Emma Donoghue Quotes

For all that being a parent is normal statistically, it's not normal psychologically. It produces some of the most extreme emotions you'll ever have.

Kids don't come with instruction manuals. It's interesting, but after you have your kids, it's a blessing. It's not as hard as people may think it is.

People say having kids is life changing, well that doesn't necessarily mean a good thing, does it? I could take one of my legs off. That would change my life.

Kids are like heroin, a little heroin addiction. When it’s bad, you’ve never been so miserable, but when it’s good you’ve never been so high.

In the end, the type of parent you are is going to be something that you carry with you. ... Having multiple kids, it's been a gift in a way. It's keeping the priorities straighter.

Having children is messy and easy to judge.

It's an honor to have kids. It's a responsibility.

I didn't sign on to be a mom.

I'm already a stepdad but, of course, I'd like to have kids.

My life is divided up into before I had kids and after.

Having a kid is hard to explain, but when you talk to another parent, you have mutual understanding of what that does to you as a person.

No one tells you how hard being a parent is! We could have had a warning! It is literally the hardest thing I've ever done but I'm loving it.

It's hard enough to be in a marriage and then have a kid, then kids: it changes everything.

Of children as of procreation -- the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable

Everybody knows the competing identities of people who have kids.

I'm all right, not as good as my mom is. Maybe because I don't have kids.

I think you lose your innocence when you have kids, because the world suddenly becomes a much more dangerous place.

Any mother with half a skull knows that when Daddy's little boy becomes Mommy's little boy, the kid is so wet he's treading water.

I was able to draw a lot from my own childhood, my friends' childhoods as well and my daughters' friends who are like my children as well. They multiply all the time. So you can have everything and say I can get all this done and then late at night one of your kids have a freak out about school or an assignment you end up staying up til 3 in morning helping them through it. Or somebody gets sick or has a crisis.

I had four children. And my youngest when we started was like, oh, gosh, 2 or a little less. And sometimes my kids would say to me, you know, how come you don't scream at those kids on television like you do us?

As complicated as joint custody is, it allows the delicious contradiction of having children and maintaining the intimacy of life-before-kid s.

(About parenting:) ... all that tedium, broken up by little spurts of high drama.

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.

I think part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.

Parenting is a constant struggle between making your kids life better and ruining your own.