Quotes About Motherhood

Being a mother had taught her so much in such a short time. She'd never known all the colors and shapes that love could take, had never known her heart could be so full yet still have the capacity to expand.

If she were their mother she'd teach them these things are nothing, the clothes and toys and furniture. These things fool people into thinking they must stay where the things are. Leave it all, she'd teach them, even your hopes, and all the dreams of safe, calm places. Go with what is most terrifying, the dizzying empty night and the lonely stars until night slows and you see the whole design. Always choose love over safety if you can tell the difference...

Odd to think of myself that way, small and blind and tethered to her. In that time before memory, everything I touched was hers. I heard her voice from the inside, with no idea that she was a separate person. Back then, she had simply been the world.

We were grown-up women, so we packed our worsts away in hidden boxes. We were mothers, so we sank those boxes under jobs and mortgages and meal plans. Mothers have to sink those boxes deep.

Hello, hello," she said, when I put him, a small stranger, into her arms. Her eyes brightened, and she smiled. My boy called her to immediate love in that way that babies have; it is their birthright. It is their superpower. She touched his open, tiny palm, his cheek, the burring of black fuzz on his head. "Hello.

Her whole body sang with a sick gladness that this was any child but hers. It was as immediate and involuntary as her heartbeat, and in her next breath, shame crept in. Not Shelby, thank God, thank God, but this girl was someone's.

I'm always saying a mother never loses her peach pit instinct. Even with a grown son, you have to stop yourself from sticking out your hand when your child finishes a piece of fruit.

Jane kneels and kisses her soiled son. David does not look at her. It is as though, however, he is dreaming of looking at her.

The girl is twenty-five. It has not been very long since her divorce but she cannot remember the man who used to be her husband. He was probably nice. She will tell the child this, at any rate.

Amnesia: The condition that enables a woman who has gone through labor to have sex again.

Think of stretch marks as pregnancy service stripes.

When I gave birth to my fourth child, I suffered from post partum hemorrhaging. I almost lost my life. I was lucky to be under the care of trained health care personnel. I started wondering then what was happening to women in rural villages.

This was always her problem, of course. That her children's sorrows became hers. She felt their pain so deeply, she hardly registered her own.

Eleanor saw her days with her children as a kind of artwork, and as with the practice of making art, much that you attempted didn't work out. Still, the act of doing it felt as demanding and precious as the creation of any book.

Maybe loving her children too much was her downfall—the weight it placed on the three of them, knowing that for their mother they represented everything of greatest meaning in her life. No question their father loved them, too, but without the heavy sense of obligation her devotion seemed to carry with it.

This was always her problem, of course. That her children's sorrows became hers. She felt their pain so deeply, she hardly registered her own.

Cada vez que un niño es concebido, el palacio de Herodes se tambalea en sus cimientos; cada vez que un niño es alumbrado, Herodes pierde un trozo de su reino; cada vez que un niño se amamanta a los pechos de su madre, Herodes es condenado al destierro

Era uno de esos pobres niños a quienes no llega nunca el don de la palabra ni el regalo de la gracia; niño alegre él y triste de ver, todo para su madre, nada para los demás

It is impossible to deny a woman in a feeding mood. It is as if they look right through you, to that small, weak part that has been there since you were a baby and that doesn't know how to defy authority.

Motherhood is a wonderful thing - what a pity to waste it on children.

Pregnancy is a process that invites you to surrender to the unseen force behind all life.

I understood and appreciated the miracle of birth, but I did not understand motherhood, nor did I appreciate the oveselling of it. To me it was a choice, one of many options. To others it was what women did. We were supposed to breed. It had been decided for us. Society expected it. Religion demanded it.

My name is not "Those People." I am a loving woman, a mother in pain, Giving birth to the future, where my babies Have the same chance to thrive as anyone.

Single or lesbian motherhood] can be seen as [one] of the most violent forms taken by the rejection of the symbolic ... as well as one of the most fervent divinizations of maternal power - all of which cannot help but trouble an entire moral and legal order without, however, proposing an alternative to it