34 Quotes by Barbara Lynn-Vannoy

To have a great marriage, not only do you need to love your spouse, but you also need to love your marriage.

The impetus that brought me flailing and kicking toward forgiveness's feet was knowing that my daughter would need an idea of how to do it later in life, too, and she was watching me now; realizing that made me shake off the dust and ask God to be a man and show me how to do it.

A hospice nurse, on the advice of a Catholic chaplain decades ago, left the window slightly open to make it easier for one's spirit to travel. Ma had sung with her son twenty-one hours before she passed by him toward that window; indeed she sang until the day she died, just as she said she would, and I believe it was her harmony, not her spirit that first arrived at heaven's door.

Words tie our lives together ribboned as the greatest gifts we give each other, entwining us, the threads by which we accomplish living.

Words are the scaffolding upon which we build our lives.

And a first-grade classroom is the place where words are born, and reborn, year after year, cradles of letters and sounds. Here, words linger longer in the air than in any other space on earth, inviting us to capture them, revel in them, then walk away with them into the world, hand in hand. Words, like children, wait to be noticed, then known, then ennobled. Words are the scaffolding upon which we build our lives.

Children arrived as innocent as fairy dust and left as tiny beacons of knowledge, and while I lived every day inside their world, I could never explain what happened. Until now.

Let me tell you. My kids are brilliant. Never underestimate children. I don't teach to their minds. Or their hearts. I teach to their spirits, and not one child has failed me. Ever.

I opened my eyes and exhaled twelve years of single parenting.