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Motherhood Quotes

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Motherhood Quotes

“For many of us, feminism denotes the task of abolishing all organized scarcities, from the private nuclear household to the nation. It’s the deprivatization of love, via the insurgency of mothers of every gender against the patriarchal institution of motherhood, the decoupling of survival from the wage, the destruction of markets, the ecological insistence on interspecies responsibility, the decarbonization of every mégapole, and the communization of continent-wide architecture: waterways, seed banks, and libraries. It’s a local proletarian strike against work (that always already gendered and stolen substance otherwise called alienated labor) and a planetary revolution in values that prioritizes care over accumulation. It’s a perfectly good name, too, for the horizon wherein work’s myriad precarious, abject, wageless, mad, incarcerated, and otherwise remaindered victims are avenged. As a revolutionary movement, feminism abolishes gender qua differential, while remaking genders qua lush, interesting, and pleasurable difference.”

“Lahko rečem, da se trudim imeti kolikor toliko tekoč pregled nad družbenimi obveznostmi in pravicami, le odkar se zavedam jasno pojma o enakopravnosti med spoloma, sem v praksi nenehno v zadregi. Tako zaenkrat rešujem svoj »ženski problem« z genetično kondicijo in čarovniškimi metodami. Namreč zelo zanimiva je miselnost nas žensk samih. Ko sem nekoč nekaj malega razmišljala v spisu, ki je govoril o ženi, družini in otrocih ter vzgoji, in vse to skupaj objavila v reviji Otrok in družina, sem dobila tako neuporaben odgovor od tov. Beltramove, ki je v kratkem povzetku bil v tem: da naj bom srečna, ker imamo raztegljive nogavice, pralne stroje, električni štedilnik in politične pravice, ki jih ni imela nobena od mojih babic. Vrniva se nazaj k delu, ki me obvezuje, in k času, ki ga merimo s 24 urami. V tem času je čas, ki ga in kadar ga uporabim za ustvarjalno delo, vedno zamejen na ure, ko moji otroci zaspijo ali pa še spijo. Oba sta kratka še za tole pismo. (Pismo objavljeno v knjigi Med tradicijo in modernizmom: pričevanja o slovenski poeziji Franceta Pibernika, Ljubljana: Slovenska matica, 1978)”

“Man of an hard heart! Hear me, Proud, Stern, and Cruel! You could have saved me; you could have restored me to happiness and virtue, but would not! You are the destroyer of my Soul; You are my Murderer, and on you fall the curse of my death and my unborn Infant’s! Insolent in your yet-unshaken virtue, you disdained the prayers of a Penitent; But God will show mercy, though you show none. And where is the merit of your boasted virtue? What temptations have you vanquished? Coward! you have fled from it, not opposed seduction. But the day of Trial will arrive! Oh! then when you yield to impetuous passions! when you feel that Man is weak, and born to err; When shuddering you look back upon your crimes, and solicit with terror the mercy of your God, Oh! in that fearful moment think upon me! Think upon your Cruelty! Think upon Agnes, and despair of pardon!”

“When I was a kid my mom would send me off to school each day with the words, ‘Remember: be happy! The most important thing today is that you are happy!”

“Listen, Nana says. Am I selfish. Am I. Because that's what Moseh ssi said. He said I'm selfish. He asked me why I don't consider the social damage and so on to the child. And it's true, I don't think I am considering it, or not as much as I should be. I thought I'd be fine no matter what people said, but maybe the reason I felt confident was because I hadn't thought enough about it. Maybe this resolve, being determined to see this through on my part only leaves the baby vulnerable, gives the baby no choice other than to bear life and endure pain? I mean, what with the rest of the world being how it is, and how tongues will wag. In fact, even the world and what it is, all that has to be considered from a new perspective, doesn't it. And how is it, the world? Fine, is it? Fit enough that I can bring a child into it? What if the baby asks me why I let it be born? Look, the average lifespan these days is about eighty years, right. What if in all that time there's nothing but misery?”

“Motherhood, however, took her by surprise. She found herself so in love with her children that she felt a need to change and restructure her life to afford time with her two bundles of joy. It led to her next phase of entrepreneurship, starting a string of baby-and-mother-related businesses. CRIB is a platform for mothers and women to network, and Trehaus provides the space for working mothers to have a career and yet be there for the baby’s first moments.”

“She had thought it would be easy from there. It wasn’t. It was simple, but not easy. There was joy, but terror, too, as though stepping back from a ship’s helm and letting the journey go. It sounded romantic enough until being dashed to pieces against the rocks. It was the loveliest tiny moments that would drench Helen in happiness, like when Lyric was nestled in the crook of her arm, resisting falling asleep. Helen had brushed a finger down the child’s nose. Her drowsy eyes had fluttered yet followed Helen’s finger, going cross-eyed just as Helen reached the nose tip. For a moment, the joy and love saturated everything.”

“There isn’t a perfect mom, a perfect house, a perfect kid, a perfect life. There’s just real. And real is one mom after another after another after another who wakes in the morning and see those kids who call her mom and pulls herself up and tries. She stumbles, but stands up. She worries, but gives. She loves. She mothers.”

“It portrayed motherhood as the highest position that a woman could achieve. For God had made Mary neither a prophet nor the messiah nor the daughter of God. Nor did God take the form of a woman. She was only the womb. She was a perpetual virgin too, and she endured the vilest harassment because of it, or so the story went. Rebecca couldn’t relate to the Virgin Mary at all.”

“Mothers have martyred themselves in their children’s names since the beginning of time. We have lived as if she who disappears the most, loves the most. We have been conditioned to prove our love by slowly ceasing to exist. What a terrible burden for children to bear—to know that they are the reason their mother stopped living. What a terrible burden for our daughters to bear—to know that if they choose to become mothers, this will be their fate, too. Because if we show them that being a martyr is the highest form of love, that is what they will become. They will feel obligated to love as well as their mothers loved, after all. They will believe they have permission to live only as fully as their mothers allowed themselves to live. If we keep passing down the legacy of martyrdom to our daughters, with whom does it end? Which woman ever gets to live? And when does the death sentence begin? At the wedding altar? In the delivery room? Whose delivery room—our children’s or our own? When we call martyrdom love we teach our children that when love begins, life ends. This is why Jung suggested: There is no greater burden on a child than the unlived life of a parent.”

“The day when a woman enjoys her first love cuts her in two. The man is the same after his first love as he was before. The woman is from the day of her first love another. That continues so all through life. The man spends a night by a woman and goes away. His life and body are always the same. The woman conceives. As a mother she is another person than the woman without child. She carries the fruit of the night nine months long in her body. Something grows. Something grows into her life that never again departs from it. She is a mother. She is and remains a mother even though her child die, though all her children die. For at one time she carried the child under her heart. And it does not go out of her heart ever again. Not even when it is dead. All this a man does not know. He does not know the difference before love and after love, before motherhood and after motherhood. Only a woman can know that and speak of that. She must always be maiden and always be mother. Before every love she is maiden, after every love she is mother." — An Abyssinian Noblewoman”

“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.”

“The best love in the world, is the love of a man. The love of a man who came from your womb, the love of your son! I don't have a daughter, but maybe the love of a daughter is the best, too. I am first and foremost me, but right after that, I am a mother. The best thing that I can ever be, is me. But the best gift that I will ever have, is being a mother.”

“...this process we're going through is not about trying to create a home where things are perfect; it's about creating a home where things are lighter.”