A man doesn't have to have all the answers; children will teach him how to parent them, and in the process will teach him everything he needs to know about life.

We perversely see mother love as the problem--when it is all we have to sustain us--rather than blaming the fathers who have run out on our mothers and on us. We seem willing to forgive fathers for loving too little even as we still shrink in terror from mothers who love too much.

. . . in the end, there is nothing a man can do that a woman can't, except be a father.

Early on, girls begin to menstruate, which is dramatic but not obvious to their playmates. They grow taller and rounder, but underneath their makeup they are still recognizably themselves. For boys it is far more disorienting. Puberty comes later, sometimes much later, and its delay is humiliating. While the tall round girls are getting themselves up like grown women, the prepubertal boys, with their featureless, hairless bodies, are just dirty little kids who could pass for the children of the hypermature girls.

Family love can be a bore, but only when you are hearing it, never when you are relating it to the ones who will be carrying it out for you. A family without a storyteller or two has no way to make sense out of their past and no way to get a sense of themselves.

Parents can make us distrust ourselves. To them, we seem always to be works-in-progress.

If fathers who fear fathering and run away from it could only see how little fathering is enough. Mostly, the father just needs to be there.