Best 779 quotes in «motherhood quotes» category

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

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

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.

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 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?

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 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 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 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?

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

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.

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 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 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’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 great woman to respect the little man in her child, and the little child in her man.

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

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

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.

I wish I had lost an arm or a leg. It would have been much easier than losing a part of my heart, which lives on, but now beats to a different rhythm.

I wonder if all mothers feel like this the moment they realize their daughters are growing up—as if it is impossible to believe that the laundry I once folded for her was doll-sized; as if I can still see her dancing in lazy pirouettes along the lip of the sandbox. Wasn't it yesterday that her hand was only as big as the sand dollar she found on the beach? That same hand, the one that's holding a boy's; wasn't it just holding mine, tugging so that I might stop and see the spiderweb, the milkweed pod, any of a thousand moments she wanted me to freeze? Time is an optical illusion—never quite as solid or strong as we think it is.

Listen kid, it’s just you and me now, so let’s help each other out. Always be honest with me, and show me how to be the mother and father I never had. I’ll make a mess of things sometimes, and I’m sorry in advance, but I’ll try. My word is bond.

Lying by Johannes in the darkness, envying him the unquestioned habit of sleep, the way he could remove himself, I wished that I might pause, take stock; that is a thought that comes back to me now: that I would like to pause pregnancy like a film, to walk away, do something else, returning later when I have had time to rest or think. I had always, before my pregnancy, regarded my body as a kind of tool, a necessary mechanism, largely self-sustaining, which, unless malfunctioning, did what I instructed of it, and so to have my agency so abruptly curtailed, revealed as little more than conceit, felt like betrayal. I no longer listened to my own command. Inside me, while I wished that I might be able to be elsewhere, that I might leave my body in the frowsty sheets and go downstairs to sit in the dark kitchen, unswollen and cool, cells split to cells, thoughtless and ascending, forming heart and lungs, eyes, ears- a hand grew nails- this child already going about its business, its still uncomprehending mind unreachable, apart.

Long ago you were a dream in your mother's sleep, and then she awoke to give you birth.

Looking up at her, Teensy said, "Any baggage you have, Bébé, ceased to be only yours the minute that sperm hit that egg.

Love had still seemed like such a paltry thing in the face of all my doubts then, much the way it felt now. David had worries my love couldn’t touch, fears my love couldn’t easily dispel. My love seemed like a well-worn blanket instead of the titanium shield I needed.

Make room for who you are by knowing who you’re not.

Mama Ginger came calling, to set the alarm on my biological clock. Oh, and to remind me that there’s no point to me being a woman if I never have children.” “Well, if that’s true, I wasted a hell of a lot of money on panty hose and lipstick.” Jettie snorted.

Looking after children is a low-status occupation. It is isolating, frequently boring, relentlessly demanding and exhausting. 7

Looking with his eyes? Seriously? What else would he look around with?” Trish nonchalantly uses her middle finger to scratch her temple. “Toddlers learn by making connections between the body part and the action.” Vince blinks. “Oh, so talking to a kid like that’s normal?” “Someday I hope to have a conversation where I don’t sound like a character from Star Wars.” “I can see how you’d look forward to that.

Mamas are always crying about how one day they see you as a baby, and the next morning, they see you growed up.

Man of an hard heart! Hear me, Proud, Stern, and Cruel! You could have saved me; you could have restored me to happiness and virtue, but would not! You are the destroyer of my Soul; You are my Murderer, and on you fall the curse of my death and my unborn Infant’s! Insolent in your yet-unshaken virtue, you disdained the prayers of a Penitent; But God will show mercy, though you show none. And where is the merit of your boasted virtue? What temptations have you vanquished? Coward! you have fled from it, not opposed seduction. But the day of Trial will arrive! Oh! then when you yield to impetuous passions! when you feel that Man is weak, and born to err; When shuddering you look back upon your crimes, and solicit with terror the mercy of your God, Oh! in that fearful moment think upon me! Think upon your Cruelty! Think upon Agnes, and despair of pardon!