Quotes About Motherhood

Laura knew the price of motherhood to be pain and responsibility; the reward, love and pride.

You can't describe love, Kathie, and you can't define it. Only it goes with you all your life. I think that love is more like a light that you carry. At first childish happiness keeps it lighted and after that romance. Then motherhood lights it and then duty...and maybe after that sorrow. You wouldn't think that sorrow could be a light would you, dearie? But it can. And then after that, service lights it. Yes...I think that is what love is to a woman...a lantern in her hand.

We're all inclined to think we have a monopoly on each new sensation that comes to us, that it's our own particular little grievance. But every feeling and every thought you may have now has probably been felt and thought by mothers from the time the world began.

Poor Christine! She had long ago spent the days of her young motherhood in the marketplace, and now that they were all squandered, she had so few pleasant things left to remember. So she crouched low over the dull embers of a few half-memories in order to warm her old heart.

Motherhood makes you stronger even as it makes you weaker. Your new sensitivity is a strength, and you should see it that way.

MOMMY WANTS A GLASS OF CHARDONNAY If you collected all the drops of days I've spent singing "Row, row, row your boat" to children fighting sleep, you'd have an ocean deep enough to drown them many times over.

I was given baby doll toys myself, and they proved a stark reminder that my life was expected to revolve around childbearing - just as my mom's had before me, and her mom's had before her.

But Momma, winning that pageant wasn't your life -- it was only a day in your life -- that's all. Mrs. Odell says life is what we make it. Maybe you'd be happier if you adjusted your thinking a bit.

I remember watching my mother emerge from her bedroom on a night when she and my father were going out, all dressed up in heels and hose, a skirt or dress that cinched her waist, her pearl choker like a ring around the moon. I'd watch her from my perch in the kitchen, walking trancelike as she fastened the back of an earring. I'd like to be small again, just for a little while, and feel close to her. I never really appreciated my mother. I never appreciated myself.

Chosen motherhood is the real liberation. The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different, and the choice to be generative in other ways can at last be made, and is being made by many women now, without guilt.

Over and over again, stories in women's magazines insist that women can know fulfillment only at the moment of giving birth to a child. They deny the years when she can no longer look forward to giving birth, even if she repeats the act over and over again. In the feminine mystique, there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future. There is no other way she can even dream about herself, except as her children's mother, her husband's wife.

It is wrong to keep spelling out unnecessary choices that make women unconsciously resist either commitment or motherhood--and that hold back recognition of the needed social changes.

I have no patience with women who complain because their mothers or their husband's mothers have to live with them. To my prejudice eye, a child's life without a grandparent en residence would be a barren thing.

Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffered Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night-she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-Is this all

Someone gorgeous, with a good figure, who's willing to do the work to regain it post pregnancy.

Now, as always, the most automated appliance in a household is the mother.

I looked back all the time, too much, too often. Like Rose, I would be circling my mother the rest of my life.

About two months after this photo was taken I was born and my mum died - clean swap. Caring about someone I never knew doesn't make sense, but that's how it is. This photo means a lot. There must be some invisible mother-daughter wiring that runs from her image in a straight line to my heart.

Love," he will respond, answering his own question. "I loved my men and they loved me Ã¢â'¬Â¦ I just couldn't give them up, just like a mother couldn't give up the child."7 *

I live for my sons. I would be lost without them.

I think men and women are the same. Even as parents, I think we're the same. We're just conditioned to think that we're different. Having said that, it's true that motherhood is a particularly vulnerable area. It's an open wound, really. A woman is exposed to being turned into a different kind of person by the experience of motherhood.

I fall to pieces when I am hurt, but when it comes to my children, I am a pillar of strength, applying balm and bandages and dressing up their wounds.

My son is going to grow up looking at the newspaper cuttings and thinking, 'Wow, my mum did this.'

I used to write my books at night when I was a freelancer with no children. I used to really work in huge spurts - I could turn around a revision in two weeks, I used to be able to write 10,000 words a day. It's like, 'Wow, what happened to that?' That's just gone.