Tony and Peg have two kids, Terry-Lynn and Harvey, both of whom are enrolled in so many extracurricular and afterschool clubs that they hardly ever see their parents. If Terry-Lynn is in Girl Guides, she doesn’t have to see Peg inviting the Purolator man in for “a cup of coffee”. If Harvey is in the anime drawing club, he doesn’t have to see Peg kissing Mr. Cooper from across the street, even if all the other neighbours secretly know what’s going on. Tony has no idea, all he knows is that Peg isn’t the same Peg he married back in 2003. All he knows is that she’s changed a great deal, and not for the better, like a beautiful butterfly regressing back into a devouring, ugly caterpillar in the span of only a couple of months.

Most parents were, like, Little League coaches and all that. My dad was a wrestling fan. Instead of going out and playing home run derby with my old man, we just watched wrestling together.

It's a sad moment, really, when parents first become a bit frightened of their children.

I took up space. I was a collection of cells and memories, awkward limbs and clumsy fashion crimes; I was the repository of my parents' expectations and evidence of their disappointments.

Dads. Do your faces light up when you first see your child in the morning or when you come home from work? Do you not understand that a child’s entire sense of value can revolve around what they see in your face when you first see them?

It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.

I think I've wanted to be an actress since the day I was born. I even asked my parents for an agent for my seventh birthday!

You see parents as kind or unkind or happy or miserable or drunk or sober or great or near-great or failed the way you see a table square or a Montclair lip-read. Kids today... You kids today somehow don't know how to feel, much less love, to say nothing of respect. We're just bodies to you. We're just bodies and shoulders and scarred knees and big bellies and empty wallets and flasks to you. I'm not saying something cliché like you take us for granted so much as I'm saying you cannot... Imagine our absence. We're so present it's ceased to mean. We're environmental. Furniture of the world.

Of course our most important role as a parent is to have our children know that they are loved and worthy. Even more importantly, it's to help them discover, and fan the flames of whatever it is that they are enthusiastic about!

We never expressed this to each other in Chinese, because it wasn’t something said in Chinese culture; the emotions were too strong, the words too coarse, and besides, it was assumed that parents and children loved each other.