Quotes About Motherhood

For a long time I felt I had done a very brave thing. There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. I felt I wasn't the best person to bring them up. I would have ended up an alcoholic or a frustrated intellectual like my mother.

We have no children Harriet. Or, rather, I have no children. You have one child.

Younger woman says, "I'm not going to be like my mother. You're maniacs. You're mad." "Yes," [older woman responds] "I know it. And so you won't be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?

When my mama was twenty-five she already had an old woman's hands, and I feared them. I did not know then what it was that scared me so. I've come to understand since that it was the thought of her growing old, of her dying and leaving me alone. I feared those brown spots, those wrinkles and cracks that lined her wrists, ankles, and the soft shadowed sides of her eyes.

Who had Mama been, what had she wanted to be or do before I was born? Once I was born, her hopes had turned, and I had climbed up her life like a flower reaching for the sun.

All the children seem to be coming out quite intelligent, thank goodness. It would have been such a bore to be the mother of morons, and it's an absolute toss-up, isn't it? If one could only invent them, like characters in books, it would be much more satisfactory to a well-regulated mind.

Now to me, Edith looks like something that would eat her young.

For this my mother wrapped me warm, And called me home against the storm, And coaxed my infant nights to quiet, And gave me roughage in my diet, And tucked me in my bed at eight, And clipped my hair, and marked my weight, And watched me as I sat and stood: That I might grow to womanhood To hear a whistle and drop my wits And break my heart to clattering bits.

Mammy was both the perfect mother and the perfect slave: whites saw her as a "passive nurturer, a mother figure who gave all without expectation of return, who not only acknowledged her inferiority to whites but who loved them."23 It is important to recognize, however, that Mammy did not reflect any virtue in Black motherhood.

innocent." Stupid, stupid woman, but a woman whose daughter was lost in the

Institutionalized motherhood demands of women maternal 'instinct' rather than intelligence, selflessness rather than self-realization, relation to others rather than the creation of self. Motherhood is 'sacred' so long as its offspring are 'legitimate' -- that is, as long as the child bears the name of a father who legally controls the mothe.r

Finally, a woman who has experienced her own mother as a destructive force--however justified or unjustified the charge--may dread the possibility that in becoming a mother she too will become somehow destructive. The mother of the laboring woman is, in any case, for better or worse, living or dead, a powerful ghost in the birth-chamber.

But I knew even then that I did not want my sons to act for me in the world, any more than I wished for them to kill or die for their country. I wanted to act, to live, in myself and to love them for their separate selves.

The so-called mother of the child isn't the child's begetter, but only a sort of nursing soil for the new-sown seed. The man, the one on top, is the true parent, while she, a stranger, foster's a stranger's sprout.

A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity. It dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path. -The Last Seance (from The Hound of Death and Other Stories, also Double Sin and Other Stories)

When will a woman lie? Sometimes for herself. Usually for the man she loves. Always for her children.

Don't you know, you idiot, that that is what every fool of a woman says about her child? Miss Bulstrode's thoughts.

For whom will a woman lie? Sometimes for herself, usually for the man she loves, always for her children.

Only mothers can't say they don't want their children and just go away.

With a sigh the young mother returned to the hearthrug and, by way of carrying out her principles of stern neglect, butted her son three times in the stomach so that he caught hold of her hair and pulled it with gleeful yells. Then they rolled over and over in a grand rough-and-tumble until the door opened

A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.

There are certain primitive elementary forces, Raoul. Most of them have been destroyed by civilization, but motherhood stands where it stood at the beginning. Animals – human beings, they are all the same. A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.

If we are to heal the planet, we must begin by healing birthing.

Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children... It was a fleeting statement, one I didn't think she'd hold on to; after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, kissed and hugged us, poured her love into us. That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.