For the next few months, I am going to do a brief recap of some powerful parenting (with educational topics) books I’ve read.
Sometimes reading quotes from books helps shift my mindset on certain topics and gets me focused on what’s really important when raising children.
Book Title: Glitter and Glue
Author: Kelly Corrigan
Book Synopsis:
When Kelly Corrigan was in high school, her mother neatly summarized the family dynamic as “Your father’s the glitter but I’m the glue.” This meant nothing to Kelly, who left childhood sure that her mom—with her inviolable commandments and proud stoicism—would be nothing more than background chatter for the rest of Kelly’s life, which she was carefully orienting toward adventure. After college, armed with a backpack, her personal mission statement, and a wad of traveler’s checks, she took off for Australia to see things and do things and Become Interesting.
My Review:
This book was beautiful. Parenthood. The quote below really hit home with me. It’s so true–” Your father’s the glitter but I’m the glue.” I saw this growing up and I know this now. Kelly reminds me of the immensely important job I have and how fast motherhood flies by.
Top Ten Quotes:
- “Your father’s the glitter but I’m the glue.”
- “But now I see there’s no such thing as “a” woman, “one” woman. There are dozens inside every one of them. I probably should have figured this out sooner, but what child can see the women inside her mom, what with all the Motherness blocking out everything else?”
- “The mother is the most essential piece on the board, the one you must protect. Only she has the range. Only she can move in multiple directions. Once she’s gone, it’s a whole different game.”
- “Raising people is not some lark. It’s serious work with serious repercussions. It’s air-traffic control. You can’t step out for a minute; you can barely pause to scratch your ankle.”
- “The thing about mothers, I want to say, is that once the containment ends and one becomes two, you don’t always fit together so nicely… The living mother-daughter relationship, you learn over and over again, is a constant choice between adaptation and acceptance.”
- “Pulling at the hem of my emotion was the creeping sense that it might well take until 2036 for this child in my arms to feel a fraction of what I already felt for her.”
- “And it occurs to me that maybe the reason my mother was so exhausted all the time wasn’t because she was doing so much but because she was feeling so much.”
- “I had thought a good mother would not elicit such comments, but now I see that a good mother is required to somehow absorb all this ugliness and find a way to fall back in love with her child the next day.”
- “That to fly requires chaotic, sometimes even violent passages–becomes a metaphor for all of life’s most meaningful endeavors.”
- “If you’d asked me when I graduated from college whose voice I’d hear in my head for the rest of my life, whose voice I’d want to hear, I’d have said some combination of my dad’s, my roommate Tracy’s, and Jackson Browne’s; I’d have listed 10, 20, or 200 others before I got to my mom’s. But now, give me almost any situation — termites, refinancing or back pain, mean girls or sibling rivalry, a child’s despair, a husband’s inattention, or my own spikes of rage and regret — and watch how fast I dial her number.”
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