Love makes no mistakes.

This is about the self-mutilating circus we have painted ourselves clowns in. About women who will prowl 30 stores in 6 malls to find the right cocktail dress, but haven’t a clue where to find fulfillment or how wear joy, wandering through life shackled to a shopping bag, beneath those 2 pretty syllables.About men wallowing on bar stools, drearily practicing attraction and everyone who will drift home tonight, crest-fallen because not enough strangers found you suitably fuckable. This, this is about my own some-day daughter. When you approach me, already stung-stayed with insecurity, begging, “Mom, will I be pretty? Will I be pretty?” I will wipe that question from your mouth like cheap lipstick and answer, “No! The word pretty is unworthy of everything you will be, and no child of mine will be contained in five letters.“You will be pretty intelligent, pretty creative, pretty amazing. But you, will never be merely ‘pretty’.

I always say that love is a combination of six things: Care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust. And it’s like baking a cake. You may have all five ingredients and miss one and so your cake isn’t going to happen. I think the majority of people in the United States have a lot of care in our lives, but we don’t always have a lot of love. I think it’s important to make that distinction, because you can care about somebody Monday through Friday and abuse them on Saturday. But in the practice of love, abuse is antithetical. You cannot love anyone and dominate them, hurt them, because once you’re doing that you’ve moved yourself out of love.

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.

What Gods do you believe in? I’ll build you a temple of mirrors so you can see them.