“When Tanya thinks about the kind of mother she wants to be, she knows she wants to be different from her own. She wants to be the kind of parent who never lets her child see any of her own sadness or anger or loneliness, because she knows how much it hurts to see that in your own mother. How stifling it can be; how impossible it becomes to have any of your own feelings. She knows it's impossible, though. That if she tries to mask all of that from her child, she'll just be hiding. And the truth is–children are smarter than that. They'd see right through her. Really what she wants to be is a mother who isn't in pain. She wonders if such a woman exists.”
Book:Something Wild