Quotes About Motherhood

I watched Ricki Lake's documentary, 'The Business of Being Born,' and that led me to call a midwife, and not an ob-gyn, when I found out I had conceived. My delivery was not easy - they call it 'labor,' not 'a vacation!' - but I was incredibly grateful that I did it that way.

In Jenny Offill's remarkable first novel, 'Last Things,' 7-year-old Grace Davitt watches her mother, Anna, descend into madness and tries to make sense of the claustrophobic world that Anna has created for her.

I think anytime with your mom, whether she's famous or not, you're watching what she's doing when you're growing up. She also taught me the basics: Make sure you use a good moisturizing shampoo and conditioner, and then use a detangler to comb through your hair. And don't overdo the heat styling.

I have always felt that my career was not going to be a straight shot up, but more of a kind of rolling wave, so that I could raise my children. So I got pregnant when I was the head of production at a studio, and I became chairperson at a bigger studio when I was pregnant with my second daughter. You just do it!

Having a baby on my own is a dream come true, but in my world, there's no sheepish spouse on his way home from a work trip to offer me a stretch of alone time.

Perfectionism is really a challenge for me, and it causes me to be super-critical of myself in so many ways: about body image constantly; about parenting; about being a mother.

People always want to know what I fed my kids. I gave them real food, not frozen pizza.

Very often, people talk about mothers, and they think that mother has to lose her sexuality. Mother has to be plain. Mothers cannot be exciting. Mother should not be up on what's going on; she shouldn't know the jargon of the day. And I just find that so old-fashioned!

A woman can plan when to have her family and how to support a family.

When I was younger, I didn't understand how a mother could put her son on a plane and just say, you know, 'Here you go, I'll see you later.' And she never followed, she never came.

Motherhood takes vanity completely out of the picture. Comfort is the key. When you are coming out of a plane after a 9-hour flight with drool all over your clothes, the last thing you are worried about is being photographed. You just want to take your kid home.

I had a planned C-section, and I cried the entire day before I had the baby.

Whether she planned it or not, the path that Pelosi took to the House is the one most women used to follow. Women raised their kids, and then they went into politics.

I sometimes think about the life that my daughter will have with no mom. What does it mean to have a ghost mom? Not that I can do anything differently about it. But it's an inferior version of what we had planned, you know? This was not our top choice.

I never planned on having children, that's never been a desire of mine.

If I really don't feel like it, I'll change my plans and choose to be with my baby. If that moment makes me happier, I think that's more important.

As moms, we have so much on our plates. We're busy, and our family depends on us for a lot of things.

I want my son to never know the mommy who would rather watch him play basketball than play with him.

It wasn't such a pleasant experience. We went through 14 hours with contractions every two minutes, no epidural, no nothing. Every two minutes, I would pass out. I went to the hospital on Saturday, and Levi was born on Monday.

You're always going to feel like you're catching up, and part of that is just balancing work and motherhood and the whole feeling of needing to please, which I do think girls and women feel more than men.

I started training again four months after giving birth, and it was strange not to be fully in control - I'm so used to my body performing at a certain level, but it wasn't. I was like, 'Oh, man, can we go back to where we were, please?'

Wouldn't it be funny if I were a total nightmare? If I just shot 21-hour days and went over budget? But, you know, it's something I'm really careful about, because I am a mom, and also, I'm an actor. I'm a pleaser: I don't want to take up too much of people's time.

A babe at the breast is as much pleasure as the bearing is pain.

Oh, I have five kids; I have plenty of abundance.