William H. Gass Quotes

You know how exasperated you can be when you're the mother of five young boys.

I'm married to Kevin, a photographer whose career has put him on the campaign trail with presidential candidates and sent him on assignment to far-flung places for long periods of time. It was sometimes rough when our children were small, and I was beginning to write in earnest.

Parenting definitely has some challenging moments.

It's impossible for a couple to bring up two children without having lots and lots of arguments.

I like to have fun, but I don't have a lot of time for myself. I do have eight kids!

I'll never get sick of raising my children, but other people might get sick of them.

Being in a marriage and having children is the greatest pleasure, but it is certainly not the easiest pleasure. It is not like eating ice cream.

It's confusing. I've had so many wives and so many children I don't know which house to go to first on Christmas.

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'm a mother of three children, and we do make mistakes.

If God had meant men to have children, he would have given them a PVC apron.

Life is too short to waste time changing the sheets every week. Especially when you have small children who tend to wait until you change the sheets to then wet the sheets.

I frequently do drive carpool in the clothes I slept in, because it's impossible to get three children out the door with lunches packed and all that stuff and have a do.

One thing that happens often times in family life is that people think maybe the challenge you are having with a child when they are a teenager or even in adolescence that this is going to go on forever and it doesn't. They get to their 20s, they change dramatically in their 20s. So sometimes it's just holding on for the ride, and just being there and holding on for the ride.

It's hard having kids because it's boring... It's just being with them on the floor while they be children. They read Clifford the Big Red Dog to you at a rate of 50 minutes a page, and you have to sit there and be horribly proud and bored at the same time.

I also have two children under three who keep me up all night and don't seem to understand the benefits of sitting in silence, which has presented an interesting challenge.

I think it's so easy when you have children just to turn your focus inward on your family and because, when they're young, you don't sleep very much, you're walking around like a zombie most of the time anyway. It's a really important part of my life to have good friends, you have to work quite hard to keep the relationships going but it's worth it.

One of the sad realities of being a parent is that the same stuff you know is exciting, educational, and enriching in your child'slife is often messy, smelly and exhausting to deal with.

A two-career couple with children is a complex, sensitive piece of machinery with lots of moving parts. Anything less than total cooperation will throw it out of whack and shut it down. A couple can wind up paying the ultimate price for trying to have it all - losing it all.

There's a marketing scheme that tells you that pregnancy and child rearing will make you into a moron, that your kids are only happy when you're buying them stuff. It's hard being a parent, but I laugh a lot and smile a lot and really enjoy it. The ratio of laughter to sadness is higher. There's part of me that wants to broadcast that. Parenting only affirmed what I already cared about, and that's good.

Babies are a nuisance, of course. But so does everything seem to be that is worth while – husbands and books and committees and being loved and everything. We have to choose between barren ease and rich unrest – or rather, one does not choose.

The difference when you have kids comes up when someone wants to meet you out after 9:30 at night. You consider that giant sacrifice. You're like, "Do I do this? Do I stay out until 10:30 and be angry, all of tomorrow?

Truth is child of Time.

I do know its important to keep the romantic spark alive in your marriage. But with four kids, sometimes it's enough just to keep yourself alive.

And nothing inspires as much shame as being a parent. Children confront us with our paradoxes and hypocrisies, and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every why — Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that? — and often there isn’t a good one. So you say, simply, because. Or you tell a story that you know isn’t true. And whether or not your face reddens, you blush. The shame of parenthood — which is a good shame — is that we want our children to be more whole than we are, to have satisfactory answers.