Motherhood Quotes - Page 14

An excellent mother knows she has the beautiful life, and she is a big time programmer.

I'd just done the most important thing a person can ever do. I'd made life. At the very instant he was put into my arms, I loved this new person more than anyone but a mother can understand.

My mother does not own my hands, though she works hard to train them. My mother does not own my eyes, though she frequently directs their focus. My mother does not own my mind, though she yields great influence upon it. My heart, however, she owns completely, for it was hers the day I was born.

I found that when women were able to act in line with their natural inclinations and ambitions -- whether to work or stay at home -- they were generally happy, and generally felt that their children were happy too. Whereas those whose natural inclinations and ambitions had been thwarted -- whether they were working or stay-at-home moms -- were sure that they and their kids would be better off if they changed course, and either went to work or went home. The morality of the situation-- whether they felt it was good or bad for their chidlren-- derived, not from some external sense of the morality of their "choices," but from the amount of happiness generated by any given arrangement.

On a good day, my style is librarian chic. On a bad day, it's frumpy mother.

Whilst writing all this, I have had in my mind a woman, whose strong and serious mind would not have failed to support me in these contentions. I lost her thirty years ago [I was a child then]--nevertheless, ever living in my memory, she follows me from age to age.She suffered with me in my poverty, and was not allowed to share my better fortune. When young, I made her sad, and now I cannot console her. I know not even where her bones are: I was too poor then to buy earth to bury her!And yet I owe her much. I feel deeply that I am the son of woman. Every instant, in my ideas and words [not to mention my features and gestures], I find again my mother in myself. It is my mother's blood which gives me the sympathy I feel for bygone ages, and the tender remembrance of all those who are now no more.What return then could I, who am myself advancing towards old age, make her for the many things I owe her? One, for which she would have thanked me--this protest in favour of women and mothers.

Have you any idea how many children it takes to turn off one light in the kitchen Three. It takes one to say What light and two more to say I didn't turn it on.

I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love & duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting & challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring to it.

Now let's make Virginia Heffernan a man. Can you imagine the same kind of spittle-flecked rage directed at a busy working father who admits to feeding his kids Annie's Organic Mac & Cheese?

Childless people are always expected to explain themselves, although it would never occur to anyone to ask a woman why she became a mother (and to insist on getting good reasons)

I looked at the clock with the faint unconscious hope common to all mothers that time will somehow have passed magically away and the next time you look it will be bedtime.

There's nothing like your mother's sympathetic voice to make you want to burst into tears.

I am a mother and mothers don’t have the luxury of falling apart in front of their children, even when they are afraid, even when their children are adults.

There's a reason why the assumed goal for women in virginity-movement screeds is marriage and motherhood only: The movement only believes that's the only thing women are meant for.

Let us also acknowledge that the hearts which suffer the most from our wars are those of mothers. Their vital voices have been left out of the political equation for too long. An Iraqi or American mother cries the same as an Israeli or Afghan mother. The eyes of a mother who has suffered the loss of a child can destroy the soul of anyone who gazes upon them. More souls become casualties of war than physical bodies. War is a soul-shattering experience for the innocent.

..."Fun?" you ask. "Weren't feminists these grim-faced, humorless, antifamily, karate-chopping ninjas who were bitter because they couldn't get a man?" Well, in fact the problem was that all too many of them HAD gotten a man, married him, had his kids, and then discovered that, as mothers, they were never supposed to have their own money, their own identity, their own aspirations, time to pee, or a brain. And yes, some women indeed became bad-tempered as a result. After all, no anger, no social change.

I remember the shift that occurred after Abby was born - there'd been the great big before, where dying grandparents and natural disasters on the news were sad but mostly distant concerns. But then I became a mother, and when that happens, you cross a line that makes all loss a crushing, personal matter.

What is so real as the cry of a child?A rabbit's cry may be wilderBut it has no soul.

I know less than you thought, but more than you realize.

Alcohol was like a fun cousin I visited every once in a while but never planned a trip around.

Oh, Marilla, I thought I was happy before. Now I know that I just dreamed a pleasant dream of happiness. This is the reality.

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.

You’re only as happy as your least happy child,’ is the best description of motherhood I have ever read.

Woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man’s attitude may be, that problem is hers — and before it can be his, it is hers alone. She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it.

She grinned, a silty grin. 'You were my two dividends, yes? Don't you forget that.'Then she sighed, took a deep breath, and said, 'But what an investment. My life.

She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.

Florence imagined the Hammer and Sickle metallurgical plant to be an enormous brick factory like the ones in New York. But as she approached she saw it was in fact a small city of its own

The memories of home and of her children rose up in her imagination with a peculiar charm quite new to her, with a sort of new brilliance. That world of her own seemed quite new to her now so sweet and precious that she would not on any account spend an extra day outside it, and she made up her mind that she would certainly go back next day.

Thus far the mighty mystery of motherhood is this: How is it that doing it all feels like nothing is ever getting done.

But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen. -Thanksgiving in Mongolia, The New Yorker, November 18, 2013 Issue

Even if Mary gives birth to a child who is not her husband's, if she has a shining pride, they become a holy mother and child.

Motherhood is near to divinity. It is the highest, holiest service to be assumed by mankind.

I also know that I won't go forth and have children just in case I might regret missing it later in life; I don't think this is a strong enough motivation to bring more babies onto the earth. Though I suppose people do reproduce sometimes for that reason - for insurance against later regret. I think people have children for all manner of reasons- sometimes out of pure desire to nurture and witness life, sometimes out of an absence of choice, sometimes without thinking about it in any particular way. Not all the reasons to have children are the same, and not all of them are necessarily unselfish. Not all the reasons not to have children are the same, either, though. Nor are all those reasons necessarily selfish.

Raising human offspring is an endeavor nothing less than a continued labor of patience, hard work, organization and ongoing adaptation. All of which is unlike that expected of any other living creatures on the planet (or this sector of the universe, as far as we can tell). It demands the most complex responsibility and long-term commitment of any parenting life-form. Indeed, it is at times, at least for quality parents, an overwhelming, exhausting, even daunting task. Albeit, one that in the end, (and, most of the time even in the middle of it), is more than worth it.

Imagine that the world had created a new 'dream product' to feed and immunize everyone born on earth. Imagine also that it was available everywhere, required no storage or delivery, and helped mothers plan their families and reduce the risk of cancer. Then imagine that the world refused to use it.

Are we always to be wantingwhat isn't:the greenest grassaccord and principlemotherhood and career?Yet our age lies to uslike an asp,whispering. "Both.

I can imagine no heroism greater than motherhood.

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.

When a mother elevates her communication, she naturally elevates the outcomes of her child's life since a mother's words become her child's universe of possibilities.