My parents said, “You’re going to boarding school. Goodbye.”
When I was in art school, my father said, “You couldn’t paint your way out of a corner.”
When I divorced my first husband, who had unilaterally decided never to get a job and never to have children, he said, “Don’t expect me to help you out; he was a perfectly good husband.”
When I fell in love later in life, my mother said, “Well, don’t marry him.”
When my two boys from this marriage called my mother from a day’s ride away on a very arduous motorcycle trip around the USA, she told them it wouldn’t be convenient for them to come by.
By the time my mother was dying of leukemia, I’d earned an foolish little MA in psychology. Suddenly she said, “My doctors don’t care about me, but you’re a professional, so they have to do what you say. It’s up to you to save my life.”