I can speak of our baby like this to no one else. Who but his father would linger over the exact width of his gummy little smile or the blueness of his eyes, or the...

This is one of the weird things about motherhood. You can predict that some of your best moments will happen around the toilet at six am while you’re holding a pile of fingernail clipping like...

Fear not, the time is comingFear not, your bones are strongFear not, help is nearbyFear not, Gula is nearFear not, the baby is at the doorFear not, he will live to bring you honorFear not,...

The very matrix of our ability to love and bond in later life, maternal sensitivity – or lack thereof – also determines cultural tenor.

But kids don’t stay with you if you do it right. It’s the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won’t be needed in the long run.

[On visitors after having a new baby…] “Put a lock on the door, barricade it if you have to. No one gets past that front door unless they come bearing one of two things: food...

Unfeeling thing that I was, the sensibilities of the maternal heart were Greek and Hebrew to me.

When mother-cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth

guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine

Parenting has nothing to do with perfection. Perfection isn’t even the goal, not for us, not for our children. Learning together to live well in an imperfect world, loving each other despite or even because...

Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it’s against the rules, isn’t it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn’t.

Confession: Having kids did not fix me. I was not somehow more whole, less botched-up, or more certain just because I had a kid… I was still me, with all my holes and problems and...

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...

My music teacher offered twittering madrigals and something about how, in Italy, in Italy, the oranges hang on the tree. He treated me – the humiliation of it – as a soprano.These, by contrast, are...

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves — our own hungers,...

MOMBIE – noun – Suffers from forgetfulness, fatigue, exhaustion, moodiness, sleeplessness, confusion and moments of insanity!Has difficulty eating or drinking anything while it’s still hot and peeing alone.

When she had him along, the world looked different, and she liked the way she saw things she’d never seen before. . . But she noticed other things, too — the way she herself felt...

There’s no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids.

I would keep her, and raise her, and love her, even if she had to teach me how to do it.

Even prior to marriage and motherhood, it’s always been about prioritising and focusing on what you can commit to. That’s been my approach to every aspect of my life, be it my relationships or my...

Reunion with the mother is a siren call haunting our imagination. Once there was bliss, and now there is struggle. Dim memories of life before the traumatic separation of birth may be the source of...

I think that the best thing we can do for our children is to allow them to do things for themselves, allow them to be strong, allow them to experience life on their own terms,...

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...

At the moment of giving birth to a child, is the mother separate from the child? You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you...

Once your baby arrives, the world is no more the same than you are. Because from our very bodies we add to the collective human destiny. Our deepest urge is always toward life, to wholeness...

When a baby is born the mother in particular enters into a new larger relationship with the world. She has become connected to all people. She is part of keeping us on earthnot the “us”...

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...

Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to...

Laborsaving devices do not necessarily save time, but they increase our expectactations of what mothers should accomplish

German is a much more precise language than English. Americans throw the word love around for everything: I love my wife! I love all my friends! I love rock music! I love the rain! I...

Women do desperately need models for power other than the maternal.

Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but...

The health of your future kids does not start with their birth—it starts with you, right now, well before you plan to impregnate your wife.

It was deflating to realize how much my own family’s quality of life might improve if I replaced myself with a Fundamentalist stay-at-home daughter.

When my friends began to have babies and I came to comprehend the heroic labor it takes to keep one alive, the constant exhausting tending of a being who can do nothing and demands everything,...

It would seem that something which means poverty, disorder, and violence every single day should be avoided entirely, but the desire to beget children is a natural urge.

Ain’t nothing worse to a mama than losing her baby—

I sighed and deleted the message, imagining the dirty clothes multiplying like rabbits, because that’s what they do when I’m not around.

An industrious mother is an initiator of a good course; always charting new course for her loved ones.

As Ramses did the same for his mother, he saw that her eyes were fixed on him. She had been unusually silent. She had not needed his father’s tactless comment to understand the full implications...

My Shepherd will supply my need”These are the things that inspire me.

I once heard someone on the radio saying that a bee is never more than forty minutes away from starving to death, and this fact has stayed with me because it seems to have a...

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...

These girls probably use double negatives and watch “A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila” with their babies instead of reading Eric Carle.

The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.

…always-the sharp,plaintive edgeon the rimof the spoonof my giving.(lines 8-13 of the poem ‘Confessions’)

We seem to feel as though the life our children have — that we have built for them — is just a delicate house of cards, held together by the most intricate balancing of all...

When you go into labor you see that you are not the captain of the ship. You are the ship. There is no captain. There are only the waves.

But would I have chosen to be Paul? I’d miss Will too much, the feel of his shins.

Mothers always worry. There’s no off switch.