Quotes About Motherhood

Aquella tarde, Rita, que no era madre ni nunca lo sería, obligó a otra mujer a serlo, forzando el dogma aprendido hasta llegar al cuerpo de otro.

Cuando descubrí lo que era coger le pregunté a mi madre, con la sorpresa, la inocencia y el espanto de la infancia, si eso que me habían dicho mis amigas era cierto, si de verdad las mujeres debían dejar que los hombres «metieran su pito» dentro de una. Mi madre me miró, se tomó un instante y luego dijo: «No lo pienses así, es como cuando uno tiene hambre y come, o tiene sed y toma agua». No mencionó el amor. Ni siquiera los hijos por venir.

Como su hija, que ni me conocía, su hija que no se atrevió a ser madre pero dispuso de mi cuerpo como si fuera de ella, así como hoy usted, que no vino a saldar una deuda sino a cometer el mismo delito, veinte años después. La mira y repite, usted vino a usar mi cuerpo.

Women have always been the strong ones of the world. The men are always seeking from women a little pillow to put their heads down on. They are always longing for the mother who held them as infants.

Anna O.'s real name was Bertha Pappenheim. Bertha Pappenheim became one of the first social workers in Europe. Her work was recognized in a commemorative German stamp issued in 1954. She was also an early feminist. Her work involved the establishing of homes for prostitutes and unwed mothers. It is possible that, and psychoanalytic terms, this career was on undoing of her own childhood sexual trauma and of the failure of any person in authority to validate its reality or offer comfort.

I find it devastatingly sad that a woman could disappear to this extent, leaving no trace other than a daughter who barely remembers her.

I want my girls to see their relationship with me as a place of refuge, a place they can retreat to for honesty, unconditional love, and support. I want to teach them and have them trust me, not fear me. I want to preserve the gentle souls that I see in them." -Liz. M.

Show me a mother who says she is 100 percent gentle, 100 percent of the time, and I'll show you a mother in deep, deep denial, and probably passive-agressive to boot." - Lynn Siprelle

The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them.

Whereas we bless an old soldier and give him alms, pitying his blind or limbless state, we do not make heroes of women mangled in the struggle to give birth.

He had only thought, and Wolsey had only thought, that the Emperor and Spain would be against it. Only the Emperor. He smiles in the dark, hands behind his head. He doesn't say which people, but waits for Liz to tell him. 'All women,' she says. 'All women everywhere in England. All women who have a daughter but not a son. All women who have lost a child. All women who have lost any hope of having a child. All women who are forty.

As a mom I know that raising children is the hardest job there is.

As a partner in a firm full of women who work outside of the home as well as stay at home mothers, all with plenty of children, gender equality is not a talking point for me. It is an issue I live every day.

But then men fall in love with them, and babies are nourished at them, and they sag a little or a lot from years of service, and you mourn the beauty you were late to recognize, and you start to think of cancer.

Part of our shared tragedy - we recognized it at once - was that we never separated from our mothers, which meant we liked girls more than the world like them, which is to say more than they liked each other, let alone themselves.

And I suppose that is what we want from our mothers: to maintain the world and, even if it is a lie, to proceed as though the world could be maintained. Whereas my father was obsessed with the past and the future, with returning to and remaking Libya, my mother was devoted to the present. For this reason, she was the truly radical force in my adolescence.

Naoma, and to the rest of the world she was Um

A pregnant woman is a frightful object. A new-born child is loathsome. A deathbed rarely makes so horrible an impression as childbirth, that terrible symphony of screams and filth and blood.

I've always wanted to be a mom.

I want my daughter to be proud of me and look up to me. I think early on in my pregnancy I realized that to be the mom I want to be, I had to change my life, and that's what I'm doing.

I don't buy that overused line about a woman's job making her a better mother. The children need more time. Everything in our home needs more time.

Being a mother was like being a ship's figurehead: you had to keep moving forward through the waves and weather, your head high, even when an iceberg was clearly on the horizon, too big to go around.

She supposed it was a universal truth that mothers, after tearing out their hair and tacking their raw beating hearts to the outsides of their clothing for anyone to see, were given no warning that some-day their baby-holding days would be over.

So exhausting, the whole business of motherhood. It was a business, too, complete with compromises and disappointing returns for your investments, with budgets and schedules and task lists and surly underlings.