There are few things in this world more satisfying than having your son teach you how to play tennis, unless it is having a semi-truck run over your foot.
A grandparent is the only baby-sitter who doesn’t charge more after midnight – or anything before midnight.
Babies on television never spit up on the Ultrasuede.
Why take pride in cooking, when they don’t take pride in eating?
There was a time when the respect and trust my children had for me would have made you sick to your stomach. They believed I could blow on a red traffic light and turn it green.
Early in my life I had made a pact with myself. I would never eat anything that moved when I cooked it, excited the dog, or inflated upon impact with my teeth.
If the nest is truly empty, who owns all this junk?
Encourage independence in your children by regularly losing them in the supermarket.
Those magazine dieting stories always have the testimonial of a woman who wore a dress that could slipcover New Jersey in one photo and thirty days later looked like a well-dressed thermometer.
For some unexplained reason, it’s always the other end of the table that’s wild and raucous, with screaming laughter and a fella who plays ‘Holiday for Strings’ on water glasses.
A friend doesn’t go on a diet because you are fat. A friend never defends a husband who gets his wife an electric skillet for her birthday. A friend will tell you she saw your old boyfriend – and he’s a priest.
With boys you always know where you stand. Right in the path of a hurricane. It’s all there. The fruit flies hovering over their waste can, the hamster trying to escape to cleaner air, the bedrooms decorated in Early Bus Station Restroom.
With girls, everything looks great on the surface. But beware of drawers that won’t open. They contain a three-month supply of dirty underwear, unwashed hose, and rubber bands with blobs of hair in them.
Parenting is a negative thing. Keep your children from killing themselves, or anyone else, and hope for the best.
Our teen-agers withdrew to their bedrooms on their thirteenth birthday and didn’t show themselves to us again until it was time to get married.
When you’re lecturing teenagers and they begin to hum and leave the room, you can sense there is hostility.
I’m on a diet as my skin doesn’t fit me anymore.
When children reach the age of sixteen, they discover the meaning of life: car keys.
We wondered why when a child laughed, he belonged to Daddy, and when he had a sagging diaper that smelled like a landfill, ‘He wants his mother.’
The fact was I didn’t want to look my age, but I didn’t want to act the age I wanted to look either. I also wanted to grow old enough to understand that sentence.