Gena Koehler

“Toddlers walk through life like we all wish we could: confident, demanding, and 100 percent positive that they are the center of the universe. They can kick their father in the testicles and feel nothing. They love to laugh. They love to destroy expensive cosmetics and to fingerpaint with long-wearing lipstick. Toddlers love to render electronic devices useless. They enjoy making debit cards and keys vanish into thin air. They like to permanent marker on shit. Toddlers live that #thuglyfe better than any of us could even try to because toddlers. don’t. give. a. fuck. The quicker you understand that, the better. Repeat after me: Toddlers don’t care and they never did.”
― Bunmi Laditan, Toddlers Are A**holes: It's Not Your Fault

“It’s harder than you think to admit your even occasional dissatisfaction as a mother without feeling instant guilt, an immediate sensation of shame for even suggesting you might not be happy when you’ve got a wonderful healthy child in this world who depends on you and loves you no matter what. It’s almost impossible to separate your “bad” feelings about the normal frustrations of post-baby life from your “good” feelings about the very baby who instigated the transformation. But it’s not realistic or healthy to deny the fact that a mother is a complicated person—or to deny that a mother is a person at all.”
― Andrea J. Buchanan, Mother Shock: Tales from the First Year and Beyond -- Loving Every (Other) Minute of It

“If there is anything that makes me not want to have another baby, it is this essential conflict, this hatred of being trapped in laundry, bottles, schedules, tiny runny noses. But none of this is about you: I don’t wish you were never born, I don’t resent you, I don’t want to give you away. I just wish I could have a break longer than the hour or so that is your nap. I wish I could have my time back, my body back. I wish there was a better division of labor than Daddy when he has time and Mommy all day, all night.”
― Andrea J. Buchanan, Mother Shock: Tales from the First Year and Beyond -- Loving Every (Other) Minute of It

“I don’t know what the opposite is of the Midas touch, but you shitbirds have it.”
― Michael Zarocostas, THE BARREL MURDER - a Detective Joe Petrosino case