Quotes About Motherhood

There is no such thing as maternal instinct: the word does not in any case apply to the human species. The mother's attitude is defined by her total situation and by the way she accepts it.

Mais de toute façon, engendrer, allaiter ne sont pas des activités, ce sont des fonctions naturelles; aucun projet n'y est engagé; c'est pourquoi la femme n'y trouve pas le motif d'une affirmation hautaine de son existence; elle subit passivement son destin biologique.

La raison profonde qui à l'origine de l'histoire voue la femme au travail domestique et lui interdit de prendre part à la construction du monde, c'est son asservissement à la fonction génératrice.

När du gjorde dig illa var det inte smärtan som fick dig att gråta, berättade modern senare. Det var känslan av att världen hade svikit dig.

On s'empresse de les décharger de toute tâche pénible et de tout souci: c'est les délivrer du même coup de toute responsabilité. On espère qu'ainsi dupées, séduites par la facilité de leur condition, elles accepteront le rôle de mère et de ménagére dans lequel on veut les confiner.

after Neruda a bronze song, something undone, salvia, a crushed butterfly. It is the blood on a light bulb, the seventh sadness, a fluctuation that closes oceans and eyes. The vermilion and solitary luminary shimmies and singes the feathers of the aviary. Moon, the clock's word, dear mother, ruin, rain. — Simone Muench, "Elegy for the Unsaid," Lampblack & Ash: Poems . (Sarabande Books; First Edition edition November 1, 2005)

world. I love her for being so happy, Carol brooded. I ought to be that way. I worship the baby, but the housework——Oh, I suppose I'm fortunate; so much better off than farm-women on a new clearing, or people in a slum. It

women about who were either pregnant or pushing wicker perambulators.

It's a GIRL. It's a little girl, with scrunched-up petal lips and a tuft of dark hair and hands in tiny fits, up by her ears. All that time, that's who was in there. And it's weird, but the minute I saw her I just thought: IT'S YOU. Of course it is.

We both gaze down at my swollen tummy for a while. I still can't quite get my head round the fact that there's a baby inside my body. Which has got to come out... somehow. OK, let's not go there. There's still time for them to invent something.

Mothers are multi-taskers.

So instead I'm zapping her lots of smiley faces and emojis of shiny suns and sailboats and dodging the truth altogether. (Maybe that's what emojis were invented for in the first place, and I've just been using them wrong. They're not there to convey thoughts in a fun way; they're there to lie to your mum.)

Children are the anchors that hold a mother to life.

Oh how she wept, mourning the marriage-bed where she let loose that double brood—monsters— husband by her husband, children by her child.

Noor was Sajida's secret. She knew the exact moment her child was conceived. Purple passed slowly, the lowest of clouds, over her eyes. Bathed in such magnificent color, Sajida lay perfectly still. Much later, she would try to relive the exact moment, as if she needed to understand how the fact of her child could have entered her body and mind at the same time. But Sajida would not summon the gentle shade ever again.

When the child must be weaned, the mother too is not without sorrow at the thought that she and the child are separated more and more, that the child which first lay under her heart and later reposed upon her breast will be so near to her no more.

When I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania I had a baby in one arm, a diploma in the other and I didn't know where I was going in life.

I did not see any way that I could possibly give birth to someone else and also give birth to myself. Far from feeling guilty, it was the first time that I had taken responsibility for my own life.

Being a mother is probably the most important thing in my life right now.

I don't really have a plan. I've lived a very big life, and I don't feel my age, and I feel like I was born to be a mother.

Whatever past you had, when you become a mother, it [life] is a whole different thing. You can't even predict it.

I am prouder of my years as a single mother than of any other part of my life.

I'm a nice middle-class girl in real life, and I'm a mom and a grandma, and I usually play sweet characters.

Life was hard on mothers; but then, they just didn't understand.