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One of the darkest, deepest shames so many of us mothers feel nowadays is our fear that we are Bad Mothers, that we are failing our children and falling far short of our own ideals.

Ayelet Waldman

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Ayelet Waldman
Age: 59
Born: 1964
Born: December 11
Journalist
Lawyer
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jerusalem
Middle East
Many
Ideals
Feel
Shame
Feels
Inspiring
Shames
Children
Failing
Darkest
Short
Nowadays
Fear
Deepest
Fall
Mothers
Mother
Falling

More quotes by Ayelet Waldman

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I wish I could view the belly that oozes over the top of my pants as a badge of maternal honor. I do try. I make sure that the women whose looks I admire all have sufficient fat reserves to survive a famine, and I make a lot of snide comments about the skeletal likes of Lara Flynn Boyle and Paris Hilton.
Ayelet Waldman
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Nothing makes me roll my eyes faster than a Coexist bumper sticker.
Ayelet Waldman
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I always tell my kids that as soon as you have a secret, something about you that you are ashamed to have others find out, you have given other people the power to hurt you by exposing you.
Ayelet Waldman
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Aborting my baby is the most serious of the many maternal crimes I tally in my head when I am at my lowest, when the Bad Mother label seems to fit best. Rocketship was my baby. And I killed him.
Ayelet Waldman
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Whatever my intentions, whatever the truth of my claim, I had no business giving a lecture to a total stranger.
Ayelet Waldman
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Because of my bipolar disorder, I tend to these mixed states, which are depressed but loud and agitated. So I can be terribly irritable. I go to cognitive behavioral therapy in order not to yell at my children.
Ayelet Waldman
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My kids are incredibly secure. More and more of their friends' parents are divorcing, but my kids have absolute confidence that we'll stay together forever. That goes a long, long way.
Ayelet Waldman
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In a perfect world, probably we'd never yell, we'd just be firm and dispassionate. But of course, everyone yells at their children.
Ayelet Waldman
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So many women today have become so focused on their children, they've developed these romantic entanglements with their children's lives, and the husbands are secondary. They're left out. And the romantic focus is on the children.
Ayelet Waldman
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If you focus all of your emotional passion on your children and you neglect the relationship that brought that family into existence... eventually, things can go really, really wrong.
Ayelet Waldman
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Courage is impulsive it is narcissism tempered with nihilism.
Ayelet Waldman
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I'm sure there are people who survive tragedy without humor, but I've never met any of them. Nor would I be particularly interested in writing about them if I did meet them.
Ayelet Waldman
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There's nothing I find quite as annoying as the phrase 'I told you so.'
Ayelet Waldman
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If your white privilege and class privilege protects you, then you have an obligation to use that privilege to take stands that work to end the injustice that grants that privilege in the first place.
Ayelet Waldman
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I hate homework. I hate it more now than I did when I was the one lugging textbooks and binders back and forth from school. The hour my children are seated at the kitchen table, their books spread out before them, the crumbs of their after-school snack littering the table, is without a doubt the worst hour of my day.
Ayelet Waldman
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There is no fundamental truth and there's nothing to be connected to: I just believe that [LSD] makes you feel better.
Ayelet Waldman
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I feed my kids organic food and milk, but I've also been known to buy the odd Lunchable. My kids are not allowed to watch TV during the week, but on weekends even the 2-year-old veges out to 'The Simpsons.
Ayelet Waldman
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Roaring like a tiger turns some children into pianists who debut at Carnegie Hall but only crushes others. Coddling gives some the excuse to fail and others the chance to succeed.
Ayelet Waldman
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I really think we were charting a course to having a more sane response to mass incarceration, to drug use, and to understanding that the war on drugs has resulted only in the empowerment of vast criminal enterprises and the destruction of democracies around the world. And all that is coming to a miserable, horrific halt.
Ayelet Waldman
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I expend far too much of my maternal energies on guilt and regret.
Ayelet Waldman