There aren't a lot of ironclad rules of family life, but here's one: No matter how much your parents deny it - and here's betting they deny it a lot - they have a favorite child. And if you're a parent, so do you.
Interpretation
Parents often have a preferred child, even if they deny it.
This quote highlights the unspoken dynamics within families, suggesting that favoritism exists among parents regarding their children, regardless of whether they admit it. It sheds light on the complexities of familial relationships and the emotional impact that perceived favoritism can have on siblings and family life.
In practice
You might use this quote during a family gathering to spark a light-hearted discussion about family dynamics.
Humans have a fraught relationship with beasts. They are our companions and our chattel, our family members and our laborers, our household pets and our household pests. We love them and cage them, admire them and abuse them. And, of course, we cook and eat them.
The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human.
Marriage is a lot of things - a source of love, security, the joy of children, but it's also an interpersonal battlefield, and it's not hard to see why: Take two disparate people, toss them together in often-confined quarters, add the stresses of money and kids - now lather, rinse, repeat for the rest of your natural life. What could go wrong?
There are a lot of obstacles in the way of our understanding animal intelligence - not the least being that we can't even agree whether nonhuman species are conscious. We accept that chimps and dolphins experience awareness; we like to think dogs and cats do. But what about mice and newts? What about a fly? Is anything going on there at all?
When you leave them in the morning, they stick their nose in the door crack and stand there like a portrait until you turn the key eight hours later.
parenting isn't a noun but a verb--an ongoing process instead of an accomplishment. And that no matter how many years you put into the job, the learning curve is, well, fairly flat.
The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.
I remember staring at my son endlessly when he was an infant, stunned by his very existence, wondering where on earth he had come from.
I love my mother, but there has been, ever since my boyhood, a sort of coldness of intercourse between us, such as is apt to come between people of strong feelings.
We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.
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