Quotation Saturday: Family
1. I don’t care how poor a man is; if he has family, he’s rich. –Dan Wilcox & thad Mumford, “Identity Crisis,” from M*A*S*H
2. It is not flesh and blood but the heart with makes us fathers and sons. –Johann Schiller
3. The family is a haven in a heartless world. –Attributed to Christopher Lasch
4. Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we’ve put it in an impossible situation. –Margaret Mead
5. If you don’t believe in ghosts, you’ve never been to a family reunion. –Ashleigh Brilliant
6. We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies. –Shirley Abbott
7. It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place. –Collette
8. To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our heart right. –Confucius
9. Becoming responsible adults is no longer a matter of whether children hang up their pajamas or put dirty towels in the hamper, but whether they care about themselves and others – and whether they see everyday chores as related to how we treat this planet. –Eda LeShan
10. Making the decision to have a child – it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside your body. –Elizabeth Stone
11. Don’t hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them. –Evelyn Waugh
12. If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance. –George Bernard Shaw
13. I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it. –Harry S. Truman
14. A man can’t make a place for himself in the sun if he keeps taking refuge under the family tree. –Helen Keller
15. Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others. Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang, a pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness, based on the tacit understanding that this is not for keeps; that any limb you climb out on will still be there later for you to climb back. –Mignon McLaughlin
16. You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them. –Desmond Tutu
17. Our most basic instinct is not for survival but for family. Most of us would give our own life for the survival of a family member, yet we lead our daily life too often as if we take our family for granted. –Paul Pearshall
18. The great gift of family life is to be intimately acquainted with people you might never even introduce yourself to, had life not done it for you. –Kendall Hailey
19. Family is just accident. . . . They don’t mean to get on your nerves. They don’t even mean to be your family, they just are. –Marsha Norman.
20. In every dispute between parent and child, both cannot be right, but they may be, and usually are, both wrong. It is this situation which gives family life its peculiar hysterical charm. –Isaac Rosenfield
21. The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness. –Nancy Mitford
22. What greater thing is there for human souls than to feel that they are joined for life – to be with each other in silent unspeakable memories. –George Eliot
23. At the end of the day, a loving family should find everything forgivable. –Mark V. Olsen & Will Sheffer
24. Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to this country and to mankind is to bring up a family. –George Bernard Shaw
25. The informality of family life is a blessed condition that allows us to become our best while looking our worst. –Marge Kennedy
26. Family faces are magic mirrors. Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present, and future. –Gail Lumet buckley
27. The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people – no mere father and mother – as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born. –Pearl S. Buck
28. The family is the nucleus of civilization. –Will and Ariel Durant
29. To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons. –Marilyn French
30. Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist. –Michael Levine
31. Home is the place where boys and girls first learn how to limit their wishes, abide by rules, and consider the rights and needs of others. –Sidonic Gruenberg
32. The most important thning a father can do for his children is to love their mother. –Theodore Hesburgh
33. Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible – the kind of atmosphere that is found in a nurturing family. –Virginia Satir
34. You would think that those who are always talking about family values would want to create an environment of permanent relationships for people. . . . but they’re not advocating family values, they’re advocating their own values. –Willie Brown
35. And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see- or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read. –Alice Walker
36. One generation plants the trees; another gets the shade. –Chinese proverb
37. Women do not have to sacrifice personhood if they are mothers. They do not have to sacrifice motherhood in order to be persons. Liberation was meant to expand women’s opportunities, not to limit them. The self-esteem that has been found in new pursujits can also be found in mothering. –Elaine Heffner
38. No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement. –Florida Scott-Maxwell
39. If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much. –Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
40. She was the archetypal selfless mother: living only for her children, sheltering them from the consequences of their actions – and in the end doing them irreparable harm. –Marcia Muller
41. Blaming mother is just a negative way of clinging to her still. –Nancy Friday
42. A mother is a person who, seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie. –Tenneva Jordan
43. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. . . indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. –Virginia Woolf
44. Every father should remember that one day his son will follow his example instead of his advice. –Unknown
45. A father is a person who carries pictures in his wallet where his money used to be. –Unknown
46. ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’ stands written among the three laws of most revered righteousness. –Aeschylus
47. If you think about it seriously, all the questions about the soul and the immortality of the soul and paradise and hell are at bottom only a way of seeing this very simple fact: that every action of ours is passed on to others according to its value, of good or evil, it passes from father to son, from one generation to the next, in a perpetual movement. –Antonio Gramsci
48. My father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it. –Clarence Budington Kellan
49. My father taught me to work; he didn’t teach me to love it. –Abraham Lincoln
50. You don’t really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around – and why his parents will always wave back. –William D. Tammeus
Mamacita Says: The Good Popsicles Are On The Bottom
Mamacita says: When I’m stressed out, I want Popsicles.
It simply has to be some kind of anomaly, however, that in a big box of 48 Popsicles, three flavors, every time I dip my hand in that box, I bring up a cherry Popsicle, the only kind I don’t like.
This stresses me out further. I put the accursed cherry Popsicle to the side and try again. Ditto.
I can only conclude, therefore, that the orange and grape Popsicles sense my presence and burrow down to the bottom of the box, as far from my grasping hand as possible. The logical thing to do, of course, would be to toss out the cherry Popsicles as I pull them, one after another, out of the box. Unfortunately, I’m not only stressed out, I’m also a cheapskate. I can’t stand waste.
There is some kind of math lesson about beating the odds here, but darned if I can put it into any kind of equation.
It hurts me that the Popsicles I love best hate me. Their obvious animosity stresses me out.
. . . goes off to freezer to try my luck one more time. . . .
I really am stressed out. I have a good reason. But I thought a post about Deathsicles might be too macabre, even for me.
The Luck of the Draw
Mamacita says: Bits and pieces of this post were first published on December 19, 2004, and December 10, 2006.
Some people are very, shall we say, “unlucky,” in the grab-bag of in-laws. People talk about how awful their mother-in-law, or father-in-law, or siblings-in-law are, and they wonder how the person they married could possibly have turned out normal, raised in that house with that crew, and from that shallow, polluted gene pool.
I have been lucky. I have been far luckier than I deserved.
My mother-in-law is a lovely, kind person who welcomed me with open arms and who loved me in spite of myself. She would not have chosen me, I’m sure, but once the deed was done, nobody would ever have known. She has shown me nothing but kindness since the day I first met her.
My children are her only grandchildren, and as a grandmother she has shown herself to be even more wonderful than anyone could have dreamed a grandmother to be. She loves her grandchildren unconditionally, absolutely unconditionally.
Whenever we needed her, she was there. She has always been there. Good times, bad times, hard times, heartbreaking times. . . she was there, and she was on our side.
She’s a writer. In fact, she’s a newspaper reporter, and she’s a darn good one. Sometimes I think she’s the only one in that whole building who knows how to spell. Her column is probably the most popular thing in the entire paper. She gets letters from all over the world, praising her writing. And, like most people who are very good at their jobs, she’s unappreciated and overworked and in spite of those things, she still produces a column that’s first-rate, and she’s never once raised her voice to anyone in that building. One of these days I’d like to, but that’s neither here nor there.
She’s generous, and forgiving, and warmhearted. She’s musical from the top of her head down to her toes, and beautiful melodies flow from her fingertips. For almost thirty years, I have loved to sit in her living room and listen to her play. Her music soothed my very soul. Whenever she was there, she played for us.
She’s a tiny little woman, barely five feet tall, and her only son is nearly seven feet tall. When they are walking together, it’s almost comical. She has a granddaughter and a niece who look very much like her, or rather, like she looked when she was their age. Her niece is so like her that people assume they are mother and daughter; they are both very short and smiling, both very loving women and it shows on their faces. Her granddaughter, my beautiful Belle, looks a lot like her, too, only Belle is tall, far taller than I am. Zappa doesn’t look anything like his grandmother but he has been crazy about her from the day he was born, and vice versa.
My MIL’s life has not been an easy one. I have always hoped that some day she would write a book about her life, but so far, there isn’t one forthcoming. I will still hope, though, because her life has been far too interesting to not share with the world.
I love my mother-in-law, and I hope she knows it. I am not a touchie-feelie person (no comments about my college years, please) and she has always respected that. I have always known, from day one, that if ever I needed her for anything, anything at all, I had only to ask. Sometimes, she was there for me before I had a chance to ask. She just knew. She knew, and she was there.
She has played the organ at the weddings of most of the people in this county.
In this little town, everybody knows her, at least by name and reputation. Both are solid gold.
I love her. What I mean to say is, I absolutely and positively love her.
She told me a few years ago that she had a beautiful set of Moss Rose dishes; her husband had bought them for her over forty years ago, and she kept them stored away in the bottom of her hutch. They were just too beautiful to use.
She told me that she had, in fact, only used them once.
She told me that the one time was years ago, when I came over to her house after an appointment with my obstetrician, and it was pouring rain, and cold, and miserable, and she had kept tiny year-old Belle and made supper for me while I sat in the waiting room for hours and hours (not an exaggeration) waiting to be told that my gigantic belly was housing Zappa. I sat down in her dining room and partook of one of the most delicious meals I’ve ever had in my life, on those lovely plates.
Those gorgeous dishes, and she’d only used them ONCE?
I looked at her in wonderment.
“You’ve only used them once, and that once was for ME?” I asked.
She said yes, that was true.
“Why would you use those special dishes just for me?” I asked her in even more wonderment.
“Why would you have to ask?” she replied.
See what I mean?
In one way or another, no matter what, she was always THERE for me.
Just last Christmas, she sat at my piano and played carol after carol, accompanied on the trombone by her brother, Hub’s wonderful Uncle David. I have almost all of that holiday concert on video, and I’m so glad.
The family holiday “concert” is was a staple in our family.
Next Christmas? We’ll do our best, but it won’t be the same. Nothing ever will.
How could it possibly be? She will no longer be there for us. In just a day or so, she will no longer be there.
Except, of course, that she will always be there.
Lucky, lucky Heaven.
