69 Quotes by Kim Brooks

I wonder if all love affairs, all marriages, all lifelong partnerships, aren't in some ways a turning away from the world.

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.

I love food, but I can't bear to read about it, to talk about it, to discuss the consequences and context of how we consume it. And this is more or less how I feel about raising children, too.

I always knew my mother was different, different from the other mothers in the way she dressed, the way she spoke, but most obviously, the way she mothered. I remember a slumber party where, instead of a sleeping bag, she urged me to bring a small, inflatable mattress because the dust on the floor was liable to aggravate my allergies.

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.

I always knew my mother loved me, but I also knew just as surely that there were moments, hours, days, when she could hardly cope with her own life, much less motherhood. Often, these episodes came without warning, like a change in weather, and so I became a meteorologist of her dysphoria.

Children are pretty darn smart and capable if we give them space and structure to grow.

'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.

I grew up in a time when I could play and bike in the neighborhood, largely because my parents assumed that if I ever needed help, I could ask a nearby adult.