Top 93 Quotes About Mothering
#1. The great myth of our work-intense era is 'quality time.' We believe we can make up for the loss of days or hours, especially with each other, by concentrated minutes. But ultimately there is no way to do one-minute mothering. There is no way to pay attention in a hurry.
Ellen Goodman
#2. I love motherhood. I certainly wasn't aware of any mothering instincts until I had babies. I wasn't a person who desperately wanted to have kids, but you don't get it until you do it, and, suddenly, this nurturing instinct exists.
Deirdre O'Kane
#3. Mothering, she learned the hard way, was about loss as well as love.
Attica Locke
#4. A dominant ideology represents the view of a dominant group, often by making the existing order seem inevitable. Thus, by depicting motherhood as natural, a patriarchal ideology of mothering locks women into biological reproduction, and denies them identities and selfhood outside mothering.
Evelyn Nakano Glenn
#5. Perhaps all the difficulties of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering in the early years wouldn't
Laura Moriarty
#6. She caught herself working so hard at mothering that she forgot to enjoy her children. -from ~Homecoming Season~
Susan Wiggs
#8. 'A mother must put on her oxygen mask first, in order to be able to help her children' - I see this instruction on airplanes as an appropriate metaphor for feminist mothering. Mothers, empowered, are able to better care for and protect their children
Andrea O'Reilly
#9. I am realizing once and for all the difference as far as I am concerned of women and men and the necessity for both. With a man, however tender he is, one is feeding him - one is always and eternally understanding, mothering, supplying him with faith in himself (not in you).
May Sarton
#10. 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
#11. We mothers are learning to mark our mothering success by our daughters' lengthening flight.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
#12. Marriage is nature's way of ensuring that a woman picks up some mothering experience before she has her first child.
Robert Breault
#13. Now that I am a mother, I understand what Mother's Day is about: it's about looking through our lives and recognizing the act of mothering everywhere we see it, and more than that, recognizing that when any of us mother
when we listen, nuture, nourish, protect
we're doing sacred work.
Shauna Niequist
#14. [Judith Warner:] Our neurotic quest to perfect the mechanics of mothering can be interpreted as an effort to do on an individual level what we've stopped trying to do on a society-wide one.
Emily Matchar
#15. As motherhood as a "private enterprise" declines and more mothers rely on the work of lower-paid specialists, the value accorded the work of mothering (not the value of children) has declined for women, making it all the harder for men to take it up.
Arlie Russell Hochschild
#16. So much of my sense of who I am is tied to mothering. When they left home, I fell into a huge, empty, black hole. Your children are grown and your career has slowed down - all the stuff that took up so much attention is gone, and you're left with expansive time and space.
Jessica Lange
#17. When you're a single parent, you're often lonely, yet seldom alone. There is no backup ... It is mothering without a net.
Amy Dickinson
#18. Most things are born in the mothering darkness and most things die. Darkness is the womb of creation, my boy. But the sun with his seven horns of flame is the father of life.
Zora Neale Hurston
#20. I believe that we are better together. We make each other better moms, better humans. We need each other, because mothering is just too darn hard.
Melanie Dale
#21. Mothers took their mothering so seriously now. Their frantic little faces ... Ponytails swinging. Eyes fixed on the mobile phones held in the palms of their hands like compasses.
Liane Moriarty
#22. What she did have, after raising two children, was the equivalent of a PhD in mothering and my undying respect.
Barbara Delinsky
#23. Before even when she lay in bed looking frail and weak she still managed to make me feel safe. Mothers do that don't they? Their very presence can help. And even if I ended up mothering her in the final days, she still was taking care of me. I miss her.
Cecelia Ahern
#24. I had no idea that mothering my own child would be so healing to my own sadness from my childhood.
Susie Bright
#25. 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
#26. Experience of the phenomenal capacity of our birthing body can give us an enduring sense of our own power as women. Birth is the beginning of life; the beginning of mothering, and of fathering. We all deserve a good beginning.
Sarah J. Buckley
#27. The notion that the maternal wish and the activity of mothering are instinctive or biologically predestined is baloney.
Betty Rollin
#28. In mothering, if you do it right, you work yourself out of a job.
Karen Tyler
#29. The bonds that women share around the world, wherever we come from, they're very powerful and they have an ease of communication because we share those very important things of our families, our mothering, of improving opportunities for the next generation.
Quentin Bryce
#30. Whatever feminists may say about their only advocating choices, everyone knows the truth: Feminism regards work outside the home as more elevating, honorable, and personally productive than full-time mothering and making a home.
Dennis Prager
#31. Deliriously imagined, The Mothering Coven is a work of wonder. Joanna Ruocco arrives: marvelous, and fully sprung!
Carole Maso
#32. I have to remind myself that it isn't bad to think about myself in this busy mothering season I'm in.
Kristen Welch
#33. When you see that 76 percent of teachers are female, I think you have to acknowledge that there's a cultural bias, and it does date back to this nineteenth century idea that teaching is a form of mothering.
Dana Goldstein
#34. Mothering while grieving should involve being understanding and keeping a gentle attitude toward yourself as you work to balance your own needs and your child's. You become stronger by remaining aware of your own well-being, which in turn makes you a stronger person for your child or children.
Elizabeth Berrien
#35. Mothering your man is not sexy for you or for him. If you want your man to "start being a man", start being his lover not his mother.
Miya Yamanouchi
#36. Needed mothering. Grief and distance bound the wound, perfecting the bond
M.L. Stedman
#37. When it comes to children, my mom doesn't believe in borders. She loves all children, and that's a good example of mothering the world. I need to do that, but before I can, I need to get over my fear of kids in the first place.
Margaret Cho
#38. I think it's a feminine energy, not necessarily men versus women, but a nurturing, mothering, loving energy. I think definitely. But I think you need a balance of both. I think right now we're just so in the extremes and people are just conditioned and given these gender assignments very early on.
Evan Rachel Wood
#39. As a Christian, your godly life and your godly mothering sends its shimmering wake throughout all eternity.
Elizabeth George
#40. My heart really softens when I think about mothering because the greatest lessons that I've learned in life have been as a mother.
Michele Bachmann
#41. The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.
Anna Quindlen
#42. Fashions change, and with the new psychoanalytical perspective of the postwar period [WWII], child rearing became enshrined as thespecial responsibility of mothersany shortcoming in adult life was now seen as rooted in the failure of mothering during childhood.
Sylvia Ann Hewlett
#43. Mothering has been the richest experience of my life, but I am still opposed to Mother's Day. It perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents.
Anne Lamott
#44. Mothering is an attitude. Done well, it is a gift
Dee Farrell
#45. Gratefulness is not just saying "thank you." It's acting. It is being yourself. A mother is grateful, shows gratefulness by mothering, a scientist by doing science.
David Steindl-Rast
#46. I am lucky in that my children are grown, my youngest is twenty-seven. I didn't have the conflict between artist and mother while they were young because I really focused in, very much, on the mothering aspect.
Pegi Young
#47. While Motherhood is not perfect, we have the opportunity to share many beautiful and perfect moments with our children everyday. We just need to be awake to those moments and attuned to them so we can more fully enjoy them. ~ Mothering with Spiritual Power by Debra Sansing Woods
Debra Sansing Woods
#49. I'm not even tone deaf, that's the arse-mothering, fuck-nosed, bugger-sucking wank of the thing.
Stephen Fry
#50. Mothering is precarious. You try to do the right thing - you think you have - then wham.
Barbara Delinsky
#51. Mothering/nurturing is a vital force and process establishing relationships throughout the universe.
Bernice Johnson Reagon
#52. Mothering or nurturing is not just a calling for women who have biological or adopted children. Mothering is a calling for all women. Every Christian woman is called to the spiritual motherhood of making disciples of all nations.
Gloria Furman
#53. Of course, a woman's choice to go out into the world is a very significant thing. But part of real liberation is recognizing that mothering is every bit as important as other kinds of work. I actually believe it's more important than anything we do out in the world.
Marianne Williamson
#54. My mothering needed a tad more Mother Theresa and a lot less Lizzy Borden.
Irene Tomkinson
#55. He says he needs mothering."
" ... Even if he didn't need mothering, which after all is only another way of saying he needs a slave.
Hilary McKay
#56. Mothering you is the first thing of consequence I have ever done.
Kelly Corrigan
#57. Loretta didn't have much time left for mothering, and once I was old enough to fry my own eggs, she started leaving me home with the cat. Then the cat ran away; she didn't notice. Poor
Robin Wasserman
#58. When we need to find something to blame for a tragedy, mothering becomes the de facto central influence in a child or adult's life. This process almost never goes as far as weighing the social circumstances that constrain a mother's choices.
Anonymous
#59. You know, there's nothing damnable about being a strong woman. The world needs strong women. There are a lot of strong women you do not see who are guiding, helping, mothering strong men. They want to remain unseen. It's kind of nice to be able to play a strong woman who is seen.
Ginger Rogers
#60. Whenever a group produces murderers, the early parental relationship must have been abusive and neglectful. Yet this elementary truth has not even begun to be considered in historical research; just stating that poor mothering lies behind wars seems blasphemous.
Lloyd DeMause
#61. mothering is our first preverbal template for an existence in which we feel welcomed or rejected, loved or abandoned, many of us have fused our relationship with our mothers with our concepts of God.
Geneen Roth
#62. He remembered another one of his mother's saying. It was back when she'd birthed Fanny, her tenth. Someone had siad it was about time she gave up mothering and rested. "Nay," she had said. "I've started something, and now I wouldn't stop if I could, and I couldn't stop if I would.
James Alexander Thom
#63. Look, they're wearing light blue gauzy frozen superhero capes because I have told them that Anna is a junior superhero with a black sister and a gay brother- both of whom are off ruling other countries because, y'know, they have jobs. You do your mothering your way. I'll do my mothering mine .
Shonda Rhimes
#64. Mothering well is a prayerful art. - Lori McConnell, Restoring Hope in a Woman's Heart
Stasi Eldredge
#65. Right mothering meets the
child's need.
Focusing on what the child should
not be draws resistant energy. Pointing
out what the child should be feeds
self-hatred and struggle.
Vimala McClure
#66. No one told me that it would all happen at the same hallowed time: Mothering is at once the hardest and the holiest and the happiest.
Ann Voskamp
#67. Being yourself is the meat and potatoes of mothering, and if you are forever copying someone else's way you are apt to lose touch with your own truth.
Janet P. Penley
#68. Mothering requires two impulses- the impulse to hold on, and the impulse to push away.
Andrew Solomon
#69. When people say "to father," they generally mean that one biological act - the act of begetting a child. It is different with the verb "to mother." "To mother" implies care. A man's act of fathering can easily be that one seed sown; a woman's act of mothering can take up all the rest of her life. I
Deborah Meyler
#70. To play down mothering as small is to crack the very foundation on which greatness stands.
Oprah Winfrey
#71. What this intensive mothering culture tells us is valuable is at discord with what really is valuable: Love your kids. Keep them safe. Accept them as they are. Then get out of their way.
Brigid Schulte
#72. Nettie, it quickly developed, had no gift for mothering. Many women have no gift for it. They mimic the recalled gestures and mannerisms of the women they've been trained to become and hope for the best.
Vivian Gornick
#73. Let me say for now that we knew once the Creation was broken, true fathering would be much more lacking than mothering. Don't misunderstand me, both are needed- but an emphasis on fathering is necessary because of the enormity of its absence
Wm. Paul Young
#74. God, I realize they need me, but even more, they need You. I need You because this mothering thing is awesome and hard. When I look back, I won't remember the days. I will remember the moments. And I'm thankful for that because, believe me, there are days I don't want to remember!
Kristen Welch
#75. And I finally understand what she needs to hear and that she's talking about not just me but Elf too and I tell her that my sorrow was not created by her, that my childhood was a joyful thing, an island in the sun, that her mothering is impeccable, that she is not to blame.
Miriam Toews
#76. EMMETT (on being a 'mama's boy'): Poppy teases me for being a mama's boy. She ain't wrong, but my ma's worth acting stupid over. She raised me in a rough world without losing her ability to be tender.
Bijou Hunter
#77. Her mother's quiet disapproval and withdrawal was a death in itself, and Franckline's despair at it was transmitted, she was sure of it, to the child. She transgressed twice, first by making the child, then by giving it her despair, the despair that left it unable to live.
Pamela Erens
#78. his mother, who had never been able to manage him, sent him to school to get rid of him, lamented his absence till he returned, then writhed and fretted under his presence until again he went.
George MacDonald
#79. All gifts are riddles, all lives/are in the middle of mother-lives.
Brenda Shaughnessy
#81. A talent for building children's souls, Hilde. So building their souls that they might grow straight and fine, nobly and beautifully formed, to their full human stature. That was where Aline's talent lay.
Henrik Ibsen
#82. Don't stand unmoving outside the door of a crying baby whose only desire is to touch you. Go to your baby. Go to your baby a million times. Demonstrate that people can be trusted, that the environment can be trusted, that we live in a benign universe.
Peggy O'Mara
#83. Mina thought to herself, watching, her momma was the kind of woman she wanted to be, wherever else she got to in her life.
Cynthia Voigt
#84. Please don't judge me too much until you are older and know more things. (Spoken from mother to daughter)
Ann Brashares
#85. She'd wanted to run an inn. To welcome people, to mother them. They had no children of their own, and she had a powerful need to nurture.
Louise Penny
#87. We are the windows through which our children first see the world. Let us be conscious of the view.
Katrina Kenison
#88. Sweater, n. Garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.
Ambrose Bierce
#89. I may have overmothered you and screwed you up in ways large and small, but I think it's time you took some measure of responsibility for where you choose to put your own penis.
Jonathan Tropper
#90. If the marriage ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.
Scott Gardner
#91. The women in the room chatted about love, about childhood, about losing parents, about Mr. Spock, about good books they'd read.
They mothered each other.
Louise Penny
#92. One of the biggest sicknesses this world has is expectation. We all expect other people to be a certain way or to do a certain thing. Most people, they spend their whole lives under the wants of other people.
Eric Shonkwiler
#93. Huh. What a dope! Wait till Mom hears about this. He's so in trouble now. You know how crazy she gets about malaria.
T.K. Naliaka
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