#motherhood

my mother, poor fish, wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a week, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile! why don't you ever smile?" and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw ↗

— Charles Bukowski

#facade #love #motherhood #pain #love

Motherhood is a nature, and fatherhood is a culture.. Motherhood is a certainty while fatherhood is an assumption.. Motherhood is original to the female whereas fatherhood is an acquired extension.. ↗

— Arabic saying

#nature

A mother isn’t the person who births you; it’s the person who rears you and shows you love. ↗

— Raquel Cepeda

#mother #mother-defined #motherhood #mothers-and-daughter #mothers-and-daughters

Franklin, I was absolutely terrified of having a child. Before I got pregnant, my visions of child rearing- reading stories about cabooses with smiley faces at bedtime, feeding glop into slack mouths- all seemed like pictures of someone else. I dreaded confrontation with what could prove a closed, stony nature, my own selfishness and lack of generosity, the thick tarry powers of my own resentment. However intrigued by a “turn of the page,” I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else’s story. And I believe that this terror is precisely what must have snagged me, the way a ledge will tempt one to jump off. The very surmountability of the task, its very unattractiveness , was in the end what attracted me to it. (32) ↗

— Lionel Shriver

#motherhood #nature

I remember the sift that occurred after Abby was born - there'd been the great big before, where dying grandparents and natural disasters on the news were sad but mostly distant concerns. But then I became a mother, and when that happens, you cross a line that makes all loss a crushing, personal matter. ↗

— DEB CALLETI

#motherhood #nature

Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who'd sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who'd cried with me over boyfriends, who'd clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother? Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#children #motherhood #parenting #life

The Vatican won't prosecute pedophile priests but I decide I'm not ready for motherhood and it's condemnation for me? These are the same people that won't support national condom distribution that PREVENTS teenage pregnancy. ↗

— Sonya Renee Taylor

#catholic #feminism #feminist #motherhood #organized-religion