Child, think not of those things, those dark possibilities. Your father and brothers are here with you today. Lavain will tug at your braids, Tirry will sing you songs, and your father will see his wife's beauty in you. Savor their love today. And it will never leave you.
I don't go to conferences quite as much as I used to: having a child and movin away from the university leaves me with less time, but I've tried to balance things out - not just spending time with Linux all the time, but having a real job and a real life at the same time.
There are women who live in U.S. with maybe one abortion clinic. The right wing is trying to make it impossible for women to get abortions, even if they are technically legal. This is done in a literal way - you can't get to a clinic, you can't afford it, you have to tell your parents - and by making it something that young people feel they can't talk about, can't ask for help with, can't do anything about but try to either induce abortions on their own, alone and unsafely, or have children they don't want and can't care for. It's just an assault on all sides.
When I say, 'We're a team,' the reason why I point that out is because at 'All My Children,' that's the mindset. They're a team. And I've said this to other people: They're like a united front.
With my child, I hardly watch TV now.
There were so many different influences in my life: being half Mexican and half Irish, growing up an only child of immigrant parents, being bullied in school, feeling alienated and lonely, this undertone of darkness. All that culminated and came out in my music and made it different.
They're [children] less forgiving. You have to be very conscious of the fact that they're not going to just accept things; they're going to question. They're going to move around if you bore them. They'll actually leave. So you really have to be on your toes.
I have a children's theater background, so I grew up performing for child audiences; it's sort of my specialty. I know the child audience pretty well - or felt like I did because I performed for them so much. I studied a lot about the child audience, about theater. So it was naturally a place that I gravitated to.
Changing schools and friends is hard on children and can often make them desperate and lonely enough to form closer ties with a sibling.
Everything seems to take on a new meaning when you become a parent and you put yourself in the shoes of the parent, not the shoes of the child.
I didn't have a clue. I grew up Protestant in Connecticut at the Saugatuck Congregational Church. We didn't talk about the devil. That's Catholicism. And so, that was my safety net. And I always say, it's probably a good thing they didn't hire a Catholic child, who may have heard about the devil, the things that were in the closet. And no one wanted to discuss them.
People need to understand; I may have been very innocent. Didn't understand the devil. Didn't understand any of that. You can only push a child so far. You have laws; number one. And number two; I had been doing this so long, I could say now that I don't want to do something. But after a certain while, they knew when they had pushed their luck with me, and that it was time to, you know, maybe back off.
I have done, I hope to say I've done things to help make a difference while I'm on this earth. Are animal issues most important to me? Absolutely. I have an affinity with them, but I also care about children and the elderly and always say that the rest of everybody else can fend for themselves because we're in a age where we can. And we're all able to do so.
I think that if I'd not made the movie, I might be a veterinarian in Connecticut. I would probably be married with some children. That's probably the way it would be. But because of the film [the Exorcist], I don't have a normal life by somebody else's standards.
Look what they did to MaCauley Culkin. The poor child. I know because I've been there. But I could say after living my life, truth will always win out. And no one can take my character away from me anymore.
If I had children, I would be very selfish. I wouldn't be out doing things. But by not having kids, it makes me freer to travel the world and talk about things I feel are important.
Sexual freedom and liberation has to be of your own making. I'm stunned when I hear about friends' children, ten or twelve years old giving blow jobs. I just don't like the girls being used or exploited in that way. It's just indiscriminate sexual relating. It's just the isolated things.
I didn't major in anthropology in college, but I do feel I had an education in different cultures very early on. My parents divorced when I was eleven, and my father immediately married a woman with three children and was with her for five years. When they got divorced, he immediately married a woman with four children. In the meantime, my mother married a man who had seven children. So I was going from one family to another between the ages of eleven and eighteen.
I'm always interested in a claustrophobic situation where people might be powerless to do things. My first three novels were all about families. Things that happen in a house within a family, because you're a child or because you want to keep the family together, you suffer things you might not have had to suffer if you weren't in that situation.
When I was younger, I definitely did face anti-ginger prejudice. As a child, all teasing hurts, whether it's because you're fat or a different race or have red hair. I had enough comments from a couple of people to make it a sore point.
I love all my children, but some of them I don't like.
Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women--the quality of shifting from child to woman, theseeming helplessness one moment and the utter self-reliance the next that baffle us, that seem most difficult to understand. These are the qualities that make her a mystery, the qualities that provoked Freud to complain, "What does a woman want?
In our minds lives the madonna image--the all-embracing, all- giving tranquil mother of a Raphael painting, one child at her breast, another at her feet; a woman fulfilled, one who asks nothing more than to nurture and nourish. This creature of fantasy, this myth, is the model--the unattainable ideal against which women measure, not only their performance, but their feelings about being mothers.
The authoritarian child-rearing style so often found in working-class families stems in part from the fact that parents see aroundthem so many young people whose lives are touched by the pain and delinquency that so often accompanies a life of poverty. Therefore, these parents live in fear for their children's future--fear that they'll lose control, that the children will wind up on the streets or, worse yet, in jail.
I just imagined how fine it would be if the children could adopt mothers, of course, mothers who were single, without other children, living in a comfortable apartment, and ready to care for the children.
