Our father presents an ...

Our father presents an optional set of rhythms and responses for us to connect to. As a second home base, he makes it safer to roam. With him as an ally--a love--it is safer, too, to show that we're mad when we're mad at our mother. We can hate and not be abandoned, hate and still love.
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 Judith Viorst

Quotes from the same author

If his mother was drowning and I was drowning and he had to choose one of us to save, He says he'd save me.
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 Judith Viorst
The need to become a separate self is as urgent as the yearning to merge forever. And as long as we, not our mother, initiate parting, and as long as our mother remains reliably there, it seems possible to risk, and even to revel in, standing alone.
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 Judith Viorst
Our mother gives us our earliest lessons in love- and its partner, hate. Our father-our "second other"-elaborates on them.
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 Judith Viorst
For many men the denial of dependency on their mother is repeated in their subsequent relationships, sometimes by an absence of any sexual interest in women, sometimes by a pattern of loving and leaving them.
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 Judith Viorst
There is a time to separate from our mother. But unless we are ready to separate-unless we are ready to leave her and be left-anything is better than separation.
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 Judith Viorst