Quotes About Motherhood

Shelby told her that if she had a hundred lifetimes she would want Sue to be her mother in every one, just as for a hundred lifetimes she would want James to be the one that stopped on the road that night. She would want him to stay here. She would want him to know her when no one else did.

There are those who insist that mothers are born with love for their children and place them before all other things, including their own needs and desires. This was not the case with us.

She acted as though I were a stranger when I appeared. "Did you want something?" she would ask. Yes, I felt like saying. A mother.

There are those who insist that mothers are born with love for their children and place them before all other things, including their own needs and desires.

I would only understand her grief when my child caused me my own.

Mary Keane watched her daughter and felt as well the punch and turn of the baby not yet born and saw the similarity of the mystery of them both—the baby unseen, moving an elbow or a foot, the means to an end all its own, unfathomable; her daughter with the unseen life playing like reflected light over her face, her lips moving in a conversation forever unheard.

Thousands more were being born today, being conceived—women with their knees raised all over the world. Mrs.

She had an image of her unborn child, its head up under her heart, its ear pressed to the wall of her flesh, treading water with the flutter of its small legs, listening. It would hear the echo of the waves, the whistle of the wind, the rise and fall of its father's breath as his lips opened and touched closed. Mary Keane was more than certain (she would have

leaning over her stomach, over the baby's feet that were now—little acrobat—pressing themselves up against her breasts. She leaned over the curve of its back and spine as they pressed themselves into her stomach and bladder, leaned over the head that was now pressing itself down toward the worn upholstery of the old car, sensing, perhaps, that its watery world was a tributary after all, not a pool. She

Narcissistic cathexis of the child by the mother does not exclude emotional devotion. On the contrary, she loves the child as her self-object, excessively, though not in the manner that he needs, and always on the condition that he presents his false self. This is no obstacle to the development of intellectual abilities, but it is one to the unfolding of an authentic emotional life.

I've spoken of the patient Peter who was obsessively forced to make conquests with women, to seduce and then to abandon them, until he was at last able to experience how he himself had repeatedly been abandoned by his mother.

This story sounds as though it were invented, but it is true from beginning to end. There are people who have to pay for the smallest things in life with their very substance and their spinal cord. That is a constantly recurring pain, and then when they are tired of suffering… Does not mother love belong to the 'smallest', but also indispensable, things in life, for which many people paradoxically have to pay by giving up their living selves?

I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide - sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.

Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.

I had wondered if all mothers shared a fear of how vibrant and alive their children were.

The niggling idea of what she would do as Ray grew older and her husband worked increasingly long hours crept up the inside of her foot and along her calf to the back of her knee and began to climb into her lap

The Olinka girls do not believe girls should be educated. When I asked a mother why she thought this, she said: A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something. What can she become? I asked. Why, she said, the mother of his children. But I am not the mother of anybody's children, I said, and I am something.

A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something. What can she become? I asked. Why, she said, the mother of his children. But I am not the mother of anybody's children, I said, and I am something.

Standing beside the river, realizing that the water of earth is recycled forever, she deeply understood this: that there are two presents. One is of the moment. The other is of a longer moment - the moment that includes the history and knowledge one knows. So that, she mused, if the tears shed by the mother of Isis are now part of this river then I am somehow connected to her in this longer present that I am able to envision and that contains both of us.

Let us bring our attention to George's mother. She who came, weeping, and picked up the shattered pieces of her child, as black mothers have done for so long.

Los olinkas no creen que se deba educar a las niñas. Cuando pregunté a una madre por qué pensaba así, me dijo: Una mujer no es nada por sí misma. Solo por su marido puede ser algo. ¿Y qué puede ser?, le pregunté. La madre de sus hijos. Pues yo no soy madre de los hijos de nadie, y sin embargo soy alguien.

But I am not the mother of anybody's children, I said, and I am something

Each woman is capable of truly bringing another into the world. This we must all do for each other.

I knew how much my mother loved me by her love and patience with my child.