Supermom wasn’t a bad job description. The pay was lousy if you were talking about real money. But the payoff was priceless in so many other ways.

Whatever life brings, we’ll share,” she says, and “I can do no more than the best I can.

In the book Soldiers on the Home Front, I was greatly struck by the fact that in childbirth alone, women commonly suffer more pain, illness and misery than any war hero ever does. An what’s...

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

noble” – be willing to someday join a larger conversation about how we might work together as a society to construct a world where healthy children can be raised and healthy families can prosper without...

Young women are closer to the time when they were manipulative and childish and they don’t let their babies manipulate them as much as older mothers do. These are only my conclusions from watching children...

He had also been demonstrative and intelligent from the very beginning, his questions startlingly insightful. She would watch him absorb a new idea and wonder what effect it would have on him, because, with Edgar,...

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

…motherhood is the thing in a woman’s life that catches her by total and complete surprise.

I’m getting stale. I always do this time of year. I keep my nose to the grindestone and put in long hours and rustle up good meals and do all the chores and run errands...

I don’t think the world should assume that we are all natural mothers. And it does. I don’t think it’s such a big thing anymore, but the idea that you sacrifice everything for your children—it’s...

-what’s really unique about maternal anxiety today is our belief that if something goes wrong with or for our children, it’s a reflection on us as mothers. Because we believe we should be able to...

What you call your life is not yours at all–not yours to plan, manipulate, or control, at least not very often. . . . In fleeting moments of deep satisfaction and insight, I saw the...

Too many times I’d left him reaching for me, from a babysitter’s arms. “Am I still a mother?” I asked myself… What parts of the day could I cut out and still give him enough?...

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...

Mother is her son’s first god; she must teach him the most important lesson of all – how to love.

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...

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

It seems to me that since I’ve had children, I’ve grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self...

A wise mother is the unifying force between father and children; her seed of love produces a harvest of trust.

The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.

While parenthood served as no disadvantage at all to men, there was evidence of a substantial “motherhood penalty”. Mothers received only half as many callbacks as their identically qualified childless counterparts.

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.

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.

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.