Quotes About Parenthood

I never believed I was going to have a baby until I heard her cry.

Their children had bound them together in a way that she knew didn't always happen to other couples. Sharing stories about their children—laughing about them, wondering about their futures—was one of the greatest pleasures of her marriage. She'd married John-Paul because of the father she knew he would one day be.

All her children would be single. All possible grandchildren swept off the table in one fell swoop. It would knock her for six, as their father would say. He hated cricket, but liked that particular sporting colloquialism.

It was like I woke up when he was born. It was like he had nothing to do with that night.

Sometimes when I look at all my children, I say to myself, Lillian, you should have stayed a virgin.

I love every second of being a mom.

At its best, parenthood was a challenge. At its worst, it was a struggle through quicksand.

Now that children don't till your fields or take you in when you're incontinent, there is no sensible reason to have them, and it's amazing that with the advent of effective contraception anyone chooses to reproduce at all.

We agreed that whether we became parents would be 'the single most important decision we would ever make together.' Yet the very momentousness of the decision guaranteed that it never seemed real, and so remained on the level of whimsy. Every time one of us raised the question of parenthood, I felt like a seven-year-old contemplating a Thumbelina that wets iself for Christmas.

Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it's against the rules, isn't it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn't.

unto me a son was born, and I felt nothing.

take me less seriously.) 10. Paying the piper. (Parenthood repays a debt. But who wants to pay a debt she can escape? Apparently, the childless get away with something sneaky. Besides, what good is repaying a debt to the wrong party? Only the most warped mother could feel rewarded for her trouble by the fact that at last her daughter's life is hideous, too.) Those, as best I can recall, are the pygmy misgivings I weighed beforehand, and I've tried not to

catalogued the downsides of parenthood, "son might turn out killer" would never have turned up on the list. Rather, it might have looked something like this: 1. Hassle. 2. Less time just the two of us. (Try no time just the two of us.) 3. Other people. (PTA meetings. Ballet teachers. The kid's insufferable friends and their insufferable parents.) 4. Turning into a cow. (I was slight, and preferred to stay that way. My sister-in-law had

La paternidad es el pago de una deuda. Pero… ¿quién quiere pagar una deuda de la que puede escaparse? En apariencia, quienes no tienen hijos se libran con alguna artimaña. Además, ¿de qué sirve pagar una deuda a quien no se la debes? Sólo la madre más retorcida siente compensados sus desvelos por el hecho de que, finalmente, la vida de su hija resulte tan horrorosa como la suya.

My approach to parenthood was conditional, and the conditions were strict. I did not want to mother an imbecile or a paraplegic; whenever I saw fatigued women wheeling their stick-limbed progeny with muscular dystrophy for water therapy at Nyack Hospital, my heart didn't melt, it sank.

What possessed us? We were so happy! Why, then, did we take the stake of all we had and place it all on this outrageous gamble of having a child? Of course you consider the very putting of that question profane. Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it's against the rules, isn't it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn't.

Mothers' bodies are not their own. The happiest ones seem to have forgotten what it is like to want themselves back at all.

Once, I was my mother's daughter. Now I am my daughter's mother.

Kim sometimes thinks that women practice being mothers on men until they become actual mothers, leaving behind a kind of vacancy.

I thought of what I'd allowed myself to become, for you. I never wanted that bloody child. I only wanted you.

And she felt it then, like a needle in her heart, the love her mother always talked about. 'You won't understand how much I love you until you're a mother yourself.

Noah was born she backed off completely for a while, barely visiting

As a son and as a father, there are still various things that I haven't done as well as I should have - that's my dilemma and regret.

My mother was in vaudeville, but after she had her children, she quit working.