I am a mother-tired, but when my soul doth magnify, my time doth magnify.

All these people keep waxing sentimental about how fabulously well I am doing as a mother, how competent I am, but I feel inside like when you’re first learning to put nail polish on your right hand with your left. You can do it, but it doesn’t look all that great around the cuticles.

Mother is in herself a concrete denial of the idea of sexual pleasure since her sexuality has been placed at the service of reproductive function alone. She is the perpetually violated passive principle; her autonomy has been sufficiently eroded by the presence within her of the embryo she brought to term. Her unthinking ability to...

If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms.

Motherhood is priced Of God, at price no man may dare To lessen or misunderstand.

Aristotle didn’t have a problem with abortion,” she says. “Oh, well, good, that’s a comfort,” I say.

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.

Don’t hide behind that nonsense. What kind of message is the Church sending to women? Only virgin children are pure? Experienced mothers are impure and unfit to raise Christ? It’s creepy and insulting when you think about it, but you would have me suspend rational judgment and just accept something I would tear your eyes...

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,...

Our culture sends some amazingly contradictory messages about what an ideal mother is like. Mothers try to live up to these ideals without recognizing the contradictions or the improbability of the task. As mothers, you are often expected to have a fulfilling career, time for personal interests, a rewarding marriage, involvement in your communities, a...

Because I’m your mother, that’s why.

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.

If I were asked to define Motherhood. I would have defined it as Love in its purest form. Unconditional Love. ~~ Revathi Sankaran

If it weren’t for her setting me free, I may still be a caged bird today, holding my own daughter captive on a shit-laden perch.

Mother seemed happiest when making and tending home, the sewing machine whistling and the Mixmaster whirling. Her deepest impulse was to nurture, to simply dwell; it had nothing to do with ambition and achievement in the world…How had I come to believe that my world of questing and writing was more valuable than her dwelling...

Intensive mothering is the ultimate female Olympics: We are all in powerful competition with each other, in constant danger of being trumped by the mom down the street, or in the magazine we’re reading. The competition isn’t just over who’s a good mother–it’s over who’s the best. We compete with each other; we compete with...

A challenging career suddenly seemed more productive to me because I could measure the results of my work. These precious little ones had endless needs. They were busy little sinful creatures who demanded all of my body, time, life, emotions, and attention! As much as I loved my children, I often felt like a failure....

H.L. Mencken once said that Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time. As she looked down at her dead child, Mary Beth realized that the unbearable sense of loss she felt was tempered by gratitude and a kind of relief. There would be no more boyfriends now, no...

Toys have taken over my family room. I watch Mary Poppins, and no matter how many spoonfuls of sugar I eat, action figures won’t march into a bin with the snap of my fingers.

A virtuous mother sows and sows seeds of greatness with great life in mind.

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 was there for every moment. It made me a better woman and a better person. I can’t say that all the damage done by my original family doesn’t still haunt me; it does. But my life would have been bereft of deeper meaning and experiences without marriage and motherhood.

When we combine very real workplace inequalities with these romantic opt-out stories, the idea that “having it all” is a laughable goal becomes enshrined as immutable truth. And when we portray opting out as a simple matter of “choice,” we ignore the systematic problems that make combining work and motherhood so difficult.

I am often slow in catching up to the times, but even so, I still cannot even grip this idea: With nothing more than pitocin in your IV drip, you can sooner control the date and time of the birth of a human being– the gushing entry into the great blue world of a whole...

Motherhood doesn’t have a nationality

We may revere motherhood, the hazy abstraction, the cream-of-wheat-with-a-halo ideal, but a mother is just a kind of woman, after all, and women are trouble and not so valuable. Low-income mothers drag down the country—why’d they have kids if they couldn’t support them? Middle-class mothers are boring frumps. Elite ones are obsessed sanctimommies.

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...

All these things we do bespeak a terrible anxiety: that our children simply will not be able to make it through life if we do not perform totemic acts to keep them on the path toward self-perfection and keep their lives pure and unfettered by distracting emotion, personality foibles, or less-than-ideal experiences.

He still had the power to stagger her at timessimply the fact that he was breathing that all his organs were in their proper places that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small sturdy limbs. He was her flesh and blood her mother had told her in the hospital the day Akash was born.

The artist and the mother are vehicles, not originators. They don’t create the new life, they only bear it. This is why birth is such a humbling experience. The new mom weeps in awe at the little miracle in her arms. She knows it came out of her but not from her, through her but...

For the most part, each day listed a different rendition of “Justin ate well” and “Justin took a great nap”. Every now and then they noted Justin doing unusual things, like biting. I was embarrassed to read “Justin is biting his friends again” or “Justin did better with biting and only bit one boy”. Other...

Motherhood is when eating chicken soup; the kids get the chicken and you get the soup and you would still feel happily stuffed.

Each woman must realize that she is the final guardian of her unborn child.

What is it about the relationship of a mother that can heal or hurt us? Her womb is the first landscape we inhabit. It is here we learn to respond – to move, to listen, to be nourished and grow. In her body we grow to be human as our tails disappear and our gills...

It’s come at last”, she thought, “the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache.

Throughout history, the most brutal cultures have always been distinguished by maternal-infant separation.

A mother’s body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it’s own entreaties to body and soul.

Young mothers are the most vicious tribe in the world if you don’t fit in.

Anything of worth is costly: devotion to Christ, a strong marriage, financial responsibility, a life of integrity, and of course, fearlessly feminine mothering.

Pthe wail of the living had answered the call of universal motherhood within her wild beast which the dead could not still.

A photograph of a disposable diaper floating in the arctic miles away from human habitat fueled my daily determination to save at least one disposable diaper from being used and created. One cloth diaper after another, days accumulated into years and now our next child is using the cloth diapers we bought for our firstborn.

The civil law, as well as nature herself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender…The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as in the nature of things, indicates the...

If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn’t mind being their mother.

Love not often, but forever. It’s one of my mother’s sayings, and all my life it has been the story of my heart…. Love for my mother; love for my friends; the dark and complex love of a woman for a man. But when Fleur was born, everything changed. A man who has never seen...

Annie turned away, her eyes glittering. ‘Here’s what no one tells you,’ she said. ‘When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.’ She looked up at me. ‘You can’t win. Either you have...

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...

A pair of young mothers now became the centre of interest. They had risen from their lying-in much sooner than the doctors would otherwise have allowed. (French doctors are always very good about recognizing the importance of social events, and certainly in this case had the patients been forbidden the ball the might easily have...

getting lucky” means drinking an entire cup of COFFEE while it’s still HOT!

He carries no burden, he feels no pain. What man, like woman, lies down in the darkness and gets up with child? The gentle, smiling ones own the good secret. Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make flesh that holds fast and binds eternity.

The journey of motherhood centers on being the person God has chosen out of all humanity and space and time to care for these souls, these beings who will exist for all eternity.