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"When we apply the lessons we've struggled for our whole lives to learn to the lives of people we love, our love becomes judgment-which is toxic. Our fear our daughters will fail leads us to fail them."
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"The unjustifiable severity of a parent is loaded with this aggravation, that those whom he injures are always in his sight."

"Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting."

"I learned to love my son without wanting to possess him and I learned how to teach him to teach himself."

"Sometimes your kids will say the nastiest things, won't they, Rose? You want to ask,'Whose child is this?'"Rose chuckled."But usually, they're just in some kind of pain. They need to work it out."

"I don't think my parents liked me. They put a live teddy bear in my crib."

"Never tell a child that something it's too hard."
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"I wanted both things: strength in my independence and also this new desire. This felt like the beginning of a new kind of love."

"Because I feared I couldn't walk to Newton Centre without her, I needed to hike through desert, snow and woods alone.Childhood is a wilderness."

"I wanted him to declare in shock how overlooked and underestimated I had been ever since I was a child. How lucky he felt to be the one to have discovered me, to have me. I wanted him to look at me like maybe I was magic."

"Absolutely devout in her complete care of my body, she had only taught me to be weak and voiceless. But I had unlearned that lesson. Our enmeshment no longer felt to me like proof of love. I was no longer willing to permit this silencing. Helplessness didn't have to be my identity, I wasn't condemned to it. I was willing-able-to change. Our enmeshment had been enabled by my belief that I needed her to help me, to take care of things for me-and to save me-but, back in the home where I'd learned this helplessness, I found I no longer felt that I was trapped in it."

"I wrote through darkness, vividly seeing: my passivity was not a crime; my desire to trust was not a flaw."

"I saw for the first time that I could stop giving people the power to make me feel disrespected. In my anger I began to see the absurdity of allowing this boy to shame me."

"I was going to mean what I said, to be direct and firm.I found my moleskin notebook and on the page behind the pages addressed to Never-Never and my family-two unsent letters-I wrote: I am the director of my life."

"She told me that my rape was not my fault, that I should feel no shame, that " simple as it may sound " I hadn't caused it. No one causes rape but rapists. No one causes rape but rapists. No one causes rape but rapists. It was true. And it had not been obvious to me. And hearing it from someone else, a professional, someone who should know, helped me believe that soon I would believe it."
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