Quotes About Motherhood

The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.

And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a good mother in the world's eyes or a bad mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs.

the terrible intimacy of pregnancy

a mother's crying, stifled, soundless, secret so as not to disturb. If you cried so others could hear you were crying to be heard but a mother's crying was just the opposite, crying not to be heard.

It was Corinne's secret belief that her daughter was a far finer person than she was herself, a riddle put to her by God. I must become the mother deserving of such a daughter—is that it?

For that was mom's trump card: she was the mother, and so possessed a mysterious and unquestioned authority. Dad was the boss, but Mom was the power.

I tried to do it all myself: be mommy and camp counselor and art teacher and prereading specialist (and somehow, in my off-hours, to do my own work). I tried my absolute best. And like so many of the moms around me, I started to go a little crazy.

What kind of choice is it, really, when motherhood forces you into a delicate balancing act -- not just between work and family, as the equation is typically phrased, but between your premotherhood and postmotherhood identities? What kind of choice is it when you have to choose between becoming a mother and remaining yourself?

There was something almost sacred in the self-sacrifice that I felt was required of me as a mother, caring for this child.

Instead of saying, 'I feel terrible. I feel guilty,' maybe [women] can take these results and advocate for [national] family-leave policies that create more options for mothers of babies," said researcher Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, the lead author of the 2002 day-care study, as she expressed her frustration with all the hand-wringing and guilt expressed in the study's wake by working mothers. "Every other industrialized nation has done it. Why can't we?

I want you to know it was no big deal...those movies showing women screaming in labor are plain bullshit....there's nothing to it...you just push and push and finally the baby pops out...to tell you the truth I don't even rember that much about it except there was a very nice guy standing over me and every time a strong contraction started he gave me a whiff of gas...

My mother named me Deenie because right before I was born she saw a movie about a beautiful girl named Wilmadeene, who everybody called Deenie for short.

El hombre caza y lucha. La mujer intriga y sueña; es la madre de la fantasía de los dioses. Posee la segunda visión, las alas que le permiten volar hacía el infinito del deseo y de la imaginación.

A man's mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault.

The best parent is both parents" means mommy is no substitute for daddy, money is not substitute for daddy, and another man is no substitute for daddy. Just as daddy is no substitute for mommy, money is no substitute for mommy, and another woman is no substitute for mommy. Divorce does not change that. The best parent is still both parents.

A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother's love endures through all.

The tie which links mother and child is of such pure and immaculate strength as to be never violated.

I wanted to curl up in her lap and stay there forever. I wanted to be her. She was raising me, cultivating me, molding me into a far better version of me than I could have ever dreamed up, let alone lived out, on my own. (149)

Call me jaded, but I didn't see then and I don't see now how hugging, and counting and focusing on a flickering candle or, God help me, a favorite stuffed animal, can possibly make you forget the nine pounds of wriggling human forcing its way out of you the same way it got into you nine months-and nine pounds-ago. As the scientific theory goes, what goes in must come out. Eventually. Somehow. And the coming-out part is never as much fun as the going in part.

Honey, men are wimps. Why do you think it's women who have the babies?

Am I a good mother? The best mother you could ever want?

There isn't a lot a mother won't do for her child, Kyra. It's sort of hardwired into our DNA.

You will be so happy you didn't get pregnant. Because this child will fill your life so full of love that you will thank God every day that somehow it was just meant to be. She was meant to be yours.

This idealization of motherhood is essentially a means of keeping women from developing a sexual consciousness and from breaking through the barriers of sexual repression, of keeping alive their sexual anxieties and guilt feelings. The very existence of woman as a sexual being would threaten authoritarian ideology; her recognition and social affirmation would mean its collapse.