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The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.

Ellen Goodman

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Ellen Goodman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 11
Journalist
Newton
Massachusetts
Adoption
Parenthood
Hopes
Central
Fears
Struggle
Inspirational
Children
Outweigh

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You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.
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We criticize mothers for closeness. We criticize fathers for distance. How many of us have expected less from our fathers and appreciated what they gave us more? How many of us always let them off the hook?
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Once upon a time we were just plain people. But that was before we began having relationships with mechanical systems. Get involved with a machine and sooner or later you are reduced to a factor.
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Traditions are the guideposts driven deep in our subconscious minds. The most powerful ones are those we can't even describe and aren't even aware of.
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You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can’t teach someone who writes columns to care.
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We each have a litany of holiday rituals and everyday habits that we hold on to, and we often greet radical innovation with the enthusiasm of a baby meeting a new sitter. We defend against it and - not always, but often enough - reject it. Slowly we adjust, but only if we have to.
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I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.
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Today Washington is our Hollywood, the Senate our Warner Bros., the White House our Beverly Hills. People who never read a line of a movie magazine deal with the lives of leaders as if they were Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
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My generation is the first in my species to have put fitness next to godliness on the scale of things. Keeping in shape has become the imperative of our middle age. The heaviest burden of guilt we carry into our forties is flab. Our sense of failure is measured by the grade on a stress test.
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There's a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over - and to let go. It means leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives.
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instant opinion is an oxymoron. You don't get real opinions in an instant. You get reactions.
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The truth is that we can overhaul our surroundings, renovate our environment, talk a new game, join a new club, far more easily than we can change the way we respond emotionally. It is easier to change behavior than feelings about that behavior.
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In today's amphetamine world of news junkies, speed trumps thoughtfulness too often.
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Taboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.
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I rewrite a great deal. I'm always fiddling, always changing something. I'll write a few words - then I'll change them. I add. I subtract. I work and fiddle and keep working and fiddling, and I only stop at the deadline.
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Forty is ... an age at which people have histories and options. At thirty, they had perhaps less history. At fifty, perhaps fewer options.
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Maybe at 20 you can write well, but I don't think you could do what I do. Some things have to happen to you first.
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My father used to say that if a man fools you once, he's a jerk. If he fools you twice, you're a jerk. Only he didn't use the word jerk.
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In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.
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I vote because it's what small-d democracy is about. Because there are places where people fight for generations and stand for hours to cast a ballot knowing what we ought to remember: that it makes a difference. Not always a big difference. Not always an immediate difference. But a difference.
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