“Our children want more than presents, that want our PRESENCE.”
“Women do desperately need models for power other than the maternal.”
“Mothers are all slightly insane.”
“There s no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids.”
“Motherhood is near to divinity. It is the highest, holiest service to be assumed by mankind.”
“It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?”
“She has watched every moment of your life, almost, and she loves you as God does, to the marrow of your bones.”
“Mothers got a hard road to travel, believe me.”
“You could run from someone you feared, you could try to fight someone you hated. All my reactions were geared toward those kinds of killers – the monsters, the enemies. When you loved the one who was killing you, it left you no options. How could you run, how could you fight, when doing so would hurt that beloved one? If your life was all you had to give your beloved, how could you not give it? If it was someone you truly loved?”
“Sometimes when you pick up your child you can feel the map of your own bones beneath your hands, or smell the scent of your skin in the nape of his neck. This is the most extraordinary thing about motherhood - finding a piece of yourself separate and apart that all the same you could not live without.”
“Motherhood is a choice you make everyday, to put someone else s happiness and well-being ahead of your own, to teach the hard lessons, to do the right thing even when you re not sure what the right thing is...and to forgive yourself, over and over again, for doing everything wrong.”
“A mother knows what her child s gone through, even if she didn t see it herself.”
“You don t have favourites among your children, but you do have allies. ”
“She [my mother] was the force around which our world turned. My mother was propelled through the universe by the brute force of reason. She was the judge in all our arguments. One disapproving word from her was enough to send us off to hide in a corner, where we would cry and fantasize our own martyrdom. And yet. One kiss could restore us to princedom. Without her, our lives would dissolve into chaos.”
“Sé que mi familia es así pero este silencio me pesa. Tengo la impresión de tener millones de cosas que decir que, en el fondo, no interesan a nadie. Me viene a la memoria lo que decían los supervivientes de los campos de la última guerra al volver a su hogar: las pesadillas no se cuentan. Los demás no imaginan este género de pesadillas. Se instala, entre ellos y nosotras, una especie de statu quo que parece decir: ‘Estás aquí, se acabó, no hablemos más de ello.”
“To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours, and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, boots, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can imagine how this can exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute.”
“New mothers enter the world of parenting feeling much like Alice in Wonderland. - Being a mother is one of the most rewarding jobs on earth and also one of the most challenging. - Motherhood is a process. Learn to love the process. - There is a tremendous amount of learning that takes place in the first year of your baby’s life; the baby learns a lot, too. - It is sometimes difficult to reconcile the fantasy of what you thuoght motherhood would be like, and what you thought you would be like as a mother, with reality. - Take care of yourself. If Mommy isn’t happy, no one else in the family is happy either. - New mother generally need to lower their expectations. - A good mother learns to love her child as he is and adjusts her mothering to suit her child.”