Quotes About What Motherhood Is

#1. That's what motherhood is: you're working; you're doing 25 different jobs, and you're not getting paid.

Melissa Peterman

#2. Because I don't have a child and as much as you can sort of imagine it it's always nice to hear from all different walks of life what motherhood is like and what that feels like. And particularly young mothers.

Abbie Cornish

#3. I also feel like motherhood, especially, is seen usually in movies with this saintly veil over it. There's something about tipping that and showing what's actually going on. Or the wish fulfillment of probably most moms, which is really exciting. It's an area that's unexplored.

Kathryn Hahn

#4. Motherhood changed me because it is so fundamental what you're doing for another person. And you are able to do even though it takes a lot.

Meg Ryan

#5. Acting and modelling are good, but motherhood is what it's all about.

Jerry Hall

#6. Then too, motherhood is broken because in this place, to be a good mother is to give yourself completely. It is to erase yourself. This is what I refused to do.

Nayomi Munaweera

#7. I've come to realize that being a mother makes me a better executive, because motherhood forces prioritization. Being a mom gives you so much more clarity on what is important.

Marissa Mayer

#8. I've learned that it's way harder to be a baby. Everything is a struggle for her. For instance, I haven't thrown up since the '90s and she's thrown up twice since we started this interview. Motherhood is cake compared to what it's like to be a baby.

Eva Mendes

#9. I wrote about the rush of love, the changing of a woman into a mother - a process that happened without conscious thought, as if the heart knew what the mind and body took time to learn. Love is the one thing that matters. That makes everything else matter. That makes everything worthwhile.

Lisa Wingate

#10. I found motherhood a crash course in existentialism (what is my purpose in life, am I mistress or slave of my destiny, when the hell do I get some sleep?) and [ the book] ROOM was the result.

Emma Donoghue

#11. I struggle to discover what these silent sons of mine want, but words have always failed me. They are sullen even as they tell me they are okay. I know they are lying but there is nothing I can do.

Jinat Rehana Begum

#12. What is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood?

Honore De Balzac

#13.
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

#14. In my previous life I was a civil attorney. At one point I truly believed that was what I wanted to be- but that was before I'd been handed a fistful of crushed violets from a toddler. Before I understood that the smile of a child is a tattoo: indelible art.

Jodi Picoult

#15. Mothers' bodies are not their own. The happiest ones seem to have forgotten what it is like to want themselves back at all.

Lisa Carey

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

Sylvia Plath

#17. WANTING to be anything is the whole point of feminism. HAVING TO BE SOMETHING is what feminists fight against, or at least the ones I know.

Alida Nugent

#18. A mother is always proud of her children. Sometimes she doesn't understand what the hell it is they're doing, but that's also part of motherhood. If you always understand your kids, they're probably not telling you everything.

Seanan McGuire

#19. You know what they say - sleep is the mother's drug of choice, but like heroin, only the very rich and the very poor can afford it.

Elissa Schappell

#20. A mother isn't the person who births you; it's the person who rears you and shows you love.

Raquel Cepeda

#21. You don't need to be primary caregiver of your children to be of primary influence in their lives. What you do for them behind the scenes in your own unique way is what makes the true difference in the long run.

Miya Yamanouchi

#22. No occupation in this world is more trying to soul and body than the care of young children. What patience and wisdom, skill and unlimited love it calls for. God gave the work to mothers and furnished them for it, and they cannot shirk it and be guiltless.

Isabella MacDonald Alden

#23. 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

#24. Bertha divined what an enormous wrong had been wrought against the world in that the longing for pleasure is placed in woman just as in man; and that with women that longing is a sin, demanding expiation, if the yearning for pleasure is not at the same time a yearning for motherhood.

Arthur Schnitzler

#25. So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is such a large part of what it means to be human?
I'm not sure. That's my answer: I'm not sure.

Anne Lamott

#26. It's true what they say, that a baby gives you a reason to live. But also, a baby is a reason that it is not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.

Rivka Galchen

#27. Morality and its victim, the mother - what a terrible picture! Is there indeed anything more terrible, more criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood?

Emma Goldman

#28. Completeness? Happiness? These words don't come close to describing my emotions. There truly is nothing I can say to capture what motherhood means to me, particularly given my medical history.

Anita Baker

#29. Motherhood is not what was left over after our Father blessed His sons with priesthood ordination. It was the most ennobling endowment He could give His daughters, a sacred trust that gave women an unparalleled role in helping His children keep their second estate.

Sheri L. Dew

#30. 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

#31. What's going to be funny is when they think Mom and Dad are a little bit cool, because right now, we're not cool Mom and Dad.

Angelina Jolie

#32. 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. (What's Wrong with the World)

John Eldredge

#33. For a long time, I tried to make my ilfe work, to make our family work. I got tired, though. Five children wears you out until the only thing left inside you, the only thing you've got to give, is a memory of what you thought you'd be.

Amy Franklin-Willis

#34. Ladies, [motherhood] is a full-time job. Do not kid yourself that you can be a dental receptionist and a mother; that you can be a typist and a mom; that you can be a Vice President and a mom. One of the two things will win. Now look at your Bible and ask what you have to do.

Alistair Begg

#35. Oh, what a power is motherhood, possessing a potent spell. Love, Light, Blessings

Euripides

#36. I realize then, what my mother already knows - has known for a long time. Motherhood is a procession of goodbyes. Some bittersweet and filled with promise and hope, some gradual, a gentle prying away of your fingers from something precious, some more violent, unexpected.

Heather Gudenkauf

#37. Our ability to choose is sacred. It's what makes humans special.

Mark Andrew Poe

#38. 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

#39. What if happiness is a choice?

Sunanda J. Chatterjee

#40. Women wear many hats in their lives. Daughter, sister, student, breadwinner. But no matter where we are or what we're doing, one hat that moms never take off is the crown of motherhood. There is no crown more glorious.

Ann Romney

#41. Just think: people decided one day that a day should be set aside for motherhood and fatherhood. What a great concept that is.

Patti Davis

#42. Motherhood is not a hobby, it is a calling. You do not collect children because you find them cuter than stamps. It is not something to do if you can squeeze the time in. It is what God gave you time for.

Neil L. Andersen

#43. A huge part of keeping women in their place has to do with creating a really limited definition of what a 'real' woman is like. And a ton of that what-makes-a-woman nonsense is attached to motherhood. Apparently, by virtue of having ovaries and a uterus, women are automatic mommies or mommies-to-be.

Jessica Valenti

#44. What I'm asking is will watching The Discovery
Channel with my young black boy instead
of the news coverage of the riot funerals riot arrests
riot nothing changes riots be enough to keep him
from harm?

Jennifer Givhan

#45. Motherhood sort of puts things into perspective, and it's bout real life, and life is about people, what we give, what we take, what we share.

Halle Berry

#46. Now in the thriving season of love
when the bud relents into flower,
your love turned absence has turned once more,
and if my comforts fall soft as rain
on her flutters, it is because
love grows by what it remembers of love

Lisel Mueller

#47. If I had known what it meant to love, I wouldn't have had children, because once we love, we love forever, like Uncle Two's wife, Step-aunt Two, who can't stop loving her gambler son, the son who is burning up the family fortune like a pyromaniac.

Kim Thuy

#48. Being a mother is like being a gardener of souls. You tend your children, make sure the light always touches them; you nourish them. You sow your seeds, and reap what you sow.

Karen White

#49. Twitter, checking in on the world, and I see a tweet from some motherhood site. It says: "Sleeplessness is a badge of honor for moms." What? A badge of honor? Right then and there, my hair catches

Shonda Rhimes

#50. Love may be the fairest gem which Society has filched from Nature; but what is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood? A smile has dried my tears.

Honore De Balzac

#51. Friends who love us know that motherhood is about transitioning
and adjusting, constantly, to those changes. We must become masters of change because that is what life demands of us.

Meg Meeker

#52. No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.

Margaret Atwood

#53. My own cabaret is constantly evolving with what is occurring in my own life, so motherhood is a natural addition to it.

Susan Egan

#54. I felt like God was giving me a chance to assist in a miracle. There is something so relieving about life taking over you like that. You're playing a part in a much bigger show. And that's what life is. It's the greatest show on earth.

Beyonce Knowles

#55. With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before

Jhumpa Lahiri