Quotes About Nurturing

As parents, we'll go to the ends of the earth for our kids. As soon as they're born - and during pregnancy - we hope and pray for their good health. As soon as they're born, we swaddle them, feed them, and breathe a sigh of relief when we see their little bodies breathing and crying as they should.

We've long assumed that as we mature, we outgrow the need for the intense closeness, nurturing, and comfort we had with our caregivers as children and that as adults, the romantic attachments we form are essentially sexual in nature. This is a complete distortion of adult love.

Conventional wisdom held that coddling by mothers and other family members created clingy, overdependent youngsters who grew up into incompetent adults. Keeping an antiseptic rational distance was the proper way to rear children.

Instead, recognize and admit that you are emotionally attached to and dependent on your partner in much the same way that a child is on a parent for nurturing, soothing, and protection. Adult attachments may be more reciprocal and less centered on physical contact, but the nature of the emotional bond is the same.

women made the best beekeepers 'cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting.

She liked to tell everyone that women make the best beekeepers, 'cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting.

And there they were. All these mothers. I have more mothers than any eight girls off the street. They are the moons shining over me.

Ana, I don't doubt you should give yourself to motherhood. I only question what it is you're meant to mother.

You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside. ... When you're unsure of yourself, when you start pulling back into doubt and small living, she's the one inside saying, Get up from there and live like the glorious girl you are. She's the power inside you.

The moment she lifted me, I was wrapped in her smell. The scent got laid down in me in a permanent way and had all the precision of cinnamon.

You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside.

Our experience of our body has been immersed in shame. Waking to the sacredness of the female body will cause a woman to "enter into" her body in a new way, be at home in it, honor it, nurture it, listen to it, delight in its sensual music. She will experience her female flesh as beautiful and holy, as a vessel of the sacred. She will live from her gut and feet and hands and instincts and not entirely in her head.

The typical misogynist expects his partner to be a never-ending source of total, all-giving love, adoration, concern, approval, and nurturing. He enters into a relationship with a woman very much as a hungry, demanding infant does, with the unspoken expectation that she will be totally giving and will meet all his needs.

This letter begins the process of "reparenting" yourself. Reparenting means to dig deep within yourself to find a loving, validating parent for the hurting child you still carry inside. This is the parent who, through this letter, comforts, reassures, and protects that part of you that is still vulnerable and frightened.

The mother myth gives great cover to unloving mothers, who far too often operate undisturbed while their husbands, other family members, and society deflect any criticism or scrutiny aimed at them. Most societies glorify mothers, as if the mere act of giving birth makes them inherently capable of nurturing. That's simply not true.

No, a home is not where your heart is, it's where your effort is. It's where you cook and eat and sleep and take pains to decorate. It's where your memories are made and kept. It's the photos on the mantel, the artwork on the walls, the blankets that you snuggle under, the trees and flowers that you plant and care for.

It takes nothing to father a child. It takes everything to be a dad.

Only Grandfather knew the truth, that there was no career or calling more thrilling, demanding or rewarding than raising a child.

I don't want her to feel as if she's responsible for my happiness. Good lord, who would wish that on a child?

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.

While a fixation on results is certainly unhealthy, short-term goals can be useful developmental tools if they are balanced within a nurturing long-term philosophy.

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.

Perhaps it is impossible for people who don't have younger siblings - or, to be more precise, people never charged in childhood with complete responsibility for their younger siblings - to imagine the huge and tender hollow that such caretaking carves out in a child.

people never charged in childhood with complete responsibility for their younger siblings—to imagine the huge and tender hollow that such caretaking carves out in a child.