Ayelet Waldman Quotes

I used to refer to myself as a 'theoretical anorexic,' just as crazy when it came to body image, but saved by a lack of self-discipline. My daughters do everything better than I do - they're smarter, more beautiful, happier. What if they end up better at anorexia, too?

During the periods in my marriage when I chose to stay home with my kids rather than work as an attorney, it caused me no end of anxiety. Despite the fact that I knew I was contributing to our family by caring for our children, I still felt that my worth was less because I wasn't earning.

Yes, I have four children. Four children with whom I spend a good part of every day: bathing them, combing their hair, sitting with them while they do their homework, holding them while they weep their tragic tears. But I'm not in love with any of them. I am in love with my husband.

In every union roles are assumed, some traditional, some not. My husband used to pay his own bills, I used to call my own repairman. But as marriages progress, you surrender areas of your own competence, often without even knowing it.

Aborting my baby is the most serious of the many maternal crimes I tally in my head when I am at my lowest, when the Bad Mother label seems to fit best. Rocketship was my baby. And I killed him.

The idea that [Jeff Sessions] is the man who is going to end the progress on the drug war makes me want to rip my hair out, every carefully nurtured curl on my head.

I smoked pot when I was a teenager because other kids were doing it, but I didn't enjoy it that much.

Here are my Mommy Messages: Wear a condom and test your Molly.

I believe the approach we take to talking to our kids about drugs can, in some cases, mean the difference between life and death. So my approach is really simple: I just don't want them to die. And I want them to be able to save someone's life if they see someone die.

I’ve sometimes thought that it’s only by recalling that desperate devotion my kids once felt for me that I can maintain my own desperate devotion in the face of their adolescent sneering.

If only shame were a reliable engine for behavior modification. All it does is make me feel bad, which inspires me to bust open a bag of cheese popcorn, which then makes me feel crappy about my weight.

I was a lesbian for a semester at Wesleyan - it was a graduation requirement.

In a perfect world I think we would microdose with LSD instead of giving teenagers Adderall. But I'd like to see it studied first.

Love & Marriage are about work & Compromise. They're about seeing someone for what he is, being disappointed and deciding to stick around anyway. They're about commitment and comfort, not some kind of sudden, hysterical recognition.

I was terrified of LSD. I don't want to get arrested.

The thing I believe in most in the world is my own fallibility, so I am willing to believe that I may be wrong too.

If producing a regular column is living out loud, then keeping a daily blog is living at the top of your lungs. For a couple of months there, I was shrieking like a banshee.

I was born in Israel, to Canadian parents. My father immigrated in 1948, part of a wave of young men and women who came as pioneers, to fight for a Jewish homeland. Their motive was in large part a reaction to the Holocaust, and their slogan was 'Never Again.'

Despite the fact that in America we incarcerate more juveniles for life terms than in any other country in the world, the truth is that the vast majority of youth offenders will one day be released. The question is simple and stark. Do we want to help them change or do we want to help them become even more violent and dangerous?

There is no fundamental truth and there's nothing to be connected to: I just believe that [LSD] makes you feel better.

My own husband was divorced when we met, but without kids. I don't know what I would have done if he'd had them. I got the message very early on that the worst mistake a woman can make is marrying a man with children.

I learned that I suffered from bipolar II disorder, a less serious variant of bipolar I, which was once known as manic depression. The information was naturally frightening; up to 1 in 5 people with bipolar disorder will commit suicide, and rates may even be higher for those suffering from bipolar II.

I believe that mothers should tell the truth, even - no, especially - when the truth is difficult. It's always easier, and in the short term can even feel right, to pretend everything is okay, and to encourage your children to do the same. But concealment leads to shame, and of all hurts shame is the most painful.

I certainly don't think it's inevitable that we don't love children who don't carry our own DNA. If that were true we wouldn't have millions of successful adoptions to consider. I do think that it's harder to love a child when you come into that child's life after the unrequited passion of infancy and early childhood has passed.

I think I wish I had never spanked my children, but I have. And they remember every instance like they tattooed it on their palms. I think it's a terrible lesson, to use physical punishment to make a point about not behaving, not being kind to their siblings, to other people. I mean that's just absurd. But I've lost it, I understand it.

The statistic that 67 percent of women's admissions to the psychiatric facilities are during the week before menstruation is critically important to every woman, and to every woman who feels she suffers from depression.

I tend to approach giving interviews with the same sense of circumspection and restraint as I approach my writing. That is to say, virtually none. When asked what I made of blogs like my own, blogs written by parents about their children, I said, 'A blog like this is narcissism in its most obscene flowering.'

When my first daughter was born, my husband held her in his hands and said, 'My God, she's so beautiful.' I unwrapped the baby from her blankets. She was average size, with long thin fingers and a random assortment of toes. Her eyes were close set, and she had her father's hooked nose. It looked better on him.

Most writers spend their lives standing a little apart from the crowd, watching and listening and hoping to catch that tiny hint of despair, that sliver of malice, that makes them think, 'Aha, here is the story.'

So many women today have become so focused on their children, they've developed these romantic entanglements with their children's lives, and the husbands are secondary. They're left out. And the romantic focus is on the children.

I think it's worth trying to be a mother who delights in who her children are, in their knock-knock jokes and earnest questions. A mother who spends less time obsessing about what will happen, or what has happened, and more time reveling in what is.

Is Valentine's Day a day to make cupcakes with your children? No, Valentine's is supposed to be a day about romantic love.

There is an inverse correlation between the cleanliness of a bathroom and my 3-year-old daughter's need to move her bowels.

If your white privilege and class privilege protects you, then you have an obligation to use that privilege to take stands that work to end the injustice that grants that privilege in the first place.

When you consider America, there are hundreds of millions of people who have smoked marijuana illegally.

Whatever my intentions, whatever the truth of my claim, I had no business giving a lecture to a total stranger.

As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

I'd never written nonfiction about the war on drugs, but I know a tremendous amount about it: I taught a class on it for seven years. I was putting into words the stuff I was teaching, and I was writing it up and thought, "Dude, you're writing a book."

In fact if I see you drinking I'll come down on you like a ton of bricks and call your mom.

I love reader mail, and I do read it, but I won't read hate mail.

What I do with my kids is - and I think they probably do ignore us - is No Alcohol. If they're drunk they will be grounded for time immemorial.

I did not want to raise a genetically compromised child. I did not want my children to have to contend with the massive diversion of parental attention, and the consequences of being compelled to care for their brother after I died. I wanted a genetically perfect baby, and because that was something I could control, I chose to end his life.

I have made so many mistakes as a mother. But the one thing that I know I do is I make sure my children know how much I love them and they are absolutely secure in that.

Why are the architects of the family-values agenda so eager to punish into the next generation? What is being served by seeking, quite literally, a tooth for a tooth?

I mean, I do actually think there is a qualitative difference between aborting in the early part of the first trimester and in, you know, the middle or later part of the second trimester, in a way that you feel about it in that you grow attached.

I'm sure there are people who survive tragedy without humor, but I've never met any of them. Nor would I be particularly interested in writing about them if I did meet them.

I expend far too much of my maternal energies on guilt and regret.

The legalization of drugs, a proliferation of a public health approach to drug use and drug addition, a compassionate mental health system. And can we just say gender equality and the end of mass incarceration and the final shedding of the vestiges of a slave-based nation? Can we have that, too? Can I have it all?