Quotes About Motherhood

I especially wish to praise and encourage young mothers. The work of a mother is hard, too often unheralded work... Do the best you can through these years, but whatever else you do, cherish that role that is so uniquely yours and for which heaven itself sends angels to watch over you and your little ones.

Our only hope to speak with kindness, to lead with patience, and to not threaten our children with homicide is to ensure our spiritual reserves are not bone-dry. Moms are the middle of the flow chart; the arrows of exertion flow constantly out from us, but when no arrows of strength, grace, and peace are flowing in, the whole mechanism is in danger. Goodness in equals goodness out.

She works hard because she has to. She isn't attempting to discern an elusive calling. She is raising her babies, working for a living, doing the best she can with what she has. Her purpose may not venture outside the walls of her home. We will never know her name. She probably won't step into leadership or innovation or advocacy or social revolution. Yet she is also worthy of the calling she has received.

My mom went back to college when she had four kids in high school, middle school, and elementary school, and it has always been a source of pride for me. She was a teacher in her heart and needed the degree to match, so she chased the dream long before it was convenient or well-timed or easy. Yes, she fell off the oat bran wagon (kindly recall 1990) and we got store-bought prom dresses, but we watched her fly. It never occurred to us to settle for less.

Because no one told me not to, I had a baby every two years, and it was truly the Mother Load.

Motherhood often feels like a game of guilt management; sometimes the guilt is overwhelming and debilitating, sometimes just a low simmer, but it always feels right there. There is never any shortage of fuel to feed the beast, so the whole mechanism is constantly nourished to administer shame and a general feeling of incompetency.

I think I've become more like my mom just because of what we're both interested in, children and teaching and writing.

I love kids and children, and I love being a mom.

My mom really instilled in me that I'm beautiful and I can do anything, and I echo that now with my own girls.

You know what makes me feel old? When I see girls who are 20-something, or the new crop of actresses, and I think, Aren't we kind of the same age? You lose perspective. Or being offered the part of a woman with a 17-year-old child. It's like, "I'm not old enough to have a 17-year-old!" And then you realize, well, yeah, you are.

A woman was not considered related to her own child by the bizarre laws of England. The man's seed contained the whole of the baby, so they said, who nestled inside the woman for most of a year before she bore it. This made the child the father's, not the mother's.

The context needs to be that the goal is a healthy mom. Because mothers never make decisions without thinking about that healthy baby. And to suggest otherwise is insulting and degrading and disrespectful.

mothers are not informed enough to know that this is not a good idea, and that any woman who has the right information would not want to have her baby induced.

You know I'm mad about you and you're the most fabulous daughter a mother could want. When you call me Mommy, it pushes my buttons and makes me feel older than I really am. Plus, you're a precocious child. Why don't you call me Anjoli?" We weren't like mother and daughter. It was more like two single women sharing an apartment in Greenwich Village in the seventies. Except I was five.

One horror of motherhood lies in the moments when she can see both the exquisiteness of her child and his utter inconsequence to others.

It wore on Stephanie more than she'd expected, dropping off Chris for kindergarten, waving or smiling at some blond mother releasing blond progeny from her SUV or Hummer, and getting back a pinched, quizzical smile whose translation seemed to be: Who are you again? How could they not know, after months of daily mutual sightings? They were snobs or idiots or both, Stephanie told herself, yet she was inexplicably crushed by their coldness.

Let me tell you something, dearie: the world is a closed door to an unwed mother and her illegitimate child. If

a higher power touched our mother's head and said: Stop what you're doing! Two little girls are waiting to be born, and you need to have them right away, because the world is desperate for their brightness.

One horror of motherhood lies in the moments when she can see both the exquisiteness of her child and his utter inconsequence to others. There are so many boys in the world.

Agnes felt her daughter's impatience that she go, and it made her want to cleave, as if holding Anna would somehow awaken in her daughter the need to be held. Agnes clasped her fiercely, trying through sheer force to open the folded part of Anna, so deeply recessed.

Then she gathered us into her arms and we held her, feeling the heat from under her skin, and we were the three-headed monster again, with its three yearning hearts. We held our mother as long as we could, and then longer, until she started to laugh. My beautiful grown-up daughters, she said.

A sudden reconfiguration of your past can change the fit and feel of your adulthood. It may cleave you from the mother whose single goal has been your happiness. If your husband has transformed greatly in his own life, he will understand your transformation.

One horror of motherhood lies in the moments when she can see both the exquisiteness of her child and his utter inconsequence to others. There are so many boys in the world. From a distance they look alike even to her, especially in uniform.

I had absolutely no idea how I had ballooned during my pregnancy. All I thought about was eating plenty of food to keep my baby healthy.