Kim Brooks

“A slice of perfectly buttered, warm-from-the-oven bread has been known to bring tears to my eyes.”

“A father who is distracted for a few minutes by his myriad interests and obligations in the world of adult interactions is being, well, a father. A mother who does the same is failing her children.”

“I don't know that I want to live in a world without cheese.”

“The desire to keep television out of our son's life was one of the few parenting priorities my husband and I agreed on from the beginning. We debated the pros and cons of co-sleeping, of pacifiers, of chemical-free crib mattresses and baby sign language. The television question, on the other hand, was a no-brainer.”

“All interesting, worthwhile humans suffered and struggled and overcame adversity of one sort or another. Pain is constructive. Misery can be useful. I believed this the way I believe the sun rises in the east. Then I had children, and I slowly began to disbelieve and disavow it.”

“Having children, entering the realm of parents and parenthood, changes our relationship to the world in ways we could not have anticipated and might not have signed up for. Before I had children, for example, I believed strongly in the nobility of suffering.”

“I love my husband. I love my family.”

“I have a profound and unshakable love of good eating.”

“I don't want to believe it - that parenting itself makes art hard, that you must always sacrifice one for the other, that there is something inherently selfish and greedy and darkly obsessive in the desire to care as much about the thing you are writing or making as you do about the other humans in your life. What parent would want to believe this?”

“We're contemptuous of 'distracted' working mothers. We're contemptuous of 'selfish' rich mothers. We're contemptuous of mothers who have no choice but to work, but also of mothers who don't need to work and still fail to fulfill an impossible ideal of selfless motherhood. You don't have to look very hard to see the common denominator.”

“I consider myself a B-minus mom. I think I would be considered an A-plus dad.”

“This is what shame does to women: It isolates us and makes us feel our stories aren't really stories at all but idiosyncratic flaws.”

“I'm sure all of us can find fault in our own education, and I certainly wished at times that I'd had other options. My own K-12 education may have been free and easy, but it wasn't necessarily very good.”

“'Did our parents really let us do that?' is a game my friends and I sometimes play. We remember taking off on bikes alone, playing in the woods for hours, crawling through storm drains to follow creek beds.”

“What an awful burden we mothers and fathers, Jewish and not, have to bear - to hatch a thing we love more than ourselves into a world so fundamentally unworthy.”

“Motherhood was the first instance in my life where I was asked to sacrifice anything for anyone.”

“I don't know exactly when I started watching television, but I know that Muppets and Smurfs hold privileged places in my memory. Without television, I surely could have mastered several classical languages or learned to play the violin, right?”

“I adore cooking and baking and holiday feasts and dining with friends and spending too much money on mind-blowing meals in wonderful restaurants, but mostly, and quite simply, I love food.”

“It is impossible to make it a crime to take your eyes off your children without also making it a crime to be poor.”

“I've harassed pediatricians and nurses, demanded extra conferences with preschool teachers, contacted speech therapists and occupational therapists over delays other mothers probably wouldn't have noticed, stressed over magnet school applications three years before they're due.”