Quotes About Motherhood

I don't feel like a mother. [...] I thought I would be smashed flat, or heaved high, mythically altered for this, the most mythic of roles but, shock of all shock, here I am, still me. And the baby? I have come to like her a little bit. That's it. A little bit.

Motherhood's biggest taboo may be not rage but mildness. Mother love must be intense. I am not intense. I feel a great guilt. So far, it is only my guilt that makes me a mother.

Suddenly it is not she who needs me, but I who need her. Don't ask me to explain, I can't. I can. We are creatures who must give comfort. We ache to give comfort, to heal what hurts. The colic is making me a mother.

So," says my sister. "Do you feel like a mother yet?" I surprise myself by saying yes. "Cool," says my sister. "When did this happen?" "I don't know," I say. "Last Tuesday maybe?" I want to chart love, to code it or encrypt it. Love = proximity + time. Love = oxytocin + night feedings. But in the end, I'm no closer to understanding it, even when I feel it.

Like so much in life, being a mother is entirely undramatic, filled with small pleasures and multiple inconveniences that only over weeks and months leave marks of any significance. You look back and say, "I know things I did not know before. I love like I did not love before, but how, or when, this happened, is really all a mystery, steps in smoke.

Being a mother means knowing the luxuriousness of giving comfort, bringing the slack body up, holding her close; she melts into your form, which is, when all is said and done, still your form.

Being a mother is a lot like growing up. When, or how, did you become an adult? What was the precise moment you lost your childhood? No one can say. It's all so permeable.

Called upon to give her baby what she never received herself, this mother may be conflicted about giving, unconsciously wanting her baby to give her the love and nurturing she never received.

Lydia, five years old, standing on tiptoe to watch vinegar and baking soda foam in the sink. Lydia tugging a heavy book from the shelf, saying, "Show me again, show me another." Lydia, touching the stethoscope, ever so gently, to her mother's heart. Tears blur Marilyn's sight. It had not been science that Lydia had loved

Years might pass and they might change, both of them, but she was sure she would still know her own child, just as she would know herself, no matter how long it had been. She was certain of this. She would spend months, years, the rest of her life looking for her daughter, searching the face of every young woman she meet for as long as it took, searching for a spark of familiarity in the faces of strangers.

She could not, she had thought as she bent to kiss the baby's flushed cheek, have loved this child more if it had come from her own flesh.

It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?)

Mia was affectionate but never effusive; Pearl had never seen her mother embrace anyone other than her.

Nath had just started the first grade, Lydia had just started nursery school, Hannah had not yet even been imagined. For the first time since she'd been married, Marilyn found herself unoccupied. She was twenty-nine years old, still young, still slender. Still smart, she thought. She could go back to school now, at last, and finish her degree. Do everything she'd planned before the children came along. Only now she couldn't remember how to write a paper, how

She had learned, with Izzy's birth, how your life could trundle along on its safe little track and then,

Mrs. Richardson, however, could not let Izzy be, and the feeling coalesced in all of them: Izzy pushing, her mother restraining, and after a time no one could remember how the dynamic had started, only that it had existed always.

She thought, as she would often for many years, of the photograph from that day, with the one golden feather inside it: Was it a portrait of her, or her daughter? Was she the bird trying to batter its way out, or was she the cage?

This was what would haunt Mrs. McCullough most: that Mirabelle hadn't cried out when Bebe had reached into the crib and lifted her up and taken her away. Despite everything—despite the homemade food and the toys and the late nights and the love, so much love, more love than Mrs. McCullough could have imagined possible—despite it all, she still had felt Bebe's arms were a safe place, a place she belonged.

I'm not saying there aren't bad mothers, she says. Just that you don't always know. What makes them do something, or not do something. Most of us, we're trying our best.

Mia held her for a moment, buried her nose in the part of Pearl's hair. Every time she did this, she was comforted by how Pearl smelled exactly the same. She smelled, Mia thought suddenly, of home, as if home had never been a place, but had always been this little person whom she'd carried alongside her.

She had learned, with Izzy's birth, how your life could trundle along on its safe little track and then, with no warning, skid spectacularly off course. Every time Mrs. Richardson looked at Izzy, that feeling of things spiraling out of control coiled around her again, like a muscle she didn't know how to unclench.

Pearl, my darling," her mother said. "I'm so sorry. It's time to go." She took Mia's hand, and Pearl, uprooted, came free and followed her mother back to the car.

She thought, as she would often for many years, of the photograph from that day, with the one golden feather inside it: Was it a portrait of her, or her daughter? Was she the bird trying to batter its way free, or was she the cage?

A part of her wanted to stay home, to simply be with her children, but her own mother had always scorned those women who didn't work. "Wasting their potential," she had sniffed. "You've got a good brain, Elena. You're not just going to sit home and knit, are you?" A modern woman, she always implied, was capable—nay, required—to have it all.