Certainly, words can be as abusive as any blow. . . . When a three-year-old yells, "You're so stupid! What a dummy!" it doesn't carry the same weight as when a mother yells those words to a child. . . . Even if you don't physically abuse young children, you can still drive them nuts with your words.
Mary BlakelyWhat stunned me was the regular assertion that feminists were "anti-family." . . . It was motherhood that got me into the movementin the first place. I became an activist after recognizing how excruciatingly personal the political was to me and my sons. It was the women's movement that put self-esteem back into "just a housewife," rescuing our intelligence from the junk pile of "instinct" and making it human, deliberate, powerful.
Mary BlakelyToday, only a fool would offer herself as the singular role model for the Good Mother. Most of us know not to tempt the fates. Themoment I felt sure I had everything under control would invariably be the moment right before the principal called to report that one of my sons had just driven somebody's motorcycle through the high school gymnasium.
Mary BlakelySince civilizing children takes the better part of two decades--some twenty years of nonstop thinking, nurturing, teaching, coaxing, rewarding, forgiving, warning, punishing, sympathizing, apologizing, reminding, and repeating, not to mention deciding what to do when--I now understand that one wrong move is invariably followed by hundreds of opportunities to be wrong again.
Mary BlakelyMost literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the "wrong crowd" read like tornado alerts in parent manuals. . . . It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren't planning to get a Ph. D. from Yale.
Mary Blakely