There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.
Interpretation
Parenthood can be frustrating and unappreciated, despite the love for children.
In this quote, Peter De Vries expresses the paradox of parenthood, where caretakers often feel they are met with ingratitude and challenge, as if they are nurturing someone who also bites back. It highlights the struggles and sacrifices of parenting, recognizing that while love drives the relationship, the difficulties can make it feel one-sided at times.
In practice
In a speech about the challenges of parenting, one might quote this to emphasize the difficulties.
We must love one another, yes, yes, that's all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other. It may be the very recognition of all men as our brothers that accounts for the sibling rivalry, and even enmity, we have toward so many of them.
I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best -- it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money -- provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it.
The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.
Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff - it is a palliative rather than a remedy.
The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
I barely saw my mother, and the mom I saw was often angry and unhappy. The mother I grew up with is not the mother I know now. It's not the mother she became after my father died, and that's been the greatest prize of my life.
My parents raised me and my siblings in an armor of advice, an ocean of alarm bells so someone wouldn't steal the breath from our lungs, so that they wouldn't make a memory of this skin.
I was raised, myself, by extremely strict but also extremely loving Chinese immigrant parents. To this day, I believe that their having high expectations for me, coupled with love, was the greatest gift that anyone's ever given me. And so that's why, even though my husband is not Chinese, I try to raise my own two daughters the same way.
Parents aren’t the people you come from. They’re the people you want to be, when you grow up.
I've been running my whole life. Running into bars, running around the world. But when you have a child, you can't run. That was a revelation.
When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters.
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