Quotes & Sayings About Parents Not Being There

Markus definitely wasn't comfortable. He was sorry about having long legs; as regrets go, it certainly was a useless one.* Not to mention another fact that amped up his torture: there's nothing worse than being seated next to a woman you're dying with desire to look at. The show was to his left, where she was, not on stage. Not only that, but what was he seeing? It was so-so. The fact that it was a Swedish play wasn't exactly helping matters! Had she done it on purpose? As if that weren't enough, the playwright had studied in Uppsala. Might as well have dinner at his parents'. — David Foenkinos

Community as belonging ...
Each person with his or her history of being accepted or rejected, with his or her past history of inner pain and difficulties in relationships with parents, is different. But in each one there is a yearning for communion and belonging, but at the same time a fear of it. Love is what we want, yet it is what we fear the most. Love makes us vulnerable and open, but then we can be hurt through rejection and separation. We may crave for love, but then be frightened of losing our liberty and creativity. We want to belong to a group, but we fear a certain death in the group because we may not be seen as unique. We want love, but fear the dependence and commitment it implies; we fear being used, manipulated, smothered and spoiled. We are all so ambivalent toward love, communion and belonging. — Jean Vanier

Kids not only understand [a dark story] but appreciate it ... Because in the real world there's fear, and dark things happen no matter how young you are. People lose parents, people lose friends ... There's darkness in the world. So I think when kids are talked to in that way, they appreciate it. They're not being given some candy-coated, 'Oh, this is a world where there are no stakes.' I think that actually insults their intelligence. — America Ferrera

There's a culture in orphanages that children are eager to escape from, and it's a culture of being reared as a group and not being doted upon by parents. For any child, that's the bottom line. The fact is that a human child wants that mommy or daddy or both. — Melissa Fay Greene

PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. (Comm. in Matt. Prolog.) Matthew has arranged his narrative in a regular series of events. First, the birth, secondly, the baptism, thirdly, the temptation, fourthly, the teachings, fifthly, the miracles, sixthly, the passion, seventhly, the resurrection, and lastly, the ascension of Christ; desiring by this not only to set forth the history of Christ, but to teach the order of evangelic life. It is nought that we are born of our parents, if we be not reborn again of God by water and the Spirit. After baptism we must resist the Devil. Then being as it were superior to all temptation, he is made fit to teach, and if he be a priest let him teach, and commend his teaching, as it were, by the miracles of a good life; if he be lay, let him teach faith by his works. In the end we must take our departure from the stage of this world, and there remains that the reward of resurrection and glory follow the victory over temptation. — Thomas Aquinas

To find out what you love to do demands a great deal of intelligence; because, if you are afraid of not being able to earn a livelihood, or of not fitting into this rotten society, then you will never find out. But, if you are not frightened, if you refuse to be pushed into the groove of tradition by your parents, by your teachers, by the superficial demands of society, then there is a possibility of discovering what it is you really love to do. So, to discover, there must be no fear of not surviving. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

And as for going into a bookstore and not finding a book suitable for your 13-year-old ... maybe you should do some research before you go in? And I'm being serious here. There are a bunch of great blogs that will tell you the content of books. Reading Teen is one of them, and I've seen others, and I love what they do because they make YA books feel safe to protective parents. There are plenty of YA books that celebrate joy and beauty. Now, I would argue that many of them are also the "dark" books to which the article refers, and that saying they aren't suggests a pretty inattentive reader ... but that's neither here nor there. I'm not trying to bicker with the careful parents. I'm just saying: do some research and you'll be surprised what you find.
So, that's what I'm going to say about it. — Veronica Roth

The uninitiated often assumed that undergraduate students were at the bottom rung, but undergrads were the paying customers, or at least their parents were. And paying customers needed to be kept happy. Grad students worked for the school as teaching and research assistants--TAs and RAs--but weren't really proper employees, and as such they weren't entitled to the benefits that, say, a cataloger in the Coffey Library received. Then there was the fact that they had to learn to leave behind passive studying and test taking, which was what most of them had been taught in their school careers up to that point, and learn how to actively attack research problems and come up with new ideas, all while being poorly paid. Like Helen had said, a not insignificant number of grad students left after a year instead of sticking around to work on obtaining their PhDs. Who could blame them? Industry paid more and had better benefits. — Neve Maslakovic

Parents with dependents are somehow thought to count for more. If, for example, there is some scarce resource - a donor kidney perhaps - and of the two potential recipients one is a parent of young children and one is not, the parent, all things being equal, will likely be favoured. To let a parent die is not only to thwart that person's preference to be saved, but also the preferences of his or her children that their parent be saved. It is quite true, of course, that the death of the parent will harm more people, but there is nonetheless something to be said against favouring parents. Increasing one's value by having children might be like increasing one's value by taking hostages. — David Benatar

Adoptees, whether or not they ever knew their birth parents, often describe the constant, gnawing feeling of there being something missing: without a connection, or at least the knowledge of where they are from, they feel incomplete. — Saroo Brierley

There is also the issue of many people who have been consciously invalidated by their parents or others in authority. This would be when someone is constantly berated for being overweight, not smart enough, not athletic enough, not tall enough, not pretty enough, not helpful enough, not thoughtful enough, not, not, not...This invalidation comes from others, but as we grow into adulthood those voices from the past become our voices in our heads, as we continue to invalidate ourselves. This could just result in low self-esteem, or it could lead to the unconscious seeking of others to validate us. — Richard L. Travis

MY LADY, WE ARE BEING HUNTED

possibility we are poisoned, possibility
there is no meat on the table, not even bait
in the trap. possibility they've already bought our parents.
possibility we'll run out of water; the salt marsh
is rising; we are followed; they've clocked our meeting
possibility this is an ambush
possibility they are downwind of us,
they've photographed the house, tattooed the children
possibility they've marked the bread with hexes
possibility the moon is theirs & netted
possibility the web of idea is upon us.
possibility we've lost this particular rumble.

who stole the sword we bedded; followed the fork
in the road where we left no footprints
who swallowed yr amber, lady, while we slept

possibility we can hide here indefinitely
possibility that we should cut & run — Diane Di Prima

God is being taken out of schools; children are not being raised in church learning the word; many parents are living lives unto themselves, exalting substance rather than Jesus Christ, and those looking for answers are going to church and finding the word is not being preached. There are consequences to these decisions. — Monica Johnson

Our parents tell us the story of our beginning and they have total control over it
they know they've changed it, and we know they've changed it, but we just let them. They massage the details to reflect who we are now, so that there will be a sense to it: you are this because that. We gave you a blanket with birdies on it and now you're a pilot, how lovely! All so that we think of ourselves as being in ... not just a story, but a good story. One written in full command of their craft. Someone who abides by the contract with the audience, even if the audience is us. Everyone loves a system. Everyone relaxes. — Catherynne M Valente

Many working mothers feel guilty about not being at home. And when they are there, they wish it could be perfect. This pressure to make every minute happy puts working parents in a bind when it comes to setting limits and modifying behavior. — Cathy Rindner Tempelsman

If you have people who treat you badly in your life, they will be a human shield against people who will treat you well. If that's not true then we should apply it to marriage and start saying to woman who are being put down or beaten, "you gotta stay with him because he needs you and he has been your husband for 20 years for heaven sakes. You just have to work to love him more and so on." This is the advice they gave to woman like 200 fucking years ago and it was abusive advice.
I view the parent child relationship (This just not my made up perspective.) it is the least voluntary relationship. At least the woman who got married chose to get married. We don't choose our parents. The highest standards of behavior are required for parents and no one else. There is no one else whose standards of behavior need be higher than parents and so often parents get away with the lowest possible standards of behavior with regards to their children. — Stefan Molyneux

The evening with its lamps burning
The night with its head in its hands
The early morning

I look back at the worried parents
Wandering through the house
What are we going to do

The evening of the clinical
The night of the psychological
The morning facedown in the pillow

The experts can handle him
The experts have no idea
How to handle him

There are enigmas in darkness
There are mysteries
Sent out without searchlights

The stars are hiding tonight
The moon is cold and stony
Behind the clouds

Nights without seeing
Mornings of the long view
It's not a sprint but a marathon

Whatever we can do
We must do
Every morning's resolve

But sometimes we suspected
He was being punished
For something obscure we had done

I would never abandon the puzzle
Sleeping in the next room
But I could not solve it — Edward Hirsch

The years were never an element, because my parents didn't age, they simply sickened. My father was mean and cocky like Cagney all the way to the dump. Flat on his back, his bones poking this way and that like the corpses in the camps, he still had a fiery eye, as though, but for those two coals, the grate held ash. There's no easy way out of this life, and I do not look forward to the day they put those tubes up my nose, and a catheter shows my pee the way out like some well-trained servant. I saw how my father's body broke his spirit like a match; and I saw how my mother's broken spirit took her body under the way a ship stinks after being disemboweled by an errant bag of ice. — William H Gass

There's nothing more true in being a child of a diaspora, a child of immigrants. We're completely new to our parents. We're not something they can ever understand. And it's not as if we are ever going to be accepted. We're accepted as long as we conform to what we are expected to be, and I'm sure that's not any different for anyone else. — Junot Diaz

Sorry, but I have to be who I am. Everyone else is taken ... So be your self! Speak your truth - if there are people around you who tempt you with non-existence blast through that and give them the full glory of who you are. Do not withhold yourself from the world. Do not piss on the incandescent gift of your existence. Do not drown yourself in the petty fog and dustiness of other people's ancient superstitions, unbeliefs, aggressions, culture and crap! No! Be a flare! We were born that way. Born perfectly happy being inconvenient to our parents. We shit, piss, cry, wake up at night, throw up on their shoulders, scream ... We are, in essence, in our humanity, perfectly comfortable with inconveniencing others. That's how we're born, how we grow and develop. I choose to inconvenience the irrational. — Stefan Molyneux

And whether or not the educators who are trying to raise up America's students can actually set and meet higher academic standards, our cultural values make their job next to impossible. It's so much easier for pundits and politicians to point out figures and blame the people who are in the trenches every day than it is to get in there with them, or even to find out what actually goes on in those trenches. It's so much easier for parents to blame teachers when their kids get in trouble than to do the heavy lifting required at home to keep kids on track. And it's so much easier for us as a nation to cross our fingers and hope that we'll "get lucky" with the innovative "solutions" being tested on America's schools today than it is for us to roll up our sleeves and invest our own time, talent, and money in the schools that are even now
with or without us
shaping our nation's future. — Tony Danza

Ohh,' said the girl with a sad tilt of her head.
It was a response Sejal would hear a lot in the following weeks and which she would eventully come to understand meant, 'Ohh, India, that must be so hard for you, and I know because I read this book over the summer called The Fig Tree (which is actually set in Pakistan but I don't realize there's a difference) about a girl whose parents sell her to a sandal maker because everyone's poor and they don't care about girls there, and I bet that's why you're in our country even, and now everyone's probably being mean to you just because of 9/11, but not me although I'll still be watching you a little too closely on the bus later because what if you're just here to kill Americans?'
There was a lot of information encoded in that one vowel sound, so Sejal missed most of it at first. — Adam Rex

Unless you are fulfilled, unless you have found something that is not just a profession but something like a vocation, a calling, you will never be able to feel happy about your parents, because they are the cause of you being in this miserable world. You cannot feel grateful, there is nothing to be grateful about. Once you are fulfilled, then you will feel tremendously grateful. And your fulfilment is possible only if you don't become a thing. Your destiny is to become a person. Your destiny is to become an intrinsic value. Your destiny is to become an end in yourself. — Osho

I remember being forced to go to Sunday school for a number of years, even though my parents were not religious. No one was really religious; it was just the framework. There was no passion for it. No passion for anything. Just a quiet, kind of floaty, kind of semi-oppressive, blank palette that youre living in. — Tim Burton

Don't misunderstand. There is no abandoning, or being abandoning. And you're not owned by your parents, either. You should understand ... that you have no other master besides yourself. No one was forcing you to wait for a slow death ... in such a lonely place. — Minari Endou

I would hate to have parents who were always looking over my shoulder, reading my diary, checking my thoughts. I would hate to be exposed. And so, perhaps, when I say I long to be a pane of glass, I am lying. I long for partial obscurity at the same time that I long for someone to know me.
It is confusing and difficult to be me.
Sometimes I I need to cry in order to release the great welling sadness I feel in my head.
For this I need privacy. I do not want anyone to see me and ask why, almost as much as I would like to be comforted.
Somehow, without ever being present, Matthew has exposed all of this, brought it wriggling to the surface like worms. They gather there now, vaguely nostalgic for the dark. — Meg Rosoff

Listen, there is no way any true man is going to let children live around him in his home and not discipline and teach, fight and mold them until they know all he knows. His goal is to make them better than he is. Being their friend is a distant second to this. — Victor Devlin

How many people can you claim truly care about you? I mean, not just the people in your life who are fun to hang out with, not just the people who you love and trust. But people who feel good when you are happy and successful, feel bad when you are hurt or going through a hard time, people who would walk away from their lives for a little while to help you with yours. Not many. I felt that from Jake and I wasn't sure how to handle it. Because there's another side to it, you know. When someone is invested in your well-being, like your parents, for example, you become responsible for them in a way. Anything you do to hurt yourself hurts them. I already felt responsible for too many people that way. You're not really free when people care about you; not if you care about them. — Lisa Unger

Dads. Do you not realize that your child needs to feel your skin on his? Do you not realize the incredible and powerful bond that skin on skin contact with your daughter will give you? Do you not understand the permanent mental connections that are made when you stroke your son's bare back or rub your daughter's bare tummy while you tell bedtime stories? And if any idiot says anything about that being inappropriate, you're gonna get kicked in the face, first by me, and then by every other good dad out there. Touching your child is your duty as a father. — Dan Pearce

Too many parents fail to understand that there is a difference between fitting in and being liked, that there is a difference between being "normal" and being happy. High school is temporary. Family is not. — Alexandra Robbins

Non-alcoholic ways in which parents may not 'be there' for the children can include:
- violence and sexual abuse
- workholism
- gambling
- transquilliser addiction-
- womanizing
- frequent journeys abroad
- death
- suicide
- being unemployed or unemployable
- frequent hospitalisation
- mental or physical handicap
- excessive religiosity
- rigid rules and regulations
- homes where children are never allowed to be themselves but must always be pleasing to adults — David Stafford

There are three degrees of filial piety. The highest is being a credit to our parents, the second is not disgracing them; the lowest is being able simply to support them. — Confucius

There's a girl calm people don't know about. It's a girl teen standstill. A motionless peace. It doesn't come from anywhere but inside us, and it only lasts for a few years. It's born from being a not woman yet. It's free flowing and invisible. It's the eye of the violent storm you call my teenage daughter. In this place we are undisturbed by all the moronic things you think about us. Our voices like rain falling. We are serene. Smooth. With more perfect hair and skin than you will ever again know. Daughters of Eve. — Lidia Yuknavitch

I get bitter, angry and disbelieving and I tell my kids there a lot of idiots out there. I also want them to know that being successful is not the real world - that their parents get treated better because they're on TV. — Al Roker

It is evident, then, that there is a sort of education in which parents should train their sons, not as being useful or necessary, but because it is liberal or noble. — Aristotle.

I also very well remember that on another occasion the father dean said: 'In order that at responsible age a man may be a real man and not a parasite, his education must without fail be based on the following ten principles. 'From early childhood there should be instilled in the child: Belief in receiving punishment for disobedience. Hope of receiving reward only for merit. Love of God - but indiference to the saints. Remorse of conscience for the ill-treatment of animals. Fear of grieving parents and teachers. Fearlessness towards devils, snakes and mice. Joy in being content merely with what one has. Sorrow at the loss of the goodwill of others. Patient endurance of pain and hunger. The striving early to earn one's bread. — G.I. Gurdjieff

Just in general as a person, not necessarily as a songwriter, being in cities wasn't the right fit. I couldn't escape and be in the woods in 10 minutes if I needed to. I like that in Eau Claire, I can walk to a bar or a coffee shop, and there's city-ish things, but I can also drive and in eight minutes be at my parents' land outside of town. — Justin Vernon

All of us growing up have come to terms with too much pain. Although we repress it, it's still there. The worst pain is that of not being wanted, of realising your parents do not need you in the way you need them. — John Lennon

In July, 1853, it pleased the Lord to try my faith in a way in which before it had not been tried. My beloved daughter and only child, and a believer since the commencement of the year 1846, was taken ill on June 20th. "This illness, at first a low fever, turned to typhus. On July 3rd there seemed no hope of her recovery. Now was the trial of faith. But faith triumphed. My beloved wife and I were enabled to give her up into the hands of the Lord. He sustained us both exceedingly. But I will only speak about myself. Though my only and beloved child was brought near the grave, yet was my soul in perfect peace, satisfied with the will of my Heavenly Father, being assured that He would only do that for her and her parents, which in the end would be the best. She continued very ill till about July 20th, when restoration began. "On — George Muller