Quotes About Motherhood

evidently heard about a young mother. She was being raped continuously in a farm shed. Her relatives came to the shed and asked the soldiers to allow her a break to breast-feed the baby because it would not stop crying. All this was taking place next to a headquarters

To become a mother, I feared, was to relinquish your status as the protagonist of your own life. Your questions were answered, your freedom was gone, your path would calcify in front of you. And yet it still pulled at me. Being a professional explorer would become largely impossible if I had a child, but having a kid seemed in many ways like the wildest possible trip.

But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen. -Thanksgiving in Mongolia, The New Yorker, November 18, 2013 Issue

There was a corresponding orbit of moods this obligatory food preparation induced in my mother: no-nonsense competence, spunky pride, and seething resentment.

To become a mother, I feared, was to relinquish your status as the protagonist of your own life.

She had her own pain. She had her own reasons. That was something I never saw clearly before motherhood flashed in front of my eyes, impairing and intensifying my vision. Nothing has looked entirely the same since.

Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are therir own

I took my coffee into the dining room and settled down with the morning paper. A woman in New York had had twins in a taxi. A woman in Ohio had just had her seventeenth child. A twelve-year-old girl in Mexico had given birth to a thirteen-pound boy. The lead article on the woman's page was about how to adjust the older child to the new baby. I finally found an account of an axe murder on page seventeen, and held my coffee cup up to my face to see if the steam might revive me.

I looked at the clock with the faint unconscious hope common to all mothers that time will somehow have passed magically away and the next time you look it will be bedtime.

I suppose the mothers of most twelve-year-old boys live with the uneasy conviction that their sons are embarked upon a secret life of crime.

Would you think I ought to give up my painting just for a home and a couple of lousy children with running noses?

Shh, let me finish," Mama said, and banged her elbow into my ribs. "Remember, now. Neither small nor tight. A roomy waist and a pleat. For God's sake, a pleat.

Basye, the tailor's wife, butted in. She was a tiny woman, who performed three jobs at once. She rocked the baby with her foot, darned a sock with her hands, and fussed and fumed with her mouth.

childbirth is at best necessary and tolerable. It is not fun. (Like shitting a pumpkin, a friend of mine told me when I inquired about the Great-Experience-You-Are-Missing.)

A mother who undergoes a nine-month pregnancy is likely to feel that the product of all that pain and discomfort 'belongs' to her.

woman who has just been delivered of a child, Her oven has caved in.

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. (quoting Doris Lessing)

That there could be something in the world that a woman could want more than children has been viewed as unacceptable. Things may be marginally different now, but, even if there is something she wants more than children, that is no reason for a woman to remain childless. Any normal woman, it is understood, wants—and should want—both.

At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child' (109).

I believe that fear of being a failure plays a large part in goading many women who are ambivalent about motherhood into maternity. That, and the fear of missing out

Wherever they might wander out in the world, whithersoever they might fare, forgetful of their mother, she felt as though for her their life must still be an action of her life, they must still be as one with herself as they had been when she alone in all the world knew of the new life which lay hidden within and drank of her blood and made her cheeks pale." –p. 329-30

Så tenkte jeg, og derfor sa jeg det. Men sørg ikke over dette; ti jeg selv har voldt at slik måtte det ende. Og Gud bedre det for deg, sønn, så du ikke arver vår lykke. Gjør nu som din mor vil; lenge har jeg lengtet etter at mitt hode skulle ligge i hennes fang.

I did have to resist the urge to open his bedroom door and check that he was all right. Old habits of motherhood die hard.

That the child is the supreme aim of woman is a statement having precisely the value of an advertising slogan.