Control is a big issue when you're sick. It's the first thing you lose - other losses come later.

Lifestyles and sex roles are passed from parents to children as inexorably as blue eyes or small feet.

I feel about mothers the way I feel about dimples: because I do not have one myself, I notice everyone who does.

It angers me that sick people have to wait for everything and everybody - doctors, nurses, callbacks, lab results, prescriptions, medications, technicians, treatment rooms. If illness is the embodiment of powerlessness, which, believe me, is true, then waiting is its temporal incarnation.

If the Richter scale could measure human calamities, the loss of a child would register a ten.

We mothers are learning to mark our mothering success by our daughters' lengthening flight.

Like many another romance, the romance of the family turns sour when the money runs out. If we really cared about families, we would not let 'born again' patriarchs send up moral abstractions as a smokescreen for the scandal of American family economics.