Motherhood Quotes

MOM—Mistress Of Miracles

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

What is more powerful than the love of a mother? Perhaps only God's hand in answering her earnest pleadings on your behalf.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Jesus of Nazareth is so entirely one of them they can hardly find anything special about him at all. He fits right in with the messy busyness of everyday life. And it is here, in their midst, with their routines of fish and wine and bread, that he proclaims the kingdom of heaven. The gospel, Jesus teaches, is in the yeast, as a woman kneads it with her bare hands into the cool, pungent dough. It is in the soil, so warm and moist when freshly turned by muscular arms and backs. It is in the tiny seeds of mustard and wheat, painstakingly saved and dried from last season's harvest...Jesus placed the gospel in these tactile things, with all the grit of life surrounding him, because it is through all this touching, tasting, and smelling that his own sheep- his beloved, hardworking, human flock- know. And it is through these most mundane, touchable, smellable, tasteable pieces of commonplace existence that he shows them, and us, to find God and know him. Jesus delivered the good news in a rough, messy, hands-on package of donkeys and dusty roads, bleeding women and lepers, water from the well, and wine from the water. Holy work in the world has always been like this: messy, earthy, physical, touchable.

~ Catherine Mcniel

Children expect their mothers to love them, no matter what. Those who don't get this tend to feel cheated the rest of their lives.

~ Bella Pollen

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

~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Time plays tricks on mothers. It teases you with breaks and brief caesuras, only to skip wildly forward, bringing breathtaking changes to your baby's body. Only he wasn't a baby anymore, and how often did I have to learn that? The lessons were painful.

~ Ruth Ozeki

Life is serious, motherhood should be fun.

~ H.l. Balcomb

I am Rabbit. I can be anywhere. I can be everywhere. I am outside time. I am outside dimension.

~ Mark Andrew Poe

I am Rabbit. I can be anywhere. I can be everywhere. I am outside time. I am outside dimension. Do you want me? I am yours.

~ Mark Andrew Poe

Don't write your child's pages. Turn them with love.

~ Mark Andrew Poe

The man smiled. Harry is unique, for he was born with a special gift of sight, with eyes able to see things that are unseen. He has talents to move matter by the sound of his voice.

~ Mark Andrew Poe

Not accustomed to entertaining angels, are we?” he asked.

~ Mark Andrew Poe

It is difficult to understand the journey of a hero,” the whisperer said.

~ Mark Andrew Poe

Do you want me? I am yours.

~ Mark Andrew Poe

For too many women in America are becoming sick with exhaustion and stress as they try to do things that can't be -- shouldn't be -- done. Too many are eaten up by resentment toward their husbands, who are not subject to the same heartless pressures. Too many are becoming anxious and depressed because they are overwhelmed and disappointed. Too many are letting their lives be poisoned by guilt because their expectations can't be met, and because there is an enormous cognitive dissonance between what they know to be right for themselves and what they're told is right for their children. Too many feel out of control.

~ Judith Warner

--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 control life so perfectly that we can keep bad things from happening.

~ Judith Warner

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 its carefully selected components, and that the slightest shock, the slightest jar to all our perfect orchestration, will bring the whole edifice crashing down.

~ Judith Warner

I tried to do it all myself: be mommy and camp counselor and art teacher and prereading specialist (and somehow, in my off-hours, to do my own work). I tried my absolute best. And like so many of the moms around me, I started to go a little crazy.

~ Judith Warner

Too many of us now allow ourselves to be defined by motherhood and direct every ounce of our energy into our children. This sounds noble on the surface but in fact it's doing no one-- not ourselves, or our children -- any good. Because when we lose ourselves in our mommy selves, we experience this loss as depression. When we disempower ourselves in our mommy selves, we experience this weakness as anxiety. When we desexualize ourselves in our mommy selves, it leads us to feel dead in our skin. All this places an undue burden upon our children. By making them the be-all-and-end-all of our lives, by breaking down the boundaries between ourselves and them so thoroughly, by giving them so much power within the family when they're very small, we risk overwhelming them psychologically and ill-preparing them, socially, for the world of other children and, eventually, other adults. Nursery school and kindergarten teachers are already complaining that our children are so indulged, made so royal at home, that they come to school lacking compassion for others and with real problems functioning socially.

~ Judith Warner

Something is missing, and it's something not so easy to name as semiabsent husbands, not so easy to point to as a lack of work, or too much work, or a lack of adequate child care. It's the sense that life should have led up to more than it has. A sense that after all the hard work, for all our achievements as individuals and as a postfeminist generation, life should be better than this.

~ Judith Warner

All these things we do bespeak a terrible anxiety: that our children simply will not be able to make it through life if we do not perform totemic acts to keep them on the path toward self-perfection and keep their lives pure and unfettered by distracting emotion, personality foibles, or less-than-ideal experiences.

~ Judith Warner

by and large,mothers and house wives are the only workers who do not have regular time off.They are the great vacationless class

~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I thought that teaching twenty-eight energetic and needy children how to read had to be the hardest job on earth. I was wrong - mothering was. Now I had to give up my right to sleep when I needed it, to a meal without interruptions, to relaxation when I wanted it, and most importantly, my right to withdraw when I felt overwhelmed.

~ Jani Ortlund

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

Long ago you were a dream in your mother's sleep, and then she awoke to give you birth.

~ Kahlil Gibran

A moment when the worst had already happened, so there was nothing left to worry about. I wanted to stop forever in that pause between cause and effect. A place where I didn’t have to be responsible for everybody all of the time.

~ Jo Furniss

Anything of worth is costly: devotion to Christ, a strong marriage, financial responsibility, a life of integrity, and of course, fearlessly feminine mothering.

~ Jani Ortlund

I wonder if all mothers feel like this the moment they realize their daughters are growing up—as if it is impossible to believe that the laundry I once folded for her was doll-sized; as if I can still see her dancing in lazy pirouettes along the lip of the sandbox. Wasn't it yesterday that her hand was only as big as the sand dollar she found on the beach? That same hand, the one that's holding a boy's; wasn't it just holding mine, tugging so that I might stop and see the spiderweb, the milkweed pod, any of a thousand moments she wanted me to freeze? Time is an optical illusion—never quite as solid or strong as we think it is.

~ Jodi Picoult

That is one of the great gifts of The Evolution of Us. Vulnerability. Christine finds it in the women she interviews, and then offers it openly from herself, too. We learn through her writing to live moment to moment, to embrace our insecurities, and to lean on one another… Lauree Ostrofsky, CPCSimply Leap, LLC

~ Christine Woodcock

We mothers have a wonderfully precious and truly powerful role to play in the future self-images of our daughters. The truth is, the most effective way to inculcate in our daughters a fighting chance at life-long self-love and empowerment is not in the books we read to them, or the workshops we send them to, or the media we do or do not expose them to, or even the things we tell them, rather it is in the reflection of self-love and empowerment they see in us, their mothers. The model of our own empowerment gives our daughters permission to be powerful. Of course, culture and societal norms mold our view of ourselves as women, but the beliefs and behaviors of our mothers are far more influential.

~ Melia Keeton-Digby

Let your children uplift your burdens and allow your role as a mother - to flourish and grow.

~ Eleesha

It is within your loving and welcoming arms that a new generation will arrive & be greeted.

~ Eleesha

Motherhood unwittingly molds us into all we are now, or are - destined to be.

~ Eleesha

Let the voices of all mothers be heard, as we come to honor the gift of Motherhood.

~ Eleesha

Motherhood furnishes us with, not just giving life — but, partaking of life’s learning.

~ Eleesha

Let us acknowledge the magnitude of Motherhood, by simply honoring all mothers— past & present.

~ Eleesha

A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again, yet after having given birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external, subject to all sorts of dangers and disappearance, so you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to keep it close enough for comfort. That's the strange thing about being a mother: until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one.

~ Jodi Picoult

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

~ Kathleen A. Kendall-Tackett

There is always the fantasy of maternal love, but it does not accommodate a mother's fear of her children.

~ Stephanie Bishop