Maternity Journey Quotes

At one point in my late twenties, I was granted a restraining order to keep myself safe from her. You know the wheels of the maternal cart have hurled off when your own adult daughter is granted a three-year stay away order.

There is a danger in the repudiation of the feminine when the daughter who rejects the aspects of the negative feminine embodied by her mother also denies positive aspects of her own feminine nature, which are playful, sensuous, passionate, nurturing, intuitive, and creative. Many women who have had angry or emotional mothers seek to control their own anger and feelings lest they be seen as destructive and castrating. This repression of anger often prevents them from seeing the inequities in a male-defined system. Women who have seen their mothers as superstitious, religious, or old-fashioned discard the murky, mysterious, magical aspects of the feminine for cool logic and analysis. A chasm is created between the heroine and the maternal qualities within her; this chasm will have to be healed later in the journey for her to achieve wholeness.

O God, in you I was conceived and born. Thank you for Jesus’ labor to make me your child by water and his maternal blood in the Spirit. Amen.

This alleged Providence was the great subterfuge of maternal thoughtlessness.

My maternal aunts and uncles, the Barros, were twelve rather eccentric brothers and sisters, though none was hopelessly mad.

It also showed that the only real block to bi-maternal reproduction is the DNA methylation pattern at key genes. It disproved a previous hypothesis that sperm were required because the sperm themselves carried certain necessary accessory factors such as particular proteins or RNA molecules required to kick-start development properly.16

My mother, writing from France, admonished me to take care of my health as she had during the war. My head could be all set for the guillotine, and still my mother would scold me for forgetting my muffler. She never missed an opportunity to try and convince me that the world is a kindly place and that she'd done a good job in conceiving me. This alleged Providence was the great subterfuge of maternal thoughtlessness.

What is it about the relationship of a mother that can heal or hurt us? Her womb is the first landscape we inhabit. It is here we learn to respond - to move, to listen, to be nourished and grow. In her body we grow to be human as our tails disappear and our gills turn to lungs. Our maternal environment is perfectly safe - dark, warm, and wet. It is a residency inside the Feminine. When we outgrow our mother's body, our cramps become her own. We move. She labors. Our body turns upside down in hers as we journey through the birth canal. She pushes in pain. We emerge, a head. She pushes one more time, and we slide out like a fish. Slapped on the back by the doctor, we breath. The umbilical cord is cut - not at our request. Separation is immediate. A mother reclaims her body, for her own life. Not ours. Minutes old, our first death is our own birth.

Slowly, the practice of gratitude will begin to transform your consciousness so you start to detect Divine Presence and Divine Mercy all around you, which in time tremendously lessens your fear and suffering. For, it will make you aware of the maternal protection of God and of how the entire universe and all of life is constantly giving you signs of God's glory, beauty, and love. Practicing gratitude not only heals you of vanity and pride; it also heals your fear, grief, and insecurity of separation.

lake level: 4204.75' What is it about the relationship of a mother that can heal or hurt us? Her womb is the first landscape we inhabit. It is here we learn to respond - to move, to listen, to be nourished and grow. In her body we grow to be human as our tails disappear and our gills turn to lungs. Our maternal environment is perfectly safe - dark, warm, and wet. It is a residency inside the Feminine. When we outgrow our mother's body, our cramps become her own. We move. She labors. Our body turns upside down in hers as we journey through the birth canal. She pushes in pain. We emerge, a head. She pushes one more time, and we slide out like a fish. Slapped on the back by the doctor, we breathe. The umbilical cord is cut - not at our request. Separation is immediate. A mother reclaims her body, for her own life. Not ours. Minutes old, our first death is our own birth.

Freud’s incest theory describes certain fantasies that accompany the regression of libido and are especially characteristic of the personal unconscious as found in hysterical patients. Up to a point they are infantile-sexual fantasies which show very clearly just where the hysterical attitude is defective and why it is so incongruous. They reveal the shadow. Obviously the language used by this compensation will be dramatic and exaggerated. The theory derived from it exactly matches the hysterical attitude that causes the patient to be neurotic. One should not, therefore, take this mode of expression quite as seriously as Freud himself took it. It is just as unconvincing as the ostensibly sexual traumata of hysterics. The neurotic sexual theory is further discomfited by the fact that the last act of the drama consists in a return to the mother’s body. This is usually effected not through the natural channels but through the mouth, through being devoured and swallowed (pl. LXII), thereby giving rise to an even more infantile theory which has been elaborated by Otto Rank. All these allegories are mere makeshifts. The real point is that the regression goes back to the deeper layer of the nutritive function, which is anterior to sexuality, and there clothes itself in the experiences of infancy. In other words, the sexual language of regression changes, on retreating still further back, into metaphors derived from the nutritive and digestive functions, and which cannot be taken as anything more than a façon de parler. The so-called Oedipus complex with its famous incest tendency changes at this level into a “Jonah-and-the-Whale” complex, which has any number of variants, for instance the witch who eats children, the wolf, the ogre, the dragon, and so on. Fear of incest turns into fear of being devoured by the mother. The regressing libido apparently desexualizes itself by retreating back step by step to the presexual stage of earliest infancy. Even there it does not make a halt, but in a manner of speaking continues right back to the intra-uterine, pre-natal condition and, leaving the sphere of personal psychology altogether, irrupts into the collective psyche where Jonah saw the “mysteries” (“représentations collectives”) in the whale’s belly. The libido thus reaches a kind of inchoate condition in which, like Theseus and Peirithous on their journey to the underworld, it may easily stick fast. But it can also tear itself loose from the maternal embrace and return to the surface with new possibilities of life.

I know why you are here.” She knew! “We receive extensive financial statements, and I know you did not pay your own way, so let us put that drama out of the way, shall we?” “Is it a drama?” Jane said with a laugh, relieved the woman was just referring to Carolyn’s bequest. “Hm?” Mrs. Wattlesbrook would not budge from her intended course of conversation. Jane sighed. “Yes, my great-aunt left me this vacation in her will, but I don’t know what you mean by drama. I never intended to hide--” “No need to make a fuss.” She waved her arms as if wafting Jane’s exclamations out the window like a foul odor. “You are here, you are paid in full. I would not have you worry that we will not take care of you just because you are not our usual type of guest and there is no chance, given your economic conditions, that you would ever be a repeat client or likely to associate with and recommend us to potential clients. Let me assure you that we will still do all in our power to make your visit, such as it is, enjoyable.” Mrs. Wattlesbrook smiled, showing both rows of yellowing teeth. Jane blinked. Economic conditions? Usual type of guest? She made herself take two deep-rooted yoga breaths, smiled back, and thought of men in breeches. “Okay then.” “Good, good.” Mrs. Wattlesbrook patted Jane’s arm, suddenly the picture of hospitality and maternal tenderness. “Now, do have some tea. You must be quite chilled from your journey.” In fact, the temperature of the limo, unlike this pseudo-inn, had been quite comfortable, and in the blazing heat the last thing Jane wanted was hot tea, but she reminded herself to play along, so she sweated and drank.

In impulsive people there is often a malfunctioning of the orbital cortex, and in hypersexual and rage-prone people there is often amygdaloid dysfunction. In people with parahippocampal and amygdala damage, one often finds inadequacies in emotional memory, sexuality, and social behavior, and in people with cingulate dysfunction, there can be problems with mood regulation and behavioral control. But the pattern of decreased functioning across the entire complex of these limbic, prefrontal, and temporal cortices—whether due to prenatal development, perinatal maternal stress, substance abuse, direct trauma, or a severe rare combination of “high-risk” genes—appeared unique to the psychopath’s brain.

First, romantic love triggered both the brain’s pleasure centers and the cortical regions that manage our sense of self, like the angular gyrus, much more intensely than friendship. Maternal love was quite similar to companionate love, except it activated the subcortical periaqueductal gray matter (PAG), a brain area that is concentrated with receptors for hormones called oxytocin and vasopressin, which are important in bonding, among other functions. These receptors are also associated with compassion and, interestingly, with pain suppression. This could suggest that, on top of the abundant joy that comes with loving a child, there is something uniquely painful about the experience that requires a natural pain reliever, so that mothers are able to better feel and even absorb the pain of their children. This might ring true to any mother who has night-weaned her baby or sent a kid off to college.

children who go through at least six adverse childhood experiences could see their life expectancy reduced by more than twenty years. Physiological stress leads to hypertension, which results in higher rates of infant and maternal mortality, among other conditions. Research has even

Xanthi came into my childhood in August of 1954, arriving at Union Station near the Chicago River, final stop in a transatlantic journey to help take care of me and my siblings in suburban Oak Park while Mom underwent treatment, such as it was in those days, for breast cancer metastases. Xanthi was a friend of my maternal grandmother’s, maybe even a distant relative. Didn’t matter to me as a four-year-old boy. Whoever she was related to, she left her home on the Peloponnesus to live with us for room and board and some money to send back home after a string of cataclysms bludgeoning Greece at the time.

The United States spends more on health care than any other advanced economy, but we don't see better outcomes in exchange. Incredibly, in many parts of the country, life expectancy is actually shrinking, and when it comes to maternal mortality, the United States is one of only thirteen countries where rates have gotten worse over the past twenty-five years. Meanwhile, working families are overwhelmed by medical bills, which are one of America's leading causes of personal bankruptcy.

The attacks on the Taj and the Oberoi, in which executives and socialites died, had served as a blunt correction. The wealthy now saw that their security could not be requisitioned privately. They were dependent on the same public safety system that ill served the poor. Ten young men had terrorized one of the world’s biggest cities for three days—a fact that had something to do with the ingenuity of a multi-pronged plot, but perhaps also to do with government agencies that had been operating as private market-stalls, not as public guardians. The crisis-response units of the Mumbai Police lacked arms. Officers in the train station didn’t know how to use their weapons, and ran and hid as two terrorists killed more than fifty travelers. Other officers called to rescue inhabitants of a besieged maternity hospital stayed put at police headquarters, four blocks away. Ambulances failed to respond to the wounded. Military commandos took eight hours to reach the heart of the financial capital—a journey that involved an inconveniently parked jet, a stop to refuel, and a long bus ride from the Mumbai airport. By the time the commandos arrived in south Mumbai, the killings were all but over.