Motherhood is a great honor and privilege, yet it is also synonymous with servanthood. Every day women are called upon to selflessly meet the needs of their families. Whether they are awake at night nursing a baby, spending their time and money on less-than-grateful teenagers, or preparing meals, moms continuously put others before themselves.
Charles Stanley
As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.
Rachel Cusk
That’s what motherhood is: you’re working; you’re doing 25 different jobs, and you’re not getting paid.
Melissa Peterman
Motherhood is more than bearing children, though it is certainly that. It is the essence of who we are as women. It defines our very identity, our divine stature and nature, and the unique traits our Father gave us.
Sheri L. Dew
Motherhood is wonderful, but it’s also hard work. It’s the logistics more than anything. You discover you have reserves of energy you didn’t know you had.
Deborah Mailman
The natural state of motherhood is unselfishness. When you become a mother, you are no longer the center of your own universe. You relinquish that position to your children.
Jessica Lange
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 most extraordinary thing about motherhood – finding a piece of yourself separate and apart that all the same you could not live without.
Jodi Picoult,Perfect Match
A mother knows what her child’s gone through, even if she didn’t see it herself.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer,Gadis Pantai
She [my mother] was the force around which our world turned. My mother was propelled through the universe by the brute force of reason. She was the judge in all our arguments. One disapproving word from her was enough to send us off to hide in a corner, where we would cry and fantasize our own martyrdom. And yet. One kiss could restore us to princedom. Without her, our lives would dissolve into chaos.
Nicole Krauss,The History of Love
Motherhood is a choice you make everyday, to put someone else’s happiness and well-being ahead of your own, to teach the hard lessons, to do the right thing even when you’re not sure what the right thing is…and to forgive yourself, over and over again, for doing everything wrong.
Donna Ball,At Home on Ladybug Farm
The mother memories that are closest to my heart are the small gentle ones that I have carried over from the days of my childhood. They are not profound, but they have stayed with me through life, and when I am very old, they will still be near . . . Memories of mother drying my tears, reading aloud, cutting cookies and singing as she did, listening to prayers I said as I knelt with my forehead pressed against her knee, tucking me in bed and turning down the light. They have carried me through the years and given my life such a firm foundation that it does not rock beneath flood or tempest.
Margaret Sanger
This is part of the essence of motherhood, watching your kid grow into her own person and not being able to do anything about it. Otherwise children would be nothing more than pets.
Heather Armstrong
A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie.
Tenneva Jordan
The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new._
Rajneesh
She never quite leaves her children at home, even when she doesn’t take them along.
Margaret Culkin Banning
When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child._
Sophia Loren
Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials._
Meryl Streep
The formative period for building character for eternity is in the nursery. The mother is queen of that realm and sways a scepter more potent than that of kings or priests.
Unknown
For that’s what a woman, a mother wants _ to teach her children to take an interest in life. She knows it’s safer for them to be interested in other people’s happiness than to believe in their own.
Marguerite Duras
Education commences at the mother’s knee, and every word spoken within hearsay of little children tends toward the formation of character.
Hosea Ballou
Motherhood is neither a duty nor a privilege, but simply the way that humanity can satisfy the desire for physical immortality and triumph over the fear of death.
Rebecca West
If you are a mother then you know the feeling of true love. Once you look into the eyes of your children you feel the love that could never be shared with another.
Mandi Nowak
The hand that rocks the cradle usually is attached to someone who isn’t getting enough sleep.
John Fiebig
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.
Barbara Kingsolver
Motherhood: The most exhausting, emotional, rewarding and life-enhancing journey a woman can take.
Charlotte Pearson
Women do not have to sacrifice personhood if they are mothers. They do not have to sacrifice motherhood in order to be persons. Liberation was meant to expand women’s opportunities, not to limit them. The self-esteem that has been found in new pursuits can also be found in mothering.
Elaine Heffner
I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best I could bring to it.
Rose Kennedy
It is not until you become a mother than your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.
Erma Bombeck
Though motherhood is the most important of all the professions
requiring more knowledge than any other department in human affairs
there was no attention given to preparation for this office.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Motherhood brings as much joy as ever, but it still brings boredom, exhaustion, and sorrow too. Nothing else ever will make you as happy or as sad, as proud or as tired, for nothing is quite as hard as helping a person develop his own individuality especially while you struggle to keep your own.
Marguerite Kelly and Elia Parsons
How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No. A woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.
G.K. Chesterton
I think motherhood is the noblest task of all, because you cannot do it at your convenience, or tailor it to suit your preferences. You have to be ready to give up everything when you take on this task: your time, restful nights, your hobbies, your pursuit of physical fitness, any beauty you may have had, and all of the private little pleasures you might have counted as a right, from late dinners and long soaks in the tub to weekend excursions and cycling tripsI’m not saying you can’t have any of these things, but you have to be ready to let them all go if you’re going to have children and put them first.
Johann Christoph Arnold,Endangered: Your Child in a Hostile World
A mother is a mother from the moment her baby is first placed in her arms until eternity. It didn’t matter if her child were three, thirteen, or thirty.
Sarah Strohmeyer,Kindred Spirits
Intensive mothering is the ultimate female Olympics: We are all in powerful competition with each other, in constant danger of being trumped by the mom down the street, or in the magazine we’re reading. The competition isn’t just over who’s a good mother
it’s over who’s the best. We compete with each other; we compete with ourselves. The best mothers always put their kids’ needs before their own, period.
Susan J. Douglas
It’s just that the thing you never understand about being a mother, until you are one, is that it is not the grown man – the galumphing, unshaven, stinking, opinionated off-spring – you see before you, with his parking tickets and unpolished shoes and complicated love life. You see all the people he has ever been all rolled up into one. I look at him and see the baby I held in my arms, dewing besotted, unable to believe that I’d created another human being. I see the toddler, reaching for my hand, the schoolboy weeping tears of fury after being bullied _by some other child. I saw the vulnerabilities, the love, the history.
Jojo Moyes,Me Before You
New mothers enter the world of parenting feeling much like Alice in Wonderland.
Debra Gilbert Rosenberg
Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can’t protect her child – not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance.
Nicole Krauss,Great House
It_takes someone really brave to be a mother, someone strong to raise a child and someone special to love someone more than herself.
Ritu Ghatourey
Just_because you give birth to a child doesn’t make you a mother! Being a mother means taking care of your kids, cuddling, watching them grow, watching them play and argue, being there for the good and the bad, and most importantly showing them your unconditional love every second of EVERYDAY!
Unknown
A mother had a slender, small body, but a large heart a heart so large that everybody’s grief and everybody’s joy found welcome in it, and hospitable accommodation.
Mark Twain
Becoming a mother makes you the mother of all children. From now on each wounded, abandoned, frightened child is yours. You live in the suffering mothers of every race and creed and weep with them. You long to comfort all who are desolate._
Charlotte Gray
It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t._
Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away
Dinah Craik
The mother loves her child most divinely, not when she surrounds him with comfort and anticipates his wants, but when she resolutely holds him to the highest standards and is content with nothing less than his best.
Hamilton Wright Mabie
The amazing thing about becoming a parent is that you will never again be your own first priority. The gift of motherhood is the selflessness that it introduces you to, and I think that’s really freeing… I think it allows you to put yourself in other people’s shoes…the empathy that it slugs you with, being a mother. And I think it makes you a better storyteller.
Olivia Wilde
I don’t know about changing my perspective, because motherhood is such a glorious blessing and I am very thankful for that. It’s such a beautiful experience. I so strongly recommend it. It’s bliss, love and fulfillment of another level.
Aishwarya Rai Bachchan
Motherhood has completely changed me. It’s just about like the most completely humbling experience that I’ve ever had. I think that it puts you in your place because it really forces you to address the issues that you claim to believe in and if you can’t stand up to those principles when you’re raising a child, forget it.
Diane Keaton
A mother, a real mother with a little child, thinks day and night about the welfare of the little one in her arms. A mother knows what dangers the child will have to encounter as he grows up. She does not let the father reassure her when he makes light of things and says that the children have to find their own way. A mother worries, for she carries the burden, and she often sees much deeper than the father just where the child is in danger.
Johann Christoph Blumhardt
I think it’s worth trying to be a mother who delights in who her children are, in their knock-knock jokes and earnest questions. A mother who spends less time obsessing about what will happen, or what has happened, and more time reveling in what is.
Ayelet Waldman
It is clear that we have to come down a bit from the high horse of reason on which we enjoy sitting. We have to be simple and take time to think how to make things understandable to the little ones. We have to become children again, and some find that too hard.
Johann Christoph Blumhardt,Thoughts About Children