My son was about five or six months old, and he was ill, and I was sent to New York to interview three people back to back. I got home, and I saw my baby. He had been very ill, and he was on three kinds of antibiotics. I'd been away for eight days. I looked at him and thought, 'What am I doing? I'm a terrible mother and a terrible journalist.'

Allison Pearson

Categorized in : Son People Home Mother

Anyone suffering Downton Abbey withdrawal symptoms will find an instant tonic.

Allison Pearson

symptoms withdrawal suffering

In death, we are not defined by what we did or who we were but by what we meant to others. How well we loved and were loved in return.

Allison Pearson

defined wells return

My ideals told me that men and women could both go out to work and be truly equal. My children told me something more complicated, something I really didn't want to hear. Their need for me was like the need for water or light: it had a devastating simplicity to it.

Allison Pearson

light men children

Men worry about childcare with their wallets, women feel it in their wombs.

Allison Pearson

worry men children

I forget the derivation of Boxing Day, but the feeling of wanting to invite your loved ones outside one at a time and punch them in the face, does that come into it somewhere?

Allison Pearson

boxing christmas feelings

Working mothers' laughter comes hardest when our double life is revealed for what it is: a juggling act in which the balls can drop at any time, invariably on our own head.

Allison Pearson

balls laughter mother

You learned that if you're tired enough, you can sleep sitting up. That the unendurable is perfectly endurable if you just take it a minute at a time, and when the alternative is no more minutes ever.

Allison Pearson

alternatives tired sleep

Death itself is too big to take in, she already sees that; the loss comes at you instead in an infinite number of small installments that can never be paid off.

Allison Pearson

infinite loss numbers

My mother was a stay-at-home mom until I was about 11, when she got a job - and it was like a light came on inside her. It's not wrong to be passionate about your career. When you love what you do, you bring that stimulation back to your family.

Allison Pearson

mom mother jobs

God probably thinks it’s worth giving a sense of humor only to those of us who have to laugh at all the rubbish bits that are wrong with us.

Allison Pearson

giving laughing thinking

No man would ever use both hands to hold a cup of tea, unless he was one day's march from the South Pole, with one chum dead in the snow, dogs all eaten and six fingers about to drop off. And even then he would look around the empty tent to check, in case anybody thought it was girly.

Allison Pearson

girly dog men

The best musicians answer something in you when you don't even know the question.

Allison Pearson

musician answers knows

When you have kids, there's a tendency to put the marriage stew on the back burner and give it a quick stir now and then. But it's important to remember why you had children with this person.

Allison Pearson

giving kids children

The great thing about unrequited love is it's the only kind that lasts.

Allison Pearson

unrequited-love lasts love-is

Can't is for pussies.

Allison Pearson

pussy

The quickest way to stop noticing something may be to buy it, just as the quickest way to stop appreciating a person may be to marry them.

Allison Pearson

appreciate may way

Children are the proof we've been here . . . they're where we go to when we die. They're the best thing and the most impossible thing, but there's nothing else . . . Life is a riddle and they are the answer. If there's any answer, it has to be them.

Allison Pearson

impossible-things answers children

When you're young your mother shields you from the world because she thinks you're too young to understand, and when she's old you shield her because she's too old to understand - or to have any more understanding inflicted upon her. The curve of life goes: want to know, know, don't want to know.

Allison Pearson

curves mother thinking

A father is the template of a man Nature gives a girl

Allison Pearson

dad girl father

People say that time is a great healer. Which people? What are they talking about? I think some feelings you experience in your life are written in indelible ink and the best you can hope for is that they fade a little over the years.

Allison Pearson

talking years thinking