#motherhood

Are we always to be wanting what isn't: the greenest grass accord and principle motherhood and career? Yet our age lies to us like an asp, whispering. "Both. ↗

— Barbara Crooker

#age

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 and domestic artistry?...I wanted to go out and do things--write books, speak out. I've been driven by that. I don't know how to rest in myself very well, how to be content staying put. But Mother knows how to BE at home--and really, to be in herself. It's actually very beautiful what she does...I think part of me just longs for the way Mother experiences home. ↗

— Sue Monk Kidd

#motherhood #beauty

A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after--oh, that' s love by a different name. ↗

— Barbara Kingsolver

#children #love #motherhood #life

Every working mother has the things she dreads, things that keep her up in the night – pink eye, an ear infection, the parent-teacher conference, the school play – all forcing her to remind the people she works with that she is not, in fact, wholly devoted to business enterprises, but has another secret life. For me, the night terror is the 5 a.m. phone call from the nanny. ↗

— Emily Roberson

#motherhood #business

For a long time, I tried to make my ilfe work, to make our family work. I got tired, though. Five children wears you out until the only thing left inside you, the only thing you've got to give, is a memory of what you thought you'd be. ↗

— Amy Franklin-Willis

#family

The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops. ↗

— Anna Quindlen

#friendship

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? ↗

— Stephenie Meyer

#breaking-dawn #motherhood #self-sacrifice #life

There's nothing like your mother's sympathetic voice to make you want to burst into tears. ↗

— Sophie Kinsella

#motherhood #mothers #parents #parents-and-children #sympathy

She sat in the sunshine watching the life on the street and guarding within herself, her own mystery of life. ↗

— Betty Smith

#motherhood #pregnancy #life

Life was hard on mothers; but then, they just didn't understand. ↗

— James T. Farrell

#life