15 Quotes by Kristina Kuzmic

This is so important that I wish I could grab every single one of you by the shoulders, look you in the eye, and say it to you over and over again until it starts to sink it: Please choose to give yourself more credit than criticism and more grace than judgment. You deserve it. And it will change you.

That's why I do the birthday cake thing a little differently with my kids. At candle time, I scream, "Make a wish! Say it out loud! Yell it at the top of your lungs!" And then we all cheer for each other's biggest dreams and do what we can to make sure they come true for one another.

I wasn't a big reader growing up, much to the dismay of my scholarly parents. My father once risked his life in a plane crash because he refused to slide down the emergency exit without first grabbing his books. He was the last passenger to exit the plane, clinging to his bag of books. But I didn't inherit my father's addiction to reading. I had always been too antsy to sit still with a book. Or to sit still at all! Until one day, I wasn't.

Parenting is about raising myself as much as it is about raising my kids.

When things get really confusing and I feel like I want to strangle one of my kids and we're escalating toward a full-on intense argument, I do my best to force myself to walk away. Because I believe the only thing harder than parenting a teenager is being a teenager.

Parenting is insane. Even without any added financial burdens or depression, parenting is a circus. It's every extreme emotion all bottled up, shaken together like a strong cocktail, and then chugged by our brain cells. Parenthood is happy and sad, fulfilling and draining. It makes us feel like superhero one second and a total failure the next. Parenting is complicated. Very, very complicated.

Getting married doesn't mean that the search for love is over. The search for the person to love is over; the search for how to love that person is just beginning.

But what did I have to be embarrassed about? It wasn't my fault. The only person who should have been embarrassed by his behavior was the man who had violated me. Why was I carrying around his shame for him? Why are women always running around picking up men's shame like dirty socks.

Childhood is not a rehearsal for life; childhood is life and children are already whole people.