands. In my menopausal years, I certainly had days when I could have gone with that look. I’m happy to admit that the existence of seriously not-to-be-messed-with elder women like the Furies in our oldest European mythology gives me great pleasure. And it’s difficult not to see them as the perfect menopausal role models, because sudden upwellings of (mostly righteous) anger are a feature of many women’s experience of menopause

IN HIS 2005 COLLECTION of essays Going Sane, Adam Phillips makes a keen observation. “Babies may be sweet, babies may be beautiful, babies may be adored,” he writes, “but they have all the characteristics that are identified as mad when they are found too brazenly in adults.” He lists those characteristics: Babies are incontinent. They don’t speak our language. They require constant monitoring to prevent self-harm. “They seem to live the excessively wishful lives,” he notes, “of those who assume that they are the only person in the world.” The same is true, Phillips goes on to argue, of young children, who want so much and possess so little self-control. “The modern child,” he observes. “Too much desire; too little organization.” Children are pashas of excess. If you’ve spent most of your adult life in the company of other adults—especially in the workplace, where social niceties are observed and rational discourse is generally the coin of the realm—it requires some adjusting to spend so much time in the company of people who feel more than think. (When I first read Phillips’s observations about the parallels between children and madmen, it so happened that my son, three at the time, was screaming from his room, “I. Don’t. Want. To. Wear. PANTS.”) Yet children do not see themselves as excessive. “Children would be very surprised,” Phillips writes, “to discover just how mad we think they are.” The real danger, in his view, is that children can drive their parents crazy. The extravagance of children’s wishes, behaviors, and energies all become a threat to their parents’ well-ordered lives. “All the modern prescriptive childrearing literature,” he concludes, “is about how not to drive someone (the child) mad and how not to be driven mad (by the child).” This insight helps clarify why parents so often feel powerless around their young children, even though they’re putatively in charge. To a preschooler, all rumpus room calisthenics—whether it’s bouncing from couch cushion to couch cushion, banging on tables, or heaving bowls of spaghetti onto the floor—feel normal. But to adults, the child looks as though he or she has suddenly slipped into one of Maurice Sendak’s wolf suits. The grown-up response is to put a stop to the child’s mischief, because that’s the adult’s job, and that’s what civilized living is all about. Yet parents intuit, on some level, that children are meant to make messes, to be noisy, to test boundaries. “All parents at some time feel overwhelmed by their children; feel that their children ask more of them than they can provide,” writes Phillips in another essay. “One of the most difficult things about being a parent is that you have to bear the fact that you have to frustrate your child.

Dear, What’s the Point of it All? What is the point of being nice? When you do not know what you are going to get from it? Knowing eventually sooner rather than later someone and maybe that person you are being nice to will turn their back on you. I always have to stay grounded and focused. When I am there for people, I feel like I am always punished for it. I am always treated as if I committed a crime. I was there for my mom; however, she was killing me slowly but surely. Like my mom, I noticed that when people get themselves in some shit, they get stuck in their own mess. They are confident that they do not have to deal with the consequences—because they know the ‘kind’ person will bail them out. What’s the point of being kind? Like my mom and the officer, there are so many people in the world who are judgmental and tainted because of their selfish needs. What’s the point of my life? Here I am in a library filled with many books. I can read them and go anywhere I want to in my mind, but after I close the book, I will have to snap out of my fantasy world and welcome the cruel cold world, which is reality. If I was a book, I would be better off left on the shelf. There is no excitement in my life—only struggles. What’s the point of living and loving life when the only thing I do is read between the lines and tread carefully? Come to think about it, I am a book that nobody can understand or read. They think they know what is best for me, but if they only take the time to listen, I would be so happy to tell them about me and my needs and wants. My actions scream for attention, but time after time, I am ignored. Sadly, without a care, they were quick to rip out the pages. Yet, once again, nobody noticed me. What’s the point of it all when I never had an opportunity to make a mistake? If I did one thing wrong, they would give up on me and send me to one home after another. I’ve always been fully exposed and had to walk in a line filled with sharp curves from disappointment to disappointment. Sorrow is my aura, and sadness hugs me tightly. It is hard to cry when my eyes are closed shut by the barbed wire fence of my eyelashes as they prohibit tears from falling. What’s the point of complicating my life? I am always back to where I started, and then ... I relive the same patterns, but on a more difficult journey. I believe when you put yourself in your own mess that you should clean it up and start over. What’s wrong with that? Nothing. However, when someone else puts you in their mess, you do not know how to clean up the mess they’ve made. You do not know how to start over because you do not know where to begin. I look at it this way; it is like telling a dead person he/she can start over. How so, when that person’s life no longer exists? I know my life isn’t over. However, I am lost in a maze my mom set up for herself—and she too is lost in her own maze. When a person gets lost in their own maze, they are really fucked up. However, this maze shouldn’t be left for me to figure out. Unfortunately, I am in it, and I have to find my way out one way or another. What’s the point of taking Kace from me? He was safe and in good hands. Now he is worse off with people who are abusing him. He didn’t ask for this—I didn’t either. He deserves so much better. Again, what is the point of it all? What’s the point of making me suffer? Do you get a kick out of it? What are you trying to accomplish? I am trying to understand; what is the point of it all? What is the point? I don’t know why I am here.

We kissed again, and I shivered in the cold night air. Wanting to get me out of the cold, he led me to his pickup and opened the door so we could both climb in. The pickup was still warm and toasty, like a campfire was burning in the backseat. I looked at him, giggled like a schoolgirl, and asked, “What have you been doing all this time?” “Oh, I was headed home,” he said, fiddling with my fingers. “But then I just turned around; I couldn’t help it.” His hand found my upper back and pulled me closer. The windows were getting foggy. I felt like I was seventeen. “I’ve got this problem,” he continued, in between kisses. “Yeah?” I asked, playing dumb. My hand rested on his left bicep. My attraction soared to the heavens. He caressed the back of my head, messing up my hair…but I didn’t care; I had other things on my mind. “I’m crazy about you,” he said. By now I was on his lap, right in the front seat of his Diesel Ford F250, making out with him as if I’d just discovered the concept. I had no idea how I’d gotten there--the diesel pickup or his lap. But I was there. And, burying my face in his neck, I quietly repeated his sentiments. “I’m crazy about you, too.” I’d been afflicted with acute boy-craziness for over half my life. But what I was feeling for Marlboro Man was indescribably powerful. It was a primal attraction--the almost uncontrollable urge to wrap my arms and legs around him every time I looked into his eyes. The increased heart rate and respiration every time I heard his voice. The urge to have twelve thousand of his babies…and I wasn’t even sure I wanted children. “So anyway,” he continued. That’s when we heard the loud knocking on the pickup window. I jumped through the roof--it was after 2:00 A.M. Who on earth could it be? The Son of Sam--it had to be! Marlboro Man rolled down the window, and a huge cloud of passion and steam escaped. It wasn’t the Son of Sam. Worse--it was my mother. And she was wearing her heather gray cashmere robe. “Reeee?” she sang. “Is that yoooou?” She leaned closer and peered through the window. I slid off of Marlboro Man’s lap and gave her a halfhearted wave. “Uh…hi, Mom. Yeah. It’s just me.” She laughed. “Oh, okay…whew! I just didn’t know who was out here. I didn’t recognize the car!” She looked at Marlboro Man, whom she’d met only one time before, when he picked me up for a date. “Well, hello again!” she exclaimed, extending her manicured hand. He took her hand and shook it gently. “Hello, ma’am,” he replied, his voice still thick with lust and emotion. I sank in my seat. I was an adult, and had just been caught parking at 2:00 A.M. in the driveway of my parents’ house by my robe-wearing mother. She’d seen the foggy windows. She’d seen me sitting on his lap. I felt like I’d just gotten grounded. “Well, okay, then,” my mom said, turning around. “Good night, you two!” And with that, she flitted back into the house. Marlboro Man and I looked at each other. I hid my face in my hands and shook my head. He chuckled, opened the door, and said, “C’mon…I’d better get you home before curfew.” My sweaty hands still hid my face. He walked me to the door, and we stood on the top step. Wrapping his arms around my waist, he kissed me on the nose and said, “I’m glad I came back.” God, he was sweet. “I’m glad you did, too,” I replied. “But…” I paused for a moment, gathering courage. “Did you have something you wanted to say?” It was forward, yes--gutsy. But I wasn’t going to let this moment pass. I didn’t have many more moments with him, after all; soon I’d be gone to Chicago. Sitting in coffee shops at eleven at night, if I wanted. Working. Eventually going back to school. I’d be danged if I was going to miss what he’d started to say a few minutes earlier, before my mom and her cashmere robe showed up and spoiled everything.

The theme of obeying God runs from Genesis to Revelation, and it is vital to our children’s success in life. A child who has a heart that is willing to surrender to God and fulfill every divine appointment given to him or her is a success.

No human being was ever meant to be the source of personal joy and contentment for someone else. And surely, no sinner is ever going to be able to pull that off day after day in the all-encompassing relationship of marriage! Your spouse, your friends, and your children cannot be the sources of your identity. When you seek to define who you are through those relationships, you are actually asking another sinner to be your personal messiah, to give you the inward rest of soul that only God can give. Only when I have sought my identity in the proper place (in my relationship with God) am I able to put you in the proper place as well. When I relate to you knowing that I am God’s child and the recipient of his grace, I am able to serve and love you. I have the hope and courage to get my hands dirty with the hard work involved when two sinners live together. And you are able to do the same with me!

Great, but maybe you should mind your own damn business,” I snap. He’s standing there in his normal, causal stance with his hands in his pockets, his stupid sexy glasses hanging off his stupid sexy nose. “Wow, someone’s uptight this morning. Monday blues? You know, I know of something that can ease that tension.” God the nerve. How does he get away with it? I take a few menacing steps towards him, but he never drops that smile. “You know. You may have everyone fooled here. But not me. Ohhhh no! I see right through you. The ‘I’m just this nice innocent science teacher, who compliments old ladies’ cardigans and plays with baking soda and test tubes’. But nope. I know the real you. The condescending type. Thinks all highly of himself. With his big bad muscles and fake—” Peter grabs for me, pulling me into his classroom. The door shuts behind him and my back is thrown against the wall and his mouth is on mine. I spend a half-second thinking of fighting him off before I fight him in a different way, kissing him just as aggressively. God this is so hot. What is wrong with me!? His movement is quick and brutal. He doesn’t bother asking, but takes, as he spreads my legs with his knees, his hands hiking up my skirt. His mouth breaks from mine, his breath caressing my earlobe as he speaks. “We have exactly three minutes before that bell rings. Now you can waste it, or you can enjoy what I’m most definitely going to.” I don’t say a word, because his hand on my thigh is burning a hole through my skin. My silence is his green light, and he raises his hand, pushing my panties aside. The smirk on his face has a lot to do with the realization that I’m already soaking wet. He uses my juices to spread me open then pushing a thick finger inside. His mouth back on mine abusing my lips with his touch while his finger fucks me, in and out, the pleasure, heavenly. “Two minutes,” he says between nips and licks, his finger pulling out and two entering me. God, this is messed up, but so hot. I’m so turned on; my hands are pulling at his hair. “One minute,” he moans into my mouth and I find myself riding his hand thrust for thrust. It’s like I can hear the seconds ticking by, knowing that if I don’t come before that minute ends I will die. “Thirty seconds,” he murmurs across my lips and his pressure increases, his pumps wild, my back riding up and down the wall. He starts counting down from ten, the numbers getting louder and louder in my brain as he slams a third finger inside me and hooks, putting pressure on just the right spot. I explode. I squeeze his fingers so tight and come all over his hand, just as he grunts out the number one. We both hear the bell sound and he pulls out, adjusting my skirt. Taking his fingers into his mouth, he sucks off my juices, never taking his eyes off me. Before I can say anything, the doorknob begins to jiggle. Light appears from the outside and the door opens as a sea of children scatter in. “Thank you Ms. Gretchen, I will most definitely try out three finger servings of baking soda in today’s explosion experiment.” Smiling heftily at me, “But, you should really be getting to class now. The precious youth is waiting for you.” With that he holds his door open, and in a daze, I walk past him. What the fuck…

I stood straight and calm, though every part of me wanted to blast the crap out of the room. No one moved, no one spoke. I barely breathed. I didn’t know how much time had passed when Ty finally broke the silence. “If we’re demigods and you are demigods, which gods are our grandparents?” Tyde asked, snapping me out of my funk. Why hadn’t it occurred to me to ask that? My parents were the children of gods. All Mer were thought of as children of Poseidon in some respects, but this was different. “Well, your father’s father is Apollo,” Mom said, “And my father is… Zeus.” Whoa, that was big. Zeus was our grandfather. How does someone wrap their mind around that? “So our grandfathers are Apollo and Zeus, but aren’t they related? Wouldn’t that make you and Dad…” Ty couldn’t finish that thought and I was grateful. I was now grossed out. I couldn’t do the math on that messed up family tree. Yuck. “It doesn’t really work that way with the gods,” Mom said, catching on to what Ty was hinting at. “They are so ancient that their blood, while it will carry power, doesn’t carry much else in terms of genealogy. Our DNA comes mostly from our mortal parents. Our powers come from our godly parents but that’s it. It’s complicated, but your father and I are not related. So if you were worried… stop. You’re not the product of kissing cousins

I was sleeping on the couch one afternoon when suddenly I sensed that someone was leaning over me. When I opened my eyes I saw the burly farmer standing there, unbuttoning his pants. Instinctively, I knew what he was up to! Hans wouldn’t be as easy to dissuade as the sturdy young man who had guided me up the mountain. With no time to think I let fly with my foot, kicking him in the groin. The force from the kick caused him to inadvertently fall forward, hitting a small end table with his mouth. When this happened he bit his lip and broke his dentures. A dreadful row ensued, especially when I assured him that I would tell his wife Clarissa that he was the one who hung her lover. Bleeding from his lip, he threatened me, shouting that he would throw me out into the snow along with my children. Determined, I ran out into the kitchen shouting for her. When Clarissa appeared, I turned, telling Hans that I would tell her what I had heard about this sordid mess; and tell her I did! Of course he instantly dismissed me and told me to get out, but his wife knew him for what he was. Clarissa knew that what I had said was true and sided with me. She added that the killing had been uncalled for and that in many ways what had happened between her and the Russian was her husband’s fault. This event seemed to have evened the score for them and she was pleased that a woman had stood up to her husband. Although in this instance she was the one who had played, it was Hans that had a reputation for being a well-known womanizer and bully. With Hans out of the room, she assured me that it would be all right to stay another night. Their relationship was very strange and I was certain that there was more to the story, but for me it was time to leave. The next morning she arranged for transportation down to Überlingen for me and my children, and was I ever glad!

Many students don't do well in School because they don't know you expect them to do well They want to do well, but it doesn't seem so important to do so. They don't have reasons to. You don’t give them reasons to. And worse you don't even ask them to. Indecision - Shulai or shulai not? Is it worth it? What's the point? Questions like that sap a Student's enegy and motivation. Plus affect his emotions. Schools who use anthems where students "say they pledge to do well and be diligent and so on" yet they aren't held RESPONSIBLE for their pledge are messing these kids up. It's like taking an oath and not caring to fulfill it. It's like conditioning a person to not take pledge seriously. I pledge to NIGERIA my country... How many of us all stay true to that pledge? The issue is if a thing is important to YOU as a parent or school enough for you to get your child or students to pledge it or promise it, then you MUST FOLLOW IT UP. Underachievers need to MAKE decision to be better day in day out. GIVE them a CHOICE. One that can FUEL their achievements.

Dear Alessio, yes, I was an altar boy. And you? What part among the altar boys do you have? It’s easier to do now, you know: You might know that, when I was a kid, Mass was celebrated different than today. Back then, the priest faced the altar, which was next to the wall, and not the people. Then the book with which he said the Mass, the missal, was placed on the right side of the altar. But before reading of the Gospel it always had to be moved to the left side. That was my job: to carry it from right to left. It was exhausting! The book was heavy! I picked it up with all my energy but I wasn’t so strong; I picked it up once and fell down, so the priest had to help me. Some job I did! The Mass wasn’t in Italian then. The priest spoke but I didn’t understand anything. and neither did my friends. So for fun we’d do imitations of the priest, messing up the words a bit to make up weird sayings in Spanish. We had fun, and we really enjoyed serving Mass.

The good news was that the smoke, whatever its source, was not getting closer to us. The bad news was that it was moving towards Oban. We wasted no time rowing across the loch. The group we’d already sent over remained visible and clearly busy, though doing what was anybody’s guess from our vantage point in the birlinn. It was getting on past noon, and I hated the idea of leaving the birlinn behind. Crafting it had been a singularly powerful experience, one that I wasn’t sure was repeatable. The birlinn we’d made was unique. In the end, though, it was a boat. It wasn’t alive like the three hundred people we were trying to keep breathing. Not to mention the thousands in Oban who could die. I’d planned to take one of the oars to give a rower a break, but I must have looked haggard. When I’d gone to offer, the bloke with the oar had taken one look at me and said, “Naw, mate.” Sitting on a thwart next to Eilidh, I fervently wished for something to distract me from the radiating warmth on my left. Rowing would at least give me something to do that wasn’t thinking about that heat or second guessing all the decisions we’d made in the past few days. We could have taken the strongest of us and returned to Oban, leaving the other three hundred to take the slower route around the loch. Sure, that was a possibility. But if we’d done that, we’d have left them vulnerable, including the children. That wasn’t acceptable to me or to anyone else. Oban had the advantage of numbers and at least some preparation at this point; the people with us did not. There were any number of things we could be questioning, but if we sat here picking apart the instincts we’d followed, all we’d do was pick up an ulcer. We were still alive. That was all that mattered. I tuned back in to the birlinn to hear a couple of the rowers talking, both of them darting glances at me and Eilidh in the process. “. . . wrecked all of Sackington’s guns and stole his grenades,” one of them said, not really trying to be quiet. Eilidh zeroed in on him like a bloodhound catching a whiff of the quarry. “Yes. We did.” “Erm, he wasn’t saying it was a bad thing!” one of the rowers blurted out. “Yes, I was! We could have used those instead of hitting things with sticks, for fuck’s sake,” the other one said. “No offense.” “Mate, they don’t even work anymore,” I said, and when I could almost see his thoughts pivot to but there’s magic now, I sighed. “We happened to be present when someone figured out how to use their magic to fire a rifle at one of Bawbag’s simulacra. Not only did the bullet literally bounce right back, but it killed his daughter when it ricocheted, and his next shot was dead on. Can you guess what happened then?” “He died,” said the guy who had tried to reassure me they weren’t questioning that decision. He had sandy brown hair that was a mess of waves half stuck to his head with sweat from the exertion, and his muscles were bulging out of his shirt—guess he was getting those Strength increases. “Did he die?” the other bloke asked. “Aye, he might as well have just shot himself in the heart. Even swords bounced right off that damn thing—piercing it with the point seems to be the only thing even marginally successful, and that might be imbuing it with Purifire more than the actual poke.” “I know how to shoot a gun,” Eilidh said bluntly. “And amateurs with firearms tend to hurt much more than they help, let alone in a state of active combat. This isn’t the fucking Wild West.” She sounded Done with a capital D, and I didn’t blame her. To his credit, the bloke seemed to mull that over for a bit before nodding as if ceding the point. Whatever the Ascended Alliance knew about friendly fire of an arcane nature, that did not extend to human-made explosives. If

When we’re in love with our children instead of with our spouse, things can get all twisted around and messed up, and families start falling apart. One small example of this is the way Valentine’s Day has been hijacked by our children. I have grudgingly participated, year after year, in elaborate Valentine’s Day parties at school for kids because somehow they have become the norm, but I’ve never understood them. Thankfully, all of my kids are in middle school or beyond now, so there are no more silly Valentine’s Day parties to go to. My husband is my valentine, and our children should know that.

For the rest of my life I will remember that red-brown blur, like a stain of dried blood, standing against the road with a thin screen of blown snow suspended between it and me, the full weight of the vehicle and the thirty-four children in it bearing down on me like a wall of water. And I will remember the formal clarity of my mind, beyond thinking or choosing now, for I had made my choice, as I wrenched the steering wheel to the right and slapped my foot against the brake pedal, and I wasn't the driver anymore, so I hunched my shoulders and ducked my head, as if the bus were a huge wave about to break over me. There was Bear Otto, and the Lamston kids, and the Walkers, the Hamiltons, and the Prescotts, and the teenaged boys and girls from Bartlett Hill, and Risa and Wendell Walker's sad little boy, Sean, and sweet Nichole Burnell, and all the kids from the valley, and the children from Wilmot Flats, and Billy Ansel's twins, Jessica and Mason-the children of my town-their wide eyed faces and fragile bodies swirling and tumbling in a tangled mess as the bus went over and the sky tipped and veered away and the ground lurched brutally forward.

See now? I thought you were just a children’s story, Asher Lee.” “I’m not,” said Asher, clenching his fist. “Can I help you?” asked Lance, with a curious expression. “You laid hands on something that belongs to me.” “Oh. Oh, ho, ho.” Lance rocked lightly in his chair, a smarmy smile spreading across his face. “Now, this wouldn’t be about that cold Northern slut, Savannah Carmichael, would it?” Asher saw red. Raw, raging red. He leaned over the desk and grabbed Lance by the knot in his tie at the base of his throat and jerked him forward until his face hit the desk. Lance was so shocked, he didn’t have a moment to react. “Call her a slut again,” snarled Asher. “She’s just a cheap piece of Northern tail.” In an instant, Asher yanked Lance up, let go of the knot, drew back his muscular, corded arm, and smashed his fist into Lance’s already bruised nose. Blood spurted onto Lance’s desk and down his shirt as he drew back his fist to hit Asher, but Asher blocked the hit with his palm and pushed Lance backward. Lance crashed unsteadily backward into his desk chair, which tipped over, causing Lance to crash onto the floor. Asher rounded the desk and pounced, straddling the younger, less fit man, pinning his arms to his sides. His fist connected with Lance’s nose one more time, and the sickening sound of cartilage snapping preceded Lance’s shrill scream. “You broke my nose, you asshole!” “You want to roughhouse with someone? Fight with me.” “I was raised better’n to fight a cripple.” “The hell you were.” Lance tried to free his arms where Asher had them pinned to his sides, but Asher’s legs were too strong. “You’re garbage. You get off on hurting women, you sick twist.” “I never touched her. She’s a lying slut.” Asher spat on the bloody mess that was now Lance’s face. “I told you not to call her that.

Smother" I’m wasted, losing time I’m a foolish, fragile spine I want all that is not mine I want him but we’re not right In the darkness I will meet my creators And they will all agree, that I’m a suffocator I should go now quietly For my bones have found a place to lie down and sleep Where all my layers can become reeds All my limbs can become trees All my children can become me What a mess I leave To follow [4x] In the darkness I will meet my creators They will all agree, I’m a suffocator Suffocator [2x] Oh no I’m sorry if I smothered you [2x] I sometimes wish I’d stayed inside my mother Never to come out

LOVE AND LOGIC TIP 8 What They See Is What They Learn I (Jim) spent my childhood on the wrong side of the tracks in a trailer in industrial Denver. When my family scraped enough money together, we bought a little garage to live in while my dad built a house on the property.              Dad worked a morning shift downtown and rode the streetcar to work, and then when he returned at 2:00 p.m. every day, he picked up his hammer and saw and built a house. It took seven years. As I watched him work, I thought, Wow! He gets to do all the fun stuff: mix the concrete, lay the bricks, put on the shingles, hammer nails, saw wood. I watched it all day, every day.              At the end of the day, when my dad knocked off, he invariably said, “Jim, clean up this mess.” So I would roll out the wheelbarrow, pick up a shovel and a rake, and clean up the mess. At the same time, Dad would explain to me that people have to learn to clean up after themselves. They need to finish and put the tools away.              When my dad noticed that I left my own stuff lying around, he complained, “Why don’t you ever pick up your stuff, Jim? There’s your bike on the sidewalk, and your tools are all over the place. When you go to look for a tool, you won’t know where it is.” I, of course, was learning all about cleaning up. I was learning that adults don’t clean up after themselves.              Had my father modeled cleaning up after himself — saying in the process, “I feel good now that the day’s work is finished, but I’ll feel better when I clean up this mess and put all the tools in the right places” — he would have developed a son who liked to clean up his own messes. As it is, my garage is a mess to this very day.

I’d attend church meetings on Sunday and hang out with my Christian friends. I’d go to a Bible study on Tuesday night and hang out with my Christian friends — again. Then, I’d go out Friday night and hang out—once again—with my Christian friends. This new world of Churchland was sort of like a retreat into some sort of cozy Christian cocoon. We did good things for other people sometimes, like an annual trip to Mexico to build homes for needy families. A couple of times each year, we helped out at the local homeless shelter, serving meals and cleaning and painting the facility. We were also involved in getting help for local families each Christmas, providing meals and gifts for the parents to give to their children. But after we had finished these projects, we headed back to the suburbs to hang out with our Christian friends again. It happened so subtly, but the more I was immersed in Churchland, the more disconnected I felt from the world around me.

All the creatures seemed happy to be at the library. The Headless Horseman gave horsey rides and the kids lined up! Someone brought out a ball and played fetch with the Hound of the Baskervilles. Dracula told jokes. The giant gently picked up some kids and lifted them high in the air. Everyone was enjoying the fun. The characters didn’t seem so scary now! Virginia Creeper’s happy smile suddenly changed to a worried frown when she looked out the window and saw the seniors’ book club coming up the walk. “Oh my,” said Ms. Creeper, “I almost forgot. It’s time for the book club! They can’t see this! It will give the seniors such a fright.” “Go and tidy up while I stall them at the door!” the librarian told Miss Smith. Virginia Creeper blocked the impatient readers from entering while Miss Smith ran around in a tizzy. She picked up overturned chairs and straightened the book shelves. Outside, the seniors were getting grouchy, but inside, the kids and the characters had become too silly to notice. “Can I help?” Zack asked Miss Smith. She handed the Incredible Storybook to Zack. “Remember,” Miss Smith said, “we have to finish each story so that the characters will go back into the book. Read the last page of each tale, while I deal with this mess!” Zack opened up the book and quickly finished all the stories. One by one, the characters went back into the Incredible Storybook. The puzzled book club burst into the room just as Zack finished the last page. “Okay, class, it’s time to check out your books,” Miss Smith said. She guided the class toward the big front desk. Everyone thanked Virginia Creeper before marching down the library steps and heading back to school. With borrowed books under their arms, the children were looking forward to reading more about all the characters they had just met. Zack smiled and wondered what they would read tomorrow.

Are you fighting off beaus with a stick?” Will asked, bouncing Janie on his knee. I winced as his words unknowingly probed my wound. “No.” “That’s not what I hear.” My head whipped around. “What kind of ‘beaus’ do you think I have? I’m here with these children all the day long.” “And a fine mess you’re making of it, too.” His eyes twinkled and teased. I wanted to hit him over the head with my rolling pin. “So, you’re getting married soon? Do tell.” I slammed the rolling pin on the pie dough. “Did Mama tell you that?” “Yes. She seemed to think it a sure thing. Some junior ace from around here, or something. Of course, she hasn’t given up on ‘dear Mr. Graves,’ either.” “I’m not marrying either one of them.

Have you ever had a “worst mom ever” day? Take heart, so have we all. Take my friend’s advice. Apologize to your children. Ask God for forgiveness. Get over it and stop letting Satan drag you down. Spend time with the Lord getting a new attitude, and He’ll help you leave the dams to the beavers!

... will send you the details tomorrow. Also, it would be best if you and Mr. Fitzpatrick got married at some point, had a few beautiful children that played rugby. Everyone loves a DILF.” I couldn’t help but laugh. It was shocked, quiet and soft at first, but then it erupted into an uncontrollable fit of giggles. Joan’s expression did change then. She looked both dismayed and diverted. “Oh, my lord. What is that sound you are making? Is that…a laugh?” I shook my head, then nodded, and then shook my head again, holding up one hand as I clutched my belly with the other. Joan glanced at me askance. “For the love of God, don’t ever laugh in public. No one will forgive you for it. You’ll be ridiculed, Ronan will go on an assault spree, and then Ian will have a mental breakdown trying to clean up the mess.

My parents were two-faced. To me, they showed no mercy. They preached from theBook of Fallen Children - Commandment 1: The Child Is Always Ungrateful. At eighteen, the free ride would stop, and I'd be dumped into the mess of the world. But in their private moments, they were soft, cowed by love. They critiqued their own parenting skills and thought of all the ways the could help their kids get ahead.

Do you remember the night we met, Abby? And the conversation we had before going to the room? It was about that list you had—the one about what you were looking for in a man?” She glowered at him and nodded, grudgingly. “An important item was manners. You might want to remember that.” “Listen, Cameron—you got me into this mess and—” “I had help,” he said firmly. “Lots of help.” “Just take me home. Please,” she said just as firmly. “In a minute. You need to listen to me now. Pay attention, Abby. If being considerate and accommodating isn’t going to work with you, I can change my approach. Regardless what nasty twist you put on things, I never intended to be a sperm donor. Nor was it my idea that we never see each other again after that night we spent together. I looked for you. I wanted more time with you. I never saw it as a quick roll in the hay. That was your doing when you disappeared on me, refused to contact me, even though you promised you would. “It’s very important that you understand something,” he went on. “I’ll try to work with you as much as you allow me to, but if you try to separate me from my children, I’ll fight. I’ll come after you. I’ll launch a search that will make Columbus look like a novice. So don’t even think about pulling something sneaky. Whether you like it or not, we’re in this together.” “Take me home. Please.” “Did you hear me?” “I heard,” she said. “Now I’d really like to go home.” He turned back toward the road and pulled around the stable to the front of Vanni and Paul’s house, Abby’s current residence. When she went to jump out of the car to flee, he grabbed her wrist and held her back. She turned and looked at him with a little panic in her eyes. “Abby, I can’t make you like me, but I can make you allow me to be a father to my children. I know a hundred ways. Please remember that.” Without

Why the sudden interest in my life, Dad?” I ask. “Phone calls and lunches and showing up at matches… I don’t know what to do with it all. I don’t know why you’re doing it.” I pound my fist on the table, and the dishes jump. “You don’t have to pretend to love me for me to love them.” “I’m not pretending, Sky. I do love you. I know I royally messed things up. But I’m still your father, and if you’ll let me, I want to be there for you.” “Take, take, take, take.” I throw up my hands. “That’s all you ever do, Dad. You take. You took from Kendra’s mother. You took from Kendra. You take from the kids because they make you feel loved. There’s nothing like unconditional love from children.” I squeeze my fist in front of my heart. “You took from Mom.” “Your mom has her own demons.” “And so do you, Dad. It’s called being an unfaithful liar.” He opens his mouth to protest, but I hold up a hand. “Do you know that I can’t have a healthy relationship with a man because I’m constantly waiting for him to leave? I’m waiting and waiting for him to take off and go away, just like you did. I’m always waiting for him to drop me. And I don’t care if he does, because I never let anyone get close enough to hurt me.” Jesus Christ. Where did that come from? I get up and finally put the plates in the sink. “I think you should go, Dad,” I say. I brace my hands on the edge of the counter because my knees are about to give out. I hear Dad shuffle around. Then he comes over and kisses my temple really quickly. “I love you, Sky,” he says. Then he’s gone.

It’s easy to lose perspective when you have little kids. One of the hardest things about this season in your life is that you don’t see many results of your training. Even though you try to teach kindness, your kids still fight. Although you pray for patience, you lose yours. You sing “Jesus loves me” until you are blue in the face, yet you wonder if it’s really sinking in. This is a season of input and training, and you are not likely to see the results of this training for years. That’s hard because we really need to see tangible fruit of our labor. We live in an instant society. We expect instant results in so many other areas of our lives and then we don’t experience it in raising our kids. We need to recognize that looking for immediate results is an unrealistic expectation. We have to remember that God is patient. He is not in a hurry. He is not surprised by our mistakes. He knows and loves each one of our children even more than we do. And he has chosen the exact children in the exact birth order with the exact personalities for our family. He has given us our kids not merely so that we can raise them but also in order that they might be used by him to grow us up into the men and women he has created us to be. He will use our children in our lives. He is at work in our family even if we can’t see it right now, even when we feel like a bad parent, even when we fear we have messed up our child forever! We have to remember that there is no mess that God cannot redeem. He is not condemning us. Instead he is delighting in us! He is patiently working through us and in us. And as he does he will gently lead us.

The ministry of motherhood with my children, especially, can sometimes seem extremely nonstrategic. Settling fusses between immature boys who are fighting over whose turn it is on the computer does not seem like a vital form of ministry, and yet it is in such everyday situations that our children learn vital relational skills. Comforting wailing babies, tending to sick children, cleaning up messes, prevailing upon teenagers to do assigned chores—all standard mothering tasks—can seem depressingly mundane. Yet when I study the ministry of Christ, I see that he responded in compassion to whatever need was presented to him, not just those needs that seemed “worthy” or important.

Don’t get sick, Victoria,” Kyle taunts as I retch, spilling my guts on the pavement, then forced to wallow in it as he holds me down for Lawrence to have his turn. “We’re just getting started.” “Don’t get sick, Kyle. We’re just getting started,” I say, slicing through another finger, taking one more digit that once held me in place. As he cries out, more memories assault me, and tears of pure hatred skid down my cheeks unexpectedly. “The daughter of a whore and a fucking pussy. You see, I know your dad never had the balls to kill those women. I just don’t care. Now take it, Victoria. Take it and shut the hell up.” “Take it!” I shout, slicing through another finger. “Take it and shut the hell up!” Jake holds him down harder as I work through all ten fingers, then tie up the damage, preventing him from bleeding too much. Kyle is a sobbing mess, but I wasn’t lying. We’re just getting started. “Your turn, Tyler. Saddle up. It’s bareback and fun tonight,” Kyle goads, grabbing my naked crotch and then slapping it. “It’s getting a little worn out.” “This is for me,” I hiss, slicing the blade down his torso, scooting back as he screams in agony. The slice is just shallow enough to burn like fire but not deep enough to bleed too much. Another memory surfaces, one that has my heart being suffocated and squeezed to death. “I’m sorry, Ms. Carlyle. But it seems like the damage done to your internal organs and the life saving measures they took at the hospital have prevented you from ever being able to have children. They were forced to perform an emergency hysterectomy.” More tears cascade down my cheeks as I slice him to the side, slowly flaying a piece of flesh from his body like the monstrous pro I’ve become. “This is for my father,” I tell him, carving another section.

Instead of seeing fusses and messes as irritations in my day, for instance, I am more likely to see them as opportunities to train my children to be peacemakers and to learn to be responsible for their own messes. Instead of resenting the interruptions in my schedule, I am more likely to accept them as divine appointments. More and more, I have learned to see my children through the eyes of God and to accept the stages of growth through which he has designed them to grow.

…I am a storyteller. From barstools to back porches, from kitchen tables to campfires, from podiums to park benches, I have spun my yarns to audiences both big and small, both rapt and bored. I didn’t start out that way. I was just a dreamer, quietly imagining myself as something special, as someone who would “make a difference” in the world. But the fact is, I was just an ordinary person leading an ordinary life. Then, partly by design, partly by happenstance, I was thrust into a series of adventures and circumstances beyond anything I had ever dreamed. It all started when I ran away from home at eighteen and hitchhiked around the country. Then I joined the Army, became an infantry lieutenant, and went to Vietnam. After Vietnam, I tried to become a hippie, got involved with Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), and became a National Coordinator for the organization. I was subsequently indicted for conspiracy to incite a riot at the Republican Convention in 1972—the so-called Gainesville Eight case—and one of my best friends turned out to be an FBI informant who testified against me at the trial. In the early eighties, I was involved with the New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission, which built a memorial for Vietnam veterans in New York City and published the book Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam. In the late eighties, I was part of a delegation of Vietnam veterans who went to the Soviet Union to meet with Soviet veterans of their Afghanistan War. I fell in love with a woman from Russia, married her, and spent nine years living there, during which I fathered two children, then brought my family back to the U.S. and the suburban middle-class life I had left so many years before. The adventures ultimately, inevitably perhaps, ended, and like Samwise Gamgee, I returned to an ordinary life once they were over. The only thing I had left from that special time was the stories… I wrote this book for two reasons. First and foremost, I wrote it for my children. Their experience of me is as a slightly boring “soccer dad,” ordinary and unremarkable. I wanted them to know who I was and what I did before I became their dad. More importantly, I hope the book can be inspiring to the entire younger generation they represent, who will have to deal with the mess of a world that we have left them. The second reason is that when I was young, I had hoped that my actions would “make a difference,” but I’m not so sure if they amounted to “a hill of beans,” as Humphry Bogart famously intoned. If my actions did not change the world, then I dream that maybe my stories can.

I love you so much, angel,” I whispered. “If anyone ever hurts you, I’ll kill them.” And I meant it. At this point it seems important to note that I am not a violent person. True story: I capture flies under plastic cups and relocate them into the wild. So, I quite literally wouldn’t hurt a fly. My soul belongs in an overstuffed teddy bear, but something inside me had changed. I wasn’t just a momma bear; I was a momma grizzly. An Ursus arctos horribilis, y’all. Accent on the horribilis. From the moment you become a parent, your heart moves outside of your body. There is nothing you wouldn’t do, no line you wouldn’t cross, to protect the child that you love. As I held my son and felt that grizzly roar within, I was forced to reckon with the possibility that I had never loved anyone like this before. That before I became a parent, my life was a little bit selfish. Not that I was a jerk or anything. It was simply this: Every decision, until I had children, was made in the interest of me. I was out in the world, living free and wild, taking consequences as they came. But when a child is born, so is a mother. And in her, a grizzly awakens. Her love is maternal, instinctive, and deep. And when necessary, even dangerous. There are certain movies you watch as a kid which inspire you to do stupid

All children require a bit of guidance on the pathto marital bliss,” the viscountess persisted. Marcus promptly spit out his brew. At his side, Lizzie’s slender frame shook with mirth and servants rushed forward with cloths to clean the mess. “M-marital bliss?” he sputtered. Good god, is that what she would call it? “Marcus,” his mother scolded. “Oh, do not look at me like that, Marcus. I daresay I prefer you charming to bitter.” “You know it is my expectation that you’ll find a young woman who makes your heart happy.” “I will tell you clearly what would make my heart happy,” he mumbled.

The book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, was written in 1986 by a minister, Robert Fulghum, and it’s full of simple-sounding life advice, like “share everything,” “play fair,” and “clean up after your own mess.” Chen believes that these skills—the elementary, pre-literate skills of treating other people well, acting ethically, and behaving in prosocial ways, all of which I consider “analog ethics”—are badly needed for an age in which our value will come from our ability to relate to other people. He writes: While I know that we’ll need to layer on top of that foundation a set of practical and technical know-how, I agree with [Fulghum] that a foundation rich in EQ [emotional quotient] and compassion and imagination and creativity is the perfect springboard to prepare people—the doctors with the best bedside manner, the sales reps solving my actual problems, crisis counselors who really understand when we’re in crisis—for a machine-learning powered future in which humans and algorithms are better together. Research has indicated that teaching analog ethics can be effective. One 2015 study that tracked children from kindergarten through young adulthood found that people who had developed strong prosocial, noncognitive skills—traits like positivity, empathy, and regulating one’s own emotions—were more likely to be successful as adults. Another study in 2017 found that kids who participated in “social-emotional” learning programs were more likely to graduate from college, were arrested

My mother tells me every day to tidy up my room. I do, but guess what happens? A mess seems to KABOOM!

Did Nesta say why she won't train?' 'Because she hates me.' Feyre snorted. 'Cassian, Nesta does not hate you. Believe me.' 'She sure as shit acts like it.' Feyre shook her head. 'No, she doesn't.' Her words were pained enough that he frowned. 'She doesn't hate you, either.' he said quietly. Feyre shrugged. The gesture made his chest ache. 'For a while, I thought she didn't. But now I don't know.' 'I don't understand why you two can't just...' He struggled for the right word. 'Get along? Be civil? Smile at each other?' Feyre's laugh was hollow. 'It's always been that way.' 'Why?' 'I have no idea. I mean, it was always that way with us, and our mother. She only had an interest in Nesta. She ignored me, and saw Elain as barely more than a doll to dress up, but Nesta was hers. Our mother made sure we knew it. Or she just cared so little what we thought or did that she didn't bother to hide it from us.' Resentment and long-held pain laced every word. That a mother would do such a thing to her children... 'But when we fell into poverty, when I started hunting, it got worse. Our mother was gone, and our father wasn't exactly present. He wasn't fully there. So it was me and Nesta, always at each other's throats.' Feyre rubbed her face. 'I'm too exhausted to go over every detail. It's all just a tangled mess.' Cassian refrained from observing that both sisters seemed to need each other- that Nesta perhaps needed Feyre more than she realised. And from mentioning that this mess between the two females hurt him more than he could express. Feyre sighed, 'That's my long way of saying that if Nesta hated you... I know what it looks like, and she doesn't hate you.' 'She might after what I said to her tonight.

know, Will,” Edmund said. “You needn’t worry. I won’t muck anything up.” He peeled back the duvet, climbed into the bed, and curled himself into a ball. At this, Mrs. Müller appeared in the doorway bearing a load of crisp white linens, patchwork quilts, and hot-water bottles wrapped in knitted cases the same dove gray as the blanket. On top of the teetering pile was a book. As she set her load down on the dressing table, she looked at Edmund. “Lord love you, child.” She went to the bedside, lifted the duvet, and tucked a hot-water bottle at Edmund’s feet. She tested his forehead once again with the palm of her hand. “Perhaps we’ll forgo the clean linens, just for tonight,” she said. “I hate to extract you, Edmund.” “Yes. I mean—thank you,” he murmured. The librarian smiled and looked at William and Anna. “If I had someplace else to put you two, I’d keep you out of the sick room, but short of making up beds on the floor somewhere…” She trailed off. “We’ll be fine,” William said. “Honestly.” Anna nodded in agreement. None of them wanted to be separated, anyhow. “In bed, then,” Mrs. Müller said. “All three of you.” She pulled back the duvet on the other side of the bed and laid down another hot-water bottle. Anna climbed into the middle, and William took his place beside her. The librarian tucked the duvet around the three of them and brushed each one’s cheek with a tenderness that even Edmund found acceptable. She retrieved the book she’d carried in with the linens and handed it to William. “Perhaps you’re all too old for bedtime stories, but what sort of librarian would I be if I didn’t provide you with some reading material?” For a long moment, the children only looked at one another. Mrs. Müller drew the wrong conclusion from their silence. “Oh, dear. You are entirely too old for bedtime stories, aren’t you?” She took a step back. “Not having children of my own, I’m sure to make a mess of these things—” “No,” Anna whispered. “We’re not too old.” Mrs. Müller looked at the boys. “We’re not too old,” William agreed. “Definitely not,” Edmund said, his voice cracking. Perhaps it was his head cold. But probably not. “Well”—the librarian gestured toward the book in William’s hands—“I hope that one will suit you.” “It will,” Anna said. “Good night, then,” the librarian whispered. As she headed for the door, all three children had the same wish. All three children were surprised that it was William who voiced it. “Would you read it to us?

Time flew by fast. My hardest job wasn’t working late hours; it was attempting to avoid Mike and praying that he wouldn’t make any late-night rendezvous for the next few weeks. I really didn’t want to leave Mike, but I couldn’t turn him into the man that I wanted him to be. All I ever wanted was an unconditional love in my life. Some days he can be the sweetest person in the world, but other days he acts as if he could beat my brains out. How could I love someone who treated me so badly? For the sake of my children, I had to get them out of the mess that I created. I hated even the idea of something happening to one of my kids because I was too stupid to get out of a bad relationship. All my dreams and fantasies—that’s all they ever were—floated around in my imagination.

The only two kids on Student Patrol were a seventh grader named Elijah and an eighth grader named Evie, who also happened to be brother and sister. Their job was to patrol the outside of Wood Intermediate between classes, which meant making sure nobody was ditching, helping kids cross the street, and getting everyone on the right buses after school. When my head finally stopped spinning, I got back on my feet. Parker had already followed me outside and was in a shouting match with Evie about who had jurisdiction over what and where. Basically, Parker and I were out of bounds. Things were a mess, but I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was find Pompom!

I’m not happy with the way I talk to my children. I try to say the right thing, but I always end up blowing it.

have a tendency to do this with parenting: If I can just get through the diaper phase. . . . Once my children were out of diapers, it became: If I can just get through these early years of elementary school, then I can minister to others.

I was getting ready for school when I heard mom says, “What happened to the plants?” “What happened to them?!” asked Dad. “Someone missed with all the herbs!” replied Mom. So, I head to our new planted pots, and I saw what I would never want to see. Out plants were smashed, and the soil has been dug. It was a total mess.

When family beliefs lead you to judge someone or something as bad, another conflict appears: Your conclusions and reality get out of sync. The Smith family judged physicians harshly, so it would be difficult for any of them to adopt a similar lifestyle—even if they had the means to do so and would be happier that way. This is parallel to my condemnation of myself when my home didn’t meet my family’s standards. Until I healed my self-judgment, it was hard for me to let my house be dirty without an emotional consequence. And as any mother knows, cleaning a home with children in it is like shoveling snow in a blizzard. I would have been an emotional mess if I hadn’t dealt with this faulty core belief, and my anxiety could have caused undue stress for my children.

St. Augustine: “The Church is a whore, but she’s my mother.” She is a mess and has many illegitimate children. But she is also our momma and managed to give birth to us and to give us enough of the truth that we have been able to ask the questions that we have in this book.

A-about the full-course offering... I was thinking, for the second dish, the, um, the fish salad..." "Don't you go giving me all your bright ideas too! Get back to washing dishes!" "Yeep! Y-yes, sir! I'm sorry, sir!" "No. I'd like to hear your idea." Stop acting like you're in charge, girly! "Um... I was wondering if we might let the customers decide how much dressing they want on it." "The dressing?! What does that matter?!" "Oh? And what gives you that idea?" "I couldn't help but notice it on the dirty dishes that come back. Some have a lot of dressing left on them. Others look like the customer dipped in their bread in the dressing but then left their veggies." Just washing the dishes... was enough to give her the idea for that improvement? "But, um, it would be hard to do anything about it, right? It would mean lots more work for the servers and the kitchen..." "No, not really. Using a Saucière to serve sauces and gravies has long been practiced in France. By presenting it as a traditional touch, it might make for an entertaining novelty for customers." SAUCIÈRE Also called a gravy boat or a sauce boat, it is a small pitcher for holding sauces. Diners can pour or ladle their preferred amount of sauce from it. "Enough! What do you two children know?! This is my kitchen! Customers come to eat my cooking! If you mess with my process any further, I'll kick you both out!" "Um, Head Chef? A customer is requesting more dressing for the second course...

For some time, my life had been an ugly, roiling mess, but I was going to pull it all together at the last minute. (It was better this way! I had acted out before I had children.) I had managed to solve the Jane Austen problems that women have been confronting for centuries—securing a provider for your children, finding a mate to pass the time with, and creating a convivial home—in an entirely unconventional way. I’d had to relinquish the poisonous heat of my affair, but with every day that felt like less of a sacrifice.

Dear Karma, I am always being struck by the lighting and shaken by the thunder. Why is that? I was born into this world cursed. How is that fair to my brother or me? We should have been born with a clean slate. It is not fair that we have to carry the karma from our past lives or our family fuck-ups. We do not deserve that. We deserve to walk on our own path and make our own mistakes, not cleaning up other people’s shit from their past or the choices they made. Kace and I do not know how to clean up a mess that we didn’t make. However, for some reason, we are paying the price. Yeah, we are paying the price—a high price at that. When will it be over? Will it extend in another life as well? Karma, if you are the only thing that can change Kace’s and my fate—then what are you waiting for? Do you not think we’ve suffered enough? We do not deserve this shit.

After speaking with Rachel, I spoke with Rachel’s mom, Leah, about how her mind-set changed in response to Rachel’s addiction, and about what she tells other parents experiencing similar struggles.12 Leah tells parents that she learned a key lesson the first time she was in Beit T’Shuvah director Harriet Rossetto’s office with her husband seated beside her: Rossetto, a formidable presence behind her vast desk, asked Leah and her husband what was most important to them, and Leah replied, “I just want Rachel to be happy.” Turning her deep, probing eyes on Leah, Rossetto laid into her with advice Leah now passes on to other parents: “Saying you just want your kid to be happy puts enormous pressure on the child. They feel if they’re not happy, they’re failing. Periods of unhappiness are okay and our kids need to know that; it’s the struggle that makes you who you are.” Rossetto advises that the goal of a kid’s happiness is actually a dual burden, negatively affecting both child and parent. “The whole family system has to change,” says Rossetto. “The child is addicted to pleasure seeking. The parent is addicted to controlling a child’s choices and behaviors and creating a perfect human being, so their emotions are a mess. If the child is having a good day, Mommy and Daddy are happy, and if he’s not having a good day Mommy and Daddy are in despair. Severing that umbilicus is what our family program does. A parent’s well-being can’t be dependent on whether or not the kid is having a good day.” In addition to counseling other parents, Leah puts Rossetto’s wisdom into daily practice with her two youngest children, who still live at home. She says, “At times we make life too easy for kids by not letting them experience things we think of as traumas but that are, in reality, not all that bad, and we solve problems for them instead of letting them stew over some things. When my kids are storming about the house, it’s tempting to feel ‘My kid is angry at me’ and to want to do something about it. Now, I can accept that they can be unhappy or angry, and I don’t need to soothe their feelings; it’s okay.

Although Bubby doesn’t like to talk about the past, sometimes she can be convinced to tell the story of her mother. Her name was Chana Rachel, and a lot of my cousins are named after her. Chana Rachel was the fifth child in a family of seven, but by the time she got married, she only had two siblings left. A diphtheria epidemic had passed through their small Hungarian town when she was younger, and Bubby’s grandmother had watched one and then another of her children die, as their throats closed up and oxygen no longer reached their lungs. When four of her children were already dead, and little Chana Rachel developed the same high fever and mottled skin, my great-great-grandmother wailed loudly in desperation and with the rage of a lunatic rammed her fist down her daughter’s throat, tearing the skinlike growth that was preventing her from breathing properly. The fever broke, and Chana Rachel recovered. She would tell that story to her children many times, but only Bubby lived on to tell it to me. This story moves me in a way I can’t quite articulate. I imagine this mother of seven as a tzadekes, a saint, so desperate to save her children that she would do anything. Bubby says it was her prayer to God that helped her daughter recover, not the breaking of the skin in her throat. But I don’t see it that way at all. I see a woman who took life into her own hands, who took action! The idea of her being fearless instead of passive thrills me. I too want to be such a woman, who works her own miracles instead of waiting for God to perform them. Although I mumble the words of the Yom Kippur prayers along with everyone else, I don’t think about what they mean, and I certainly don’t want to ask for mercy. If God thinks I’m so evil, then let him punish me, I think spitefully, wondering what kind of response my provocative claim might elicit in heaven. Bring it on, I think, angry now. Show me what you’ve got. With a world that suffers so indiscriminately, God cannot possibly be a rational being. What use is there appealing to a madman? Better to play his game, dare him to mess with me. A sudden feeling of peaceful resolution washes over me, that traditional Yom Kippur revelation that supposedly comes when one’s penance has been accepted. I know instinctively that I am not as helpless as some would like me to think. In the conversation between God and myself, I am not necessarily powerless. With my charm and persuasiveness, I might even get him to cooperate with me.

Of course I can. I'm the King. I can do whatever the fuck I want. But I can be kind, too. In reward for you putting an Heir inside the Canopus troll, when I find it, I'll use the Imperial Star to stop the heavens from colliding every time you are alone with Roxanya. You can have her too, in reward for good behaviour that is." "Have her?" I asked in confusion, my brain struggling to keep up with this fucking mess that had unfolded all around us. "Phoenixes are useful and there is deep power in her blood. I think it is worth allowing crossbreeding in this one circumstance. Any children you sire with her can be Guardian bonded to the Heirs you make with Mildred. This way you can have it all. I think I'm being more than fair.

As a young mother, I found that embracing God's call to motherhood once and for all brought me great peace. Instead of seeing fusses and messes as irritations in my day, I was more likely to see them as opportunities to train my children to be peacemakers and to learn to be responsible. Instead of resenting the interruptions to my schedule, I was more likely to accept them as divine appointments. More and more, I learned to see my children through the eyes of God. To fully experience our fulfillment in Christ and fulfill his will for our lives, we must come to the point where we give our whole selves to him — our freedom, our time, our bodies, all of our possessions and gifts — trusting hi, to show us how to use all that we are for his glory. To sacrifice means to give up or surrender something of value. We are living sacrifices, which means that moment by moment, out of our worship for him, we are to surrender our own needs and expectations for the greater value of pleasing the Lord.