Joys Of Motherhood Quotes

The joys of motherhood are not excessively apparent during the first few weeks of a baby's life. ~ Vera Brittain

Until women learn to want economic independence, and until they work out a way to get this independence without denying themselves the joys of love and motherhood, it seems to me feminism has no roots. ~ Crystal Eastman

Motherhood is exactly the kind of "special circumstance" that lends itself to memoir. It is a time of transition and sometimes a period of intense identity struggle: Who am I if I spend all day shirtless, trying to nurse a colicky baby? What happened to my former life, my former self? How do I balance my own needs with those of my family? I am drawn to all kinds of motherhood memoirs because I am interested in the different ways that women process the challenges and joys of motherhood, and how they write about life in general through their mother eyes. ~ Kate Hopper

No whimpering, madam! You can't have the joys of motherhood without some of its pangs! Think of your blessings, and don't be a coward! - ~ Kate Douglas Wiggin

I tell my kids, 'I am thinking about you every other minute of my day.' ~ Michelle Obama

First rule of motherhood, dearie: men are screw-ups. Learn it now and you'll be a whole lot happier. ~ Neal Shusterman

Nothing can prepare you for the all-consuming nature of motherhood, and I am very aware of my good fortune, as I spent years fretting about whether I'd ever meet anyone to have a baby with. ~ Mariella Frostrup

What is so real as the cry of a child?
A rabbit's cry may be wilder
But it has no soul. ~ Sylvia Plath

The outrageous madonna/whore duality that we mock in Women's Studies 101 has its subtle, and very insidious, expression in the good/bad mother paradigm that we grapple with every day of our lives. ~ Shannon Drury

Women have made enormous progress on the lower and middle rungs of the career ladder, but we are failing to make the leap into senior positions. Everyone jumps to the conclusion that it's motherhood that holds women back, but often the big roadblock is the lack of executive presence. ~ Sylvia Ann Hewlett

It's the curse of motherhood. You're required to love us even when we vex you. ~ Julia Quinn

May we hope that, when we are all dead and gone, leaders will arise who have been personally experienced in the hard, practical work, the difficulties, and the joys of organizing nursing reforms, and who will lead far beyond anything we have done! ~ Florence Nightingale

Ah! the joys of linger... ~ Aporva Kala

My children have always existed at the deepest center of me, right there in the heart/hearth, but I struggled with the powerful demands of motherhood, chafing sometimes at the way they pulled me away from my separate life, not knowing how to balance them with my unwieldy need for solitude and creative expression. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

The best definition I have ever heard of a vocation is that it's the place where your great joy meets the world's great need. We need all of you to find your vocation. To develop your joys, your passions, and to match them to the world's great needs. ~ Eric Greitens

Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Many women experience a sense of pressure that men rarely do - the pressure to succeed at work and to keep things running smoothly at home, especially when children arrive on the scene. ~ Tiffany Dufu

If I wasted my time worrying, I would be deprived of all the simple joys of life! ~ Jen Selinsky

They had been the reason for the receding love between her and her husband. She claimed a substitution for her sacrifices, an amendment of her situation. ~ Laura Gentile

Your children teach you so much. It's a real mirror of yourself. ~ Kate Hudson

These days, "getting lucky" means drinking an entire cup of COFFEE while it's still HOT! ~ Tanya Masse

Houses are the abiding joys; they are the most emotion-stirring of all things. An automobile is regarded with fond affection, a typewriter becomes the inseparable companion, clothes can stir sentimentality, and the bit of bric-a-brac is a toy one would weep to see torn away - but houses are real, deep, emotional things. How much excitement in the cutting of a window, what enormous importance in the angle of a roof! ~ Rose Wilder Lane

Our cares are the mothers, not only of our charities And virtues, but of our best joys and most cheering and enduring pleasures. ~ William Gilmore Simms

I have sent books and music there, and all / Those instruments with which high spirits call / The future from its cradle, and the past / Out of its grave, and make the present last / In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die, / Folded within their own eternity. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

I have been so afraid that our friendship will not survive Clare's death. I can sense this in your voice, too, when we talk. . . .

When I talk to Mark about this, he tries to console me with Aristotle (I hope you are smiling). Aristotle, he tells me, describes three types of friendship: friendship based on utility, on pleasure, and on virtue (the pursuit of good). The third type is the highest and most stable form. Mark says that we pursue the good, and that sharing new motherhood alone could not possibly replace that.

Maybe right now we are confusing our friendship with a friendship of pleasure, since we have given each other so much of it (hilarity and clogs and dreams of Italy). And we are worried since these friendships fade when pleasure fades (and Clare has taken so much pleasure with her). But surely that's not all we've shared.

The highest friendship, Aristotle wrote, 'requires time and familiarity; for, as the proverb says, it is impossible for men to know each other well until they have consumed together much salt, nor can they accept each other and be friends till each has shown himself dear and trustworthy to the other.' I guess we are now in the phase of eating much salt. . . .

I am not sure what it means to eat much salt, but it doesn't sound pleasant. It makes me think of tears rolling down our faces into our mouths. . . .

Yet this time is not merely that. When I see you or read your letters, I am sud ~ Amy Alznauer

Christ the Lord is risen to-day, Sons of men and angels say. Raise your joys and triumphs high; Sing, ye heavens, and earth reply. ~ Charles Wesley

A lot of women feel like they should be enjoying motherhood, they should be fulfilled and shouldn't be thinking, 'I wish I didn't have to do this.' ~ Sophie Hannah

True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one's own the suffering and joys of others. ~ Andre Gide

There is a lot of healing going on. Really! More people are vegetarians, more are in the green movement, more of us are tearing down the old paradigms and embracing same-sex marriage, single motherhood, men raising babies. ~ Iyanla Vanzant

Having friends around for a pleasant evening is one of life's most cherished joys as far as I am concerned. But when those with me are fellow believers, how much greater that joy is, for we know that it's rekindled, one day in eternity. ~ James Stewart

I think one of the great joys of being a writer is you can transcend everything, even your own sex, what century you live in, and how you think. I found it quite natural to think as a male because I actually think that as a female, one often thinks in the mind of a male in terms of eroticism. You think about what the other person feels. So it's not that hard to imagine being that person. ~ Rebecca Miller

Happiness? that entails comfort, organization, a constructed stability altogether foreign to me. To have troubles is to feel the scaffolding that is happiness shaken by the blows of fate. In this sense i am safe. Trouble can not reach me, because i have no scaffolding. I am a man of sadness and joy, a completely different alternative to that of happiness-unhappiness. I lived naked and solitary, without family or friends, keeping alive by a trade so beneath me that i need think about it, no more than i need think about my breathing or my digestion. My usual moral climate is jet black sadness, opaque and sombre. But this darkness is often shot through by flashing joys, unexpected and unmerited, which swiftly die out, but leave my eyes full of gold and dancing fireflies. ~ Michel Tournier

You're always going to feel like you're catching up, and part of that is just balancing work and motherhood and the whole feeling of needing to please, which I do think girls and women feel more than men. ~ Kim Gordon

Maybe I stepped into the skin my mother left behind, and became the girl my mother had been, the one she still wanted to be. Maybe I was wearing her youth now like an airy scarf, an accessory, all bright nerves and sticky pearls, and maybe that's why she spent so much time staring at me with that wistful look in her eyes. I was wearing something of hers, something she wanted back. It was written all over her face. ~ Laura Kasischke

Live for a while in the books you love. Learn from them what is worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be returned to you a thousand times over. Whatever your life may become, these books -of this I am certain- will weave through the web of your unfolding. They will be among the strongest of all threads of your experiences, disappointments, and joys. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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

One of my earliest joys as a parent lay in knowing that at the end of the day I had once again ushered three babies back to their beds, against the odds, unscathed and peaceful. Happiness was a houseful of safe, inert bodies. Actually, it still is. ~ Phyllis Grissim-Theroux

Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung. ~ John Keats

I remind mothers everywhere of the sanctity of your calling. No other can adequately take your place. No responsibility is greater, no obligation more binding than that you rear in love and peace and integrity those whom you have brought into the world. ~ Gordon B. Hinckley

There are two ways to ruin any chances of leading a happy life. The first is to chase a goal twenty-four hours a day, day after day, and gladly give up all the little laughs and joys that life has to offer in exchange for that ever-elusive moment of jubilation. The second way is far worse, in that it NEVER fails. You know what it is, Sam? Falling in love with someone who chases a goal twenty four hours a day. ~ Ali Sheikh

-she loved Lily Cate like her own, and for this night, this moment, she would be her mother, even though there was no guarantee of tomorrow. ~ Laura Frantz

I am consumed, or I have been consumed, with these issues of motherhood and the way we act out societal expectations and roles. So both my nonfiction and my fiction have been pretty much exclusively about that. ~ Ayelet Waldman

... Chinese consider eating food to be one of the rare joys of living... ~ Frederick J. Simoons

All these years, these angers, these hardenings, this desire to control, I had thought I had to snap the hand closed to shield joy's fragile flame from the blasts. In a storm of struggles, I had tried to control the elements, clasp the fist tight so as to protect self and happiness. But palms curled into protective fists fill with darkness. I feel that sharply, even in this ... and this realization in all its full emptiness: My own wild desire to protect my joy at all costs is the exact force that kills my joy. ~ Ann Voskamp

If you really want to seriously think about life, and therefore take painting very seriously ... and take seriously the joys that it can bring to one, then you want to go to museums. You want to study the great of the past ... ~ Nelson Shanks

We were hockey gypsies, heading down another gravel road every weekend, plowing into the heart of that magnificent northern landscape. We never gave a thought to being deprived as we travelled, to being shut out of the regular league system. We never gave a thought to being Indian. Different. We only thought of the game and the brotherhood that bound us together off the ice, in the van, on the plank floors of reservation houses, in the truck stop diners where if we'd won we had a little to splurge on a burger and soup before we hit the road again. Small joys. All of them tied together, entwined to form an experience we would not have traded for any other. We were a league of nomads, mad for the game, mad for the road, mad for ice and snow, an Arctic wind on our faces and a frozen puck on the blade of our sticks. ~ Richard Wagamese

The care of babies involves education, and is entrusted only to the most fit," she repeated.

"Then you separate mother and child!" I cried in cold horror, something of Terry's feeling creeping over me, that there must be something wrong among these many virtues.

"Not usually," she patiently explained. "You see, almost every woman values her maternity above everything else. Each girl holds it close and dear, an exquisite joy, a crowning honor, the most intimate, most personal, most precious thing. That is, the child-rearing has come to be with us a culture so profoundly studied, practiced with such subtlety and skill, that the more we love our children the less we are willing to trust that process to unskilled hands - even our own."

"But a mother's love - " I ventured.

She studied my face, trying to work out a means of clear explanation.

"You told us about your dentists," she said, at length, "those quaintly specialized persons who spend their lives filling little holes in other persons' teeth - even in children's teeth sometimes."

"Yes?" I said, not getting her drift.

"Does mother-love urge mothers - with you - to fill their own children's teeth? Or to wish to?"

"Why no - of course not," I protested. "But that is a highly specialized craft. Surely the care of babies is open to any woman - any mother!"

"We do not think so," she gently replied. "Those of us who are the most highly ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

As a woman who chooses to be childless, I generally have just one problem: other adults. Living in a culture where women are assumed to prioritize motherhood above all else and where a woman's personal choices are often considered matters of public discussion means everyone things they have the right to discuss my body and my choices, so anyone curious about my lack of spawn feels the right to march right on over and ask me about it. ~ Danielle Henderson

She remembers blood.
A fine mist which goes deep into her lungs, over her skin and through the air. She remembers a desert at dusk. The sky indigo blue and the fire bright, so bright that she can see everything. Near the fire, in the night, all she knows is chaos wrapped in crimson. All is death and nightmare with a single solitary dancer who smiles cruelly as he moves. He is power and darkness. He is man and beast, silver coin eyes and that face, those claws and the agony of loss.
Time stretches wide; seconds like vast eons swallow up her world. Vince is dead, his mother, his brother and her small son ripped apart and gushing as he/it moves. She is screaming, a howl of agony beyond words, primal and wordless. Still he moves, faster than air, faster than she could ever be. Blood drips from her face as she grunts, running with her lungs on fire and her last remaining hope wrapped in her arms. ~ Amanda M. Lyons

It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from. ~ Anne Tyler

Coco is the greatest part of my life. I love everything about being a mom, but our talks and walks on the beach are my favorite moments. ~ Courteney Cox

Being a mother was like being trapped in the first fifteen minutes of a horror film. Everything was fine, lovely. But there was this persistent sense of dread. ~ Laura Lippman

Joys season'd high, and tasting strong of guilt. ~ Edward Young