Best 779 quotes in «motherhood quotes» category

In case you haven't heard, let me tell you now, babies do not come out knowing how to breastfeed.

Indra believed that the birth of each of her sons had been accompanied by a sign... With Sarva, overnight her cascading black hair showed a thick clutch of grey. He was the child she would struggle most with.

In much the same way, motherhood has become the essential female experience, valued above all others: giving life is where it's at. "Pro-maternity" propaganda has rarely been so extreme. They must be joking, the modern equivalent of the double constraint: "Have babies, it's wonderful, you'll feel more fulfilled and feminine than ever," but do it in a society in freefall in which waged work is a condition of social survival but guaranteed to no one, and especially not to women. Give birth in cities where accommodation is precarious, schools have surrendered the fight and children are subject to the most vicious mental assault through advertising, TV, internet, fizzy drink manufacturers and so on. Without children you will never be fulfilled as a woman, but bringing up kids in decent conditions is almost impossible.

In order for them to be the best they can be, my children need me to be the best version of me I can be. That means taking charge of our lives, being strong even if I don’t feel it,being brave and believing that I can make things better.

In preparation for motherhood, I read books, I watched people around me, and I learned what to do but also what not to do. I quickly realized that my schooling and tertiary education did little to prepare me for being a parent. I even attended antenatal classes to prepare for the birth, but that is where it ended. When my baby was handed to me after delivery, I never received a manual. Oh, how I wished they came with one!

In the 1950s at least less was expected of women. Now we're supposed to build a career, build a home, be the supermum that every child deserves, the perfect wife, meet the demands of elderly parents, and still stay sane.

In the cookies of motherhood, you're the chocolate chips.

In thirty years, the narratives of my sons will be different from mine. Because today I am telling my truth and standing in a pool of my trauma, making myself uncomfortable and, hopefully, making you uncomfortable too. Today, I am making it known that when color is clear, when race and inequity are not ignored, and when our differences are not only acknowledged but championed as one of the most valuable aspects of life, we can work together to make meaningful strides toward true social justice.

I often must sacrifice my own needs and desires for the purpose of giving my children what they need and modeling for them the depths of Christ's love. "...make myself available in the routine tasks and myriad interruptions of daily life b/c I believe it is God's will for me to serve my family through them.

I resist the exhaustion, the sensitivity, my rounded belly and breasts. I resist, above all, the softness of pregnancy. Pregnancy is all curves and couches and naps, all tenderness and susceptibility.

I realized, listening to the silences that fell sometimes in my interview groups, that there are things that are sayable and unsayable about motherhood today. It is permissable, for example, to talk a lot about guilt, but not a lot about ambition. You can talk a lot about sex (or its lack) but not about the feelings that are keeping women from sleeping with their husbands. You can talk about society's lack of "appreciation" of mother's and the need for more social validation -- but not about policy that might actually make life better. You cannot really challenge the American culture of rugged individualism.

I realized that it was not Ko-san, now safely ditched for ever, but Ko-san's mother who stood in need of pity and consideration. She must still live on in this hard unpitying world, but he, once he had jumped [in battle], had jumped beyond such things. The case could well have been different, had he never jumped; but he did jump; and that, as they say, is that. Whether this world's weather turns out fine or cloudy no more worries him; but it matters to his mother. It rains, so she sits alone indoors thinking about Ko-san. And now it's fine, so she potters out and meets a friend of Ko-san's. She hangs out the national flag to welcome the returned soliders, but her joy is made querulous with wishing that Ko-san were alive. At the public bath-house, some young girl of marriageable age helps her to carry a bucket of hot water: but her pleasure from that kindness is soured as she thinks if only I had a daughter-in-law like this girl. To live under such conditions is to live in agonies. Had she lost one out of many children, there would be consolation and comfort in the mere fact of the survivors. But when loss halves a family of just one parent and one child, the damage is as irreparable as when a gourd is broken clean across its middle. There's nothing left to hang on to. Like the sergeant's mother, she too had waited for her son's return, counting on shriveled fingers the passing of the days and nights before that special day when she would be able once more to hang on him. But Ko-san with the flag jumped resolutely down into the ditch and still has not climbed back.

I spent a lifetime being small for those closest to me but this is not the woman my son will know

I snap and storm around and then spend long nights thinking of the most damaged adults I know and wondering if my particular brand of maternal fuckups are how they ended up like that.

Is she a good baby? People would ask me. Well, no, I'd say. That swirl of hair on the back of her head. We must have taken a thousand pictures of it.

I suddenly imagined the Buddha, staring at his naval, laughing. The truth is so simple, so free.

I struggle to discover what these silent sons of mine want, but words have always failed me. They are sullen even as they tell me they are okay. I know they are lying but there is nothing I can do.

is this what it is to be a mother who has to carry the weight of having to protect her children in a world that is conspiring to kill them? Are you forced to exist within a terrible trinity of emotion: rage, grief of guilt? What of the joy and the peace that loving a child brings? What of pride and of hope? Could it really be true that my mother has been given no door number four or five or six or even seven to walk through in order to know the wholeness of motherhood? Is she one in a long line of Black mothers limited to survival mode or grief?

I suffer from CLAUSTROPHOBIA, a fear of closed spaces.For example, I’m petrified that the WINE store will be closed before I have time to get there!!!

I take care of your children like the priceless jewels that they are and I don't expect a thank-you for my efforts. You never have to worry about our kids because you know no harm will come to them in my care. Do you have any idea what a burden I have taken off your shoulders? The ability to relieve another human being of worry and anxiety is the single greatest act of love one can do for another and I do it for you.

It didn't matter that there was a war on our doorstep. She had things to do, places to be.

I think she was too tired to play anymore, she was in a hurry to get to Heaven so she didn't wait, why didn't she wait for me?

It had been six weeks since I brought my second child, my daughter, kicking and screaming into the world. Six weeks, that magic number men everywhere look forward to and women dread.

I think I would scream too if someone violently jammed a big ass breast in my mouth.

I think women should have choices and should be able to do what they like, and I think it's a great choice to stay at home and raise kids, just as it's a great choice to have a career. But I don't entirely approve of people who get advanced degrees and then decide to stay at home. I think if society gives you the gift of one of those educations and you take a spot in a very competitive institution, then you should do something with that education to help others... But I also don't approve of working parents who look down on stay-at-home mothers and think they smother their children. Working parents are every bit as capable of spoiling children as ones who don't work - maybe even more so when they indulge their kids out of guilt. The best think anyone can teach their children is the obligation we all have toward each other - and no one has a monopoly on teaching that.

It is difficult to exaggerate the adverse influence of the precepts and practices of religion upon the status and happiness of woman. Owing to the fact that upon women devolves the burden of motherhood, with all its accompanying disabilities, they always have been, and always must be, at a natural disadvantage in the struggle of life as compared with men.... With certain exceptions, women all the world over have been relegated to a position of inferiority in the community, greater or less according to the religion and the social organisation of the people; the more religious the people the lower the status of the women...

It is a mother's noble conceit to believe she has the power to take her child's suffering and do it for him.

It is an oyster, with small shells clinging to its humped back. Sprawling and uneven, it has the irregularity of something growing. It looks rather like the house of a big family, pushing out one addition after another to hold its teeming life - here a sleeping porch for the children, and there a veranda for the play-pen; here a garage for the extra car and there a shed for the bicycles. It amuses me because it seems so much like my life at the moment, like most women's lives in the middle years of marriage. It is untidy, spread out in all directions, heavily encrusted with accumulations....

It is difficult to understand the journey of a hero,” the whisperer said.

It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus— that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying with our entire curved and silenced selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that are being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?

I try to feel my own edges in the low light. I send my mind to the outer edges of me — where do I end? I send myself to my innermost edges, and I see that in both directions  I am infinite.

It is true that breasts can induce sexual tension in men, but truer than that is the fact, that breasts are the primary and healthiest source of nutrition for the infant, so, if men can't use their higher mental faculty of self-restraint at the sight of breastfeeding at public places, then it's not the women who need to change their breastfeeding place, it's the men who need to work on their character.

It is within your loving and welcoming arms that a new generation will arrive & be greeted.

It must be difficult to be a mother,” she continued thoughtfully. “To create and nurture and raise a tiny person, to invest all of your heart in it, only to have them grow up and not need you anymore. It must hurt to feel that kind of abandonment. To be forced to let go because of time and nature and the well-being of… both the child and the mother, I suppose?

It portrayed motherhood as the highest position that a woman could achieve. For God had made Mary neither a prophet nor the messiah nor the daughter of God. Nor did God take the form of a woman. She was only the womb. She was a perpetual virgin too, and she endured the vilest harassment because of it, or so the story went. Rebecca couldn’t relate to the Virgin Mary at all.

It’s time to stop dreaming about who you want your son to be and help him become the healthy, happy, and successful man he’s supposed to be.

It's tough being AWESOME all the time, but the kids need someone to look up to!

It takes a tremendous amount of strength to be a single mother. To hold down the forte of a home, a life and your child's entire happiness.

It takes a great woman to respect the little man in her child, and the little child in her man.

I voted for every woman who has to leave a baby too soon, who has to downgrade her career, or who is made to feel invisible in her role as a mother.

I've always looked at America like a foster mother doing it only for the check. At any minute, I just knew she'd be ready to give up on me.

I want a son with you,” he said huskily. “I want a houseful of children.” Her eyes sketched his face. “Dark-haired little boys with green eyes….” He crushed her mouth under his, roughly, hungrily, possessively. “Don’t tempt me,” he said tightly. “I want you like hell.” “I wouldn’t stop you,” she said softly. “Anything you want, Garet. Anything.

I wanted to say, 'This is my life: sitting around dying of boredom, the whining, the tantrums, the baby weight, the endlessness of it all. The way the clock drags all day until Birdie’s naptime, at which point it magically speeds up, and I look up from scrolling around on the internet having not gotten to anything that I vowed to complete when I had the time: a real proper blog post, some freezable dinners, an updated resume, reading an actual book without interruption. It is soul-killing, hour by hour, to have nothing on the horizon but trips to Target, picture books that I read again and again and again until I could recite them in my sleep, new shoes to buy and watch my daughter outgrow like those super-sped-up videos of flowers blooming, an endless line of little kid shoes growing bigger and bigger while my own life grows smaller and smaller, too. My schedule used to be full of town halls and correspondence with people whose lives were being impacted by our policies. I used to spent my days figuring out how to connect with people about the things they cared most about, how to solve real problems. And now it’s just ‘oh, we’re out of baking soda so the diaper pail is making Birdie’s room smell like the town dump. Better go to Target.’ And that’ll be a whole day’s accomplishment. Shit.' But I didn’t say all that. I knew by now, after having versions of this conversation a hundred thousand times, that Graham would never understand. Could never understand.

I was not afraid of darkness When I was in you.

I was lounging in the kitchen, enjoying the small fermata between emptying the dishwasher and reloading it. It's a glamorous life.

I went back to the women and said, 'Tell me exactly what you want us to do.' And they said, 'Don't do anything for us, do something for our children'.

I was unhappy there and going through a rough transition, so I was desperate for any friend I could find that I could talk to. I thought that's what he was. We had this secret from my mom, who I didn't like much at the time. It was a harmless secret, so I didn't feel bad about it. All we did was go to the movies and hang out doing fun things all day. It wasn't until much later that the warning signs began, but I was still too young and stupid to see them for what they were at the time. Basically, he was patient as he built up the trust between us. He became a close friend and convinced me that he was on my side somehow. He took total advantage of my ignorance and totally betrayed me a few years later, when he slept with me. After my mom found out, she went psychotic and all she gave a fuck about was what had been done to her. She didn't care about anything except for how hurt she was by what had happened. She blamed me and him equally, telling me that sixteen years old was old enough to know better. Even though I never initiated a goddamn thing with him, and never would have. Even though it happened in the apartment she and I had gotten together, that he was not supposed to be staying in.

I wondered if perhaps I'd gone mad. I had known this man less than twenty-four hours and already I wanted to raise his children.

I will openly admit it: I was Baba's boy, but Mama is the human I aspire to be.

I wonder if all moms do this—try to make the terrifying seem mundane.