Character, not passion keeps marriages together long enough to do their work of raising children into mature, responsible, productive citizens.

Parents have subtle ways of humbling you, of reminding you of your origins, perhaps by showing up at the moment of your greatest glory and reminding you where you came from and demonstrating that you still have some of it between your toes.

In time, after a dozen years of centering their lives around the games boys play with one another, the boys' bodies change and that changes everything else. But the memories are not erased of that safest time in the lives of men, when their prime concern was playing games with guys who just wanted to be their friendly competitors. Life never again gets so simple.

A boy is not free to find a partner of his own as long as he must be the partner to his mother.

The mother must teach her son how to respect and follow the rules. She must teach him how to compete successfully with the other boys. And she must teach him how to find a woman to take care of him and finish the job she began of training him how to live in a family. But no matter how good a job a woman does in teaching a boy how to be a man, he knows that she is not the real thing, and so he tends to exaggerate the differences between men and women that she embodies.

When it comes to little girls, God the father has nothing on father, the god. It's an awesome responsibility.

Each generation's job is to question what parents accept on faith, to explore possibilities, and adapt the last generation's system of values for a new age.