Claire Fontaine Quotes & Sayings

God doesn't create suffering Claire, we do. We make the world and then we break it. — Claire Fontaine

We carve our destinies blindfolded, with sharp knives. — Claire Fontaine

Sometimes, we have to give birth to our children twice ... Once your child becomes the "garbage" other parents are afraid of, you never look at any teen, or yourself, the same again. All you see is the child they once were. — Claire Fontaine

I know that for every mother, there is always the possibility of three in your relationship with your daughter. You, your daughter the way she is, and your daughter the way you want her to be. I learned the hard way ten years ago that that kind of control is an illusion and a barrier. — Claire Fontaine

Travel empties out everything you've into the box called your life, all the things you accumulate to tell you who you are — Claire Fontaine

[Samantha Dunn] wrote that when God wants your attention, first He throws feathers. After that, He starts throwing bricks. — Claire Fontaine

Accountability is not about blame, it's not about being wrong, it is about owning the choices you've made, or are making, that create the results you have in your life. And you do create everything in your life. — Claire Fontaine

There are lots of ways to lose yourself - motherhood's just one of them. — Claire Fontaine

Caretaking is never about the other person. It's about wanting to feel needed because you're afraid you're not wanted. — Claire Fontaine

What was the payoff? It obviously kept me in my cozy zone of being in control, being a good mother, with a good daughter. Most of all, I realize, is that it allowed me to maintain the lie that she was healed, that Nick hadn't permanently damaged her, that I'd truly saved her. Because if I did, if there was no lasting residue of him, it meant that the denial that kept me in the marriage long enough for him to hurt her didn't help create the situation she's in now.
The person who I worked hardest to keep safe seems to have been me. — Claire Fontaine

I could see where I'd mistaken drama and conflict for life, which meant years of living reactively instead of generatively, a life I let be determined by circumstances and the choices of others. We like to think life happens to us, but pretty much everything in your life is there because you wanted it, even if unconsciously. Results, I have learned, don't lie. — Claire Fontaine

We tell our daughters we don't trust them in a thousand ways. We don't consciously mean to, but we steal their confidence in their own strength by stealing their pain. And their confidence in our strength by saying we aren't strong enough to see them struggle. — Claire Fontaine

Once your baby arrives, the world is no more the same than you are. Because from our very bodies we add to the collective human destiny. Our deepest urge is always toward life, to wholeness and well being. — Claire Fontaine

It is its own religion, this love. Uncontainable, savage, and without end, it is what I feel for my child. — Claire Fontaine

My relationship with God has evolved as well. I no longer rail or beg or sass back. I was standing on a bluff over the ocean the other day and suddenly laughed out loud as I realized what an illusion that was, what an impossibility. That would assume a relationship between a "me" and "Other," a separation. There is no otherness; to be separate from God is to be separate from myself, from life itself. What I've been looking for, I'm looking with. — Claire Fontaine

A woman's relationship with herself is mirrored everywhere in her life, but no place more than with her daughter. — Claire Fontaine

- Child is abused, perpetrator threatens to hurt mother. Child feels protective of mother.
- Struggle to escape perp reinforces feelings of mutual protection. It's Mom and I against the world.
- Something necessary at the time later creates "enmeshment." Child doesn't see her actions as separate from mother. Even during normal adolescent individuation. But
- Normal individuation doesn't happen in abuse survivors. They don't feel normal, so they
- Act out in unhealthy or self-destructive ways, which creates
- Fear and pain for mother, which creates
- Guilt for child who still feels responsible for mother's emotional health.
- Child seeks release from the guilt and from not feeling normal, which leads to
- Escape to the world of other not normal people, where mother can't see her child self-destruct, which leads to
"The bad news. — Claire Fontaine

These are the kinds of regrets all women have, mistakes and missteps, paths not chosen, opportunities gone. Youth gone. Forever. And until I honestly acknowledge how this regret feels, acknowledge that I'm not okay with how some of my life went, it's like having a fake past, and a fake present, which is surely a prescription for a fake future. — Claire Fontaine