Victoria Secunda Quotes
A daughter is a mother's gender partner, her closest ally in the family confederacy, an extension of her self. And mothers are their daughters' role model, their biological and emotional road map, the arbiter of all their relationships.
Victoria Secunda
Quotes to Explore
But many more daughters of distant fathers are unable to reach orgasm, or achieve it with consistency with any man. Indeed these daughters have the most trouble in bed: for them, affection and arousal are synonymous with rejection.
Victoria Secunda
Happiness" alone does not guarantee mental health and well-being. A tempering dose of disappointment- an occasional taste of frustration and learning that you do recover from it- goes a long way toward producing long-term contentment. Indeed the ability to ride out the bad times without feeling doomed is essential to survival. When happiness is not taken for granted, and when one is acquainted with its opposite it is more easily savored and has more lasting effects.
Victoria Secunda
Little children require their parent's unqualified love in order to survive and feel secure. Very soon, however, they need a tempered version of that devotion- parents who can give them the freedom to fail or feel sorrow or taste frustration, to fully experience their own pain and pleasure and learn from them. Therapists call this phenomenon "ownership".
Victoria Secunda
When fathers are lovingly involved with their daughters from birth, the daughters reap the benefits all their lives. Daughters who had fathers they could count on are the most likely to be drawn to men who treat them well, to see their lovers as dependable people who won't suddenly disappear, and to be consistently orgasmic.
Victoria Secunda
For all children, mothers are their first love, their first acquaintance with intimacy, touch, warmth, tenderness, sustenance. Infancy is a conspiracy between mothers and their babies, a bond that fathers can only helplessly witness, denied the profound pleasure and pain of giving birth.
Victoria Secunda
Father absence has been implicated in anorexia nervosa, in which daughters may exhibit literal father hunger by starving themselves.
Victoria Secunda
If you scratch below the glossy surface of many "enviable" marriages, often you'll find a disenchanted wife whose husband finds the landscape of her emotions as uninteresting as the moon's.
Victoria Secunda
Most people can recall schoolyard confrontations with with bullies. Boys were expected to deal with them by standing their ground and slugging it out, even, as one man told me, "if you knew you were going to get your head bashed in. You had to show you could take it, and you'd die rather than cry.
Victoria Secunda
Mothers are not simply models of femininity to their daughters but also examples of how a woman reacts to a man. Daughters learn about fathers, and men, not only by being with Dad but also by observing their parent's marital relationship-- or its unraveling.
Victoria Secunda
Children who are accustomed to being treated well internalize that treatment and have a permanent sense of well-being. But children whose every need is instantly gratified and who are constantly praised to the skies do not have the same sense of well-being; rather they may feel despair or rage when that gratification is withheld, or when everyone doesn't glorify them in the same way.
Victoria Secunda
Most fathers don't see the war within the daughter, her struggles with conflicting images of the idealized and flawed father, her temptation both to retreat to Daddy's lap and protection and to push out of his embrace to that of beau and the world beyond home.
Victoria Secunda
Lacking older siblings, the oldest or only child identifies primarily with her parents, conforming to their ideals and demands, not the least reason being that she no one with whom to share those demands. Since firstborns try to live up to the expectations of adults- teachers' as well as parents'- rather than that of peers, they are likely to learn more and to bring home better report cards than younger siblings. Thus firstborns pave the way for younger siblings, setting the standards against which they are measured and measure themselves.
Victoria Secunda
Idealizing Daddy is grand when you're five; it's crippling when you're twenty-five or thirty-five. For if you still believe in Daddy's miracles, you may not believe that you can make your own dreams come true. Worse, you may not even be able to formulate them without his guidance.
Victoria Secunda
But for girls, the surest and safest way to avoid being picked on or terrorized is to get the bully to like you.
Victoria Secunda
If father and daughter can manage to cross the finish line of her emancipation together- she accepting Daddy's flaws, he viewing hers as opportunities for her to learn and grow- the ups and downs of their relationship and mutual growth can prepare her for the ambiguities of life. The example of the father weathering his own emotional seasons can help the daughter weather her own.
Victoria Secunda
The good father does not have to be perfect. Rather, he has to be good enough to help his daughter to become a woman who is reasonably self-confident, self-sufficient, and free of crippling self-doubt, and to feel at ease in the company of men.
Victoria Secunda
When mothers and fathers are supportive or each other, it makes each of their paternal jobs infinitely easier. And parents who cannot bear being in one another's presence reveal as much, if not more, to a child about romantic love as anything the mother or father might say.
Victoria Secunda
A daughter is a mother's gender partner, her closest ally in the family confederacy, an extension of her self. And mothers are their daughters' role model, their biological and emotional road map, the arbiter of all their relationships.
Victoria Secunda
