#motherhood

With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood. ↗

— Isadora Duncan

#glory #motherhood #pay #price

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#parents-and-children #motherhood

Literature gives us a window into other people's experiences in other places, in other times, so I thought it would be really interesting to investigate how different people had written about motherhood, and childhood. ↗

— Natalie Merchant

#childhood #different #different people #experiences #gives

In my previous life I was a civil attorney. At one point I truly believed that was what I wanted to be- but that was before I'd been handed a fistful of crushed violets from a toddler. Before I understood that the smile of a child is a tattoo: indelible art. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#art

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

— Susan McCutcheon

#nature

The life of a mother is the life of a child: you are two blossoms on a single branch. ↗

— Karen Maezen Miller

#life #motherhood #parenting #life

The most difficult part of being a mother was to observe the mistakes of one's children: the foolish loves, the desperate solitude and alienation, the lack of will, the gullibility, the joyous and naive leaps into the unknown, the ignorance, the panicky choices and the utter determination. ↗

— David Bergen

#age

A mother has far greater influence on her children than anyone else, and she must realize that every word she speaks, every act, every response, her attitude, even her appearance and manner of dress affect the lives of her children and the whole family. It is while the child is in the home that he gains from his mother the attitudes, hopes, and beliefs that will determine the kind of life he will live and the contribution he will make to society. ↗

— N. Eldon Tanner

#attitude

Whatever life brings, we'll share," she says, and "I can do no more than the best I can. ↗

— Carol Emshwiller

#motherhood #attitude

If I – as a beneficiary of that exact formula – will concede that my own life was indeed enriched by that precise familial structure, will the social conservatives please (for once!) concede that this arrangement has always put a disproportionately cumbersome burden on women? Such a system demands that mothers become selfless to the point of near invisibility in order to construct these exemplary encironments for their families. And might those same social conservatives – instead of just praising mothers as “sacred” and “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 women have to scrape bare the walls of their own souls to do so? ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#sacrifice #family