Mary Kay Blakely

Famous quotes containing the words mary kay blakely, kay blakely, mary kay, mary, kay and/or blakely:

    “One year, I’d completely lost my bearings trying to follow potty training instruction from a psychiatric expert. I was stuck on step on, which stated without an atom of irony: “Before you begin, remove all stubbornness from the child.” . . . I knew it only could have been written by someone whose suit coat was still spotless at the end of the day, not someone who had any hands-on experience with an actual two-year-old.”
    —Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)

    “The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seems as absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.”
    —Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)

    “Spooky things happen in houses densely occupied by adolescent boys. When I checked out a four-inch dent in the living room ceiling one afternoon, even the kid still holding the baseball bat looked genuinely baffled about how he possibly could have done it.”
    —Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)

    “It is the space inside that gives the drum its sound.”
    —Hawaiian saying no. 1189, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)

    “Since civilizing children takes the better part of two decades—some twenty years of nonstop thinking, nurturing, teaching, coaxing, rewarding, forgiving, warning, punishing, sympathizing, apologizing, reminding, and repeating, not to mention deciding what to do when—I now understand that one wrong move is invariably followed by hundreds of opportunities to be wrong again.”
    —Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)

    “What stunned me was the regular assertion that feminists were “anti-family.” . . . It was motherhood that got me into the movement in the first place. I became an activist after recognizing how excruciatingly personal the political was to me and my sons. It was the women’s movement that put self-esteem back into “just a housewife,” rescuing our intelligence from the junk pile of “instinct” and making it human, deliberate, powerful.”
    —Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)