Struggles Of Motherhood Quotes

In the book Soldiers on the Home Front, I was greatly struck by the fact that in childbirth alone, women commonly suffer more pain, illness and misery than any war hero ever does. An what's her reward for enduring all that pain? She gets pushed aside when she's disfigured by birth, her children soon leave, hear beauty is gone. Women, who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed freedom-fighting heroes put together.

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.

Motherhood brings as much joy as ever, but it still brings boredom, exhaustion, and sorrow too. Nothing else ever will make you as happy or as sad, as proud or as tired, for nothing is quite as hard as helping a person develop his own individuality especially while you struggle to keep your own.

That’s the funny thing,” she said. “Men always want to die for something. For someone. I can see the appeal. You do it once and it’s done. No more worrying, not knowing, about tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. I know you all think it sounds brave, but I’ll tell you something even braver. To struggle and fight for the ones you love today. And then do it all over again the next day. Every day. For your whole life. It’s not as romantic, I admit. But it takes a lot of courage to live for someone, too.

I stumble and fall. I weep and struggle to rise. My mom feels it all.

I struggle with enormous discrepancies: between the reality of motherhood and the image of it, between my love for my home and the need to travel, between the varied and seductive paths of the heart. The lessons of impermanance, the occasional despair and the muse, so tenuously moored, all visit their needs upon me and I dig deeply for the spiritual utilities that restore me

Real women have children, wise women choose for themselves.

Reunion with the mother is a siren call haunting our imagination. Once there was bliss, and now there is struggle. Dim memories of life before the traumatic separation of birth may be the source of Arcadian fantasies of a lost golden age.

If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses.

Does rough weather choose men over women? Does the sun beat on men, leaving women nice and cool?' Nyawira asked rather sharply. 'Women bear the brunt of poverty. What choices does a woman have in life, especially in times of misery? She can marry or live with a man. She can bear children and bring them up, and be abused by her man. Have you read Buchi Emecheta of Nigeria, Joys of Motherhood? Tsitsi Dangarembga of Zimbabwe, say, Nervous Conditions? Miriama Ba of Senegal, So Long A Letter? Three women from different parts of Africa, giving words to similar thoughts about the condition of women in Africa.' 'I am not much of a reader of fiction,' Kamiti said. 'Especially novels by African women. In India such books are hard to find.' 'Surely even in India there are women writers? Indian women writers?' Nyawira pressed. 'Arundhati Roy, for instance, The God of Small Things? Meena Alexander, Fault Lines? Susie Tharu. Read Women Writing in India. Or her other book, We Were Making History, about women in the struggle!' 'I have sampled the epics of Indian literature,' Kamiti said, trying to redeem himself. 'Mahabharata, Ramayana, and mostly Bhagavad Gita. There are a few others, what they call Purana, Rig-Veda, Upanishads … Not that I read everything, but …' 'I am sure that those epics and Puranas, even the Gita, were all written by men,' Nyawira said. 'The same men who invented the caste system. When will you learn to listen to the voices of women?

If you view creativity as a selfish act, you will always struggle to justify making time for it.

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.

When we encourage new parents to 'treasure these moments because they don't last forever' we need to remember to also reassure them that they will survive these moments because they don't last forever. Parenting is hard, and the struggles can sometimes feel like they overshadow the joys. Knowing that struggling is normal and will pass helps us get through the hard times so we can truly treasure the good ones.

Sometimes I almost go hours without crying, Then I feel if I don't, I'll go insane. It can seem her whole life was her dying. She tried so hard, then she tired of trying; Now I'm tired, too, of trying to explain. Sometimes I almost go hours without crying. The anxiety, the rage, the denying; Though I never blamed her for my pain, It can seem her whole life was her dying. And mine was struggling to save her; prying, Conniving: it was the chemistry in her brain. Sometimes I almost go hours without crying. If I said she was easy, I'd be lying; The lens between her and the world was stained: It can seem her whole life was her dying. But the fact, the fact, is stupefying: Her absence tears at me like a chain. Sometimes I almost go hours without crying. It can seem her whole life was her dying. - Villanelle for a Suicide's Mother

Birth is not merely that which divides women from men: it also divides women from themselves, so that a woman's understanding of what it is to exist is profoundly changed. Another person has existed in her, and after their birth the live within the jurisdiction of her consciousness. When she is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself; and so it is as difficult to leave your children as it is to stay with them. To discover this is to feel that your life has become irretrievably mired in conflict, or caught in some mythic snare in which you will perpetually, vainly struggle.

It does appear that in some other cultures the work of motherhood is not left entirely up to one person the way it is here, so a baby can be handed around to many relatives, which gives the mother some blessed relief. Our society tends to elevate pregnancy and childbirth to unrealistic romantic heights then leave women on their own to struggle with the task, making them wonder what they are doing wrong when at times it all seems too much.

It is difficult to exaggerate the adverse influence of the precepts and practices of religion upon the status and happiness of woman. Owing to the fact that upon women devolves the burden of motherhood, with all its accompanying disabilities, they always have been, and always must be, at a natural disadvantage in the struggle of life as compared with men.... With certain exceptions, women all the world over have been relegated to a position of inferiority in the community, greater or less according to the religion and the social organisation of the people; the more religious the people the lower the status of the women...

Single Mothers Your shoulders are heavy, but you stand tall and raise your head high, knowing that you are raising kings and queens, future leaders of the world. You are pounding the pavement, kicking butt, making it look easy but we know better; we know the struggle, we understand the pain. The road feels lonely but you are not alone.

Treat sins that your children struggle with like basic math. Practice, Practice, and you'll get it.

One mother could look after twelve children and decades later these twelve adults would fidget and struggle to look after that one mother.

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.

She bravely wakes up every morning to face the same chaos that left her drained the night before, because they need her to be a mother. She smiles even when her own heart is breaking because they need someone to draw strength from. She teaches them to have faith in good things even if she struggles to crawl out of her own darkness, because they need to see the light. Strength of a Mother's Love

Some women are born mothers, some women become mothers, and some have motherhood thrust upon them. I struggled against it all my life, but I think the truth is I was probably born to it. I don't do badly, I don't do well, I just do it.

To destroy the institution is not to abolish motherhood. It is to release the creation and sustenance of life into the same realm of decision, struggle, surprise, imagination, and conscious intelligence, as any other difficult, but freely chosen work.

If we can put aside mother blaming, or the tendency to make sweeping generalizations about women juggling careers and thus struggling to be present to their families, our collective understanding of Mother Hunger could guide an inspired effort to support women in preparation for motherhood

Procreative choice is for women an equivalent of the demand for the legally limited working day which Marx saw as the great watershed for factory workers in the nineteenth century. The struggles for that “modest Magna Carta,” as Marx calls it… did not end capitalism, but they changed the relation of the workers to their own lives.

I am thirty-three years old and have been riding horses since I was nine. From the beginning, I was entranced with their power, their muscled fluidity. I was a typical young girl in love with horses. But there was more -- a nuance I couldn't articulate and still struggle to name. Call it a connection, an invisible fiber that runs between me and these four-legged creatures, as if we are one and the same.

Ada had always believed that her mother, in rebuilding the house only three miles from where it had once been, had kept her world piteously small, but maybe what mattered, Ada thought as she gazed at it now, was not how big or how small her mother's world was, but that her mother had managed to keep it at all. It must have been no trifling thing to carve out a space of her own, to protect it and hold within it the people she loved.

At the core, making space for creativity traces back to permission, to the idea that feeding our souls is not a waste. Creativity is not a waste of time, or money, or resources. It’s not a waste of space in our schedules, our minds, our homes. If you view creativity as a selfish act, you will always struggle to justify making time for it. If you believe pursuing creativity is self-serving, it’s going to be the first thing you cut from your life in busy seasons.

For what is at stake is fundamentally a woman’s femininity: just as the white Victorian woman unhappy with a life of petticoats and socializing might have had her uterus injected with tea in an attempt to bring her in line with the ideal female of her time, the twenty-first-century mother who is struggling to stay steeped in ever-patient love and fun might need psychiatric internment to accept proper intensive motherhood. Thurer summed up the progression of the twentieth century nicely when she wrote, “[Experts] have invented a motherhood that excluded the experience of the mother.

The remaking of the self that mothers experience- the struggles of overcoming bordeom, fatigue, irritation; of being persistently present; of trying to survive a love that can feel like an ocean one can't swim- is not of great concern to a world focused on having. So many fall back on a system of rewards, products, and achievements that fits into the framework of success in which they've operated for most of their lives: this is the "Mommy Olympics," as de Marneffe calls it. Or they can resort to cliches, which mask the complexities of individual experience and squash it into a quote to be hung above the dining room table or posted on Facebook. There is no way to articulate and venerate being in a society so focused on having. One of the ways, which we have mostly lost, would be ritual. In a void where few rituals, stories, and symbols are available to mothers, women have responded by conjuring a shadow universe of fear and darkness and loss. The immense passion and confusing energy that motherhood generates gets channeled into a never-ending series of disaster scenarios necessitating vigilant prevention. The wide-open and terrifying potential for being narrows into a relentless pursuit of security.

Lot of questions came up during that struggle between life and death. Are such bonds, with a husband and sons, necessary for women? I thought they were not, so I moved away from them. I am living with my art. I give the same advice to my students. I don’t make a sand pot often. I make it occasionally so that I don’t forget the fragile nature of paativratyam.’ ‘Does a woman have a world other than her husband’s? Is there a higher meaning to a woman’s life than motherhood? Your experience may have been different. But to preach everyone on the basis of your experience …’ ‘A woman thinks she doesn’t have a world other than that of her husband’s. True. But some day that very husband will tell her that there is no place for her in his world. Then what’s left for her? She thinks giving birth to sons is the ultimate goal of her life. But those sons become heirs to their father, and even before we realize it, they leave her hands and go under the wing of their father. They submit to his authority. Or they begin to legislate our lives. Why bear such sons? Nobody will experience this as harshly as I have. Having realized this bitter truth, isn’t it my responsibility to share it with other women? But you Brahmins give no value for my words anyway. I teach my skills to people of different tribes in this forest and give them the essence of my experience.

The number of people struggling with pregnancy-related stress, pain, and anger at a time that we collectively pretend is the happiest of their lives is staggering.

Kristen had dreamed of having children since she was herself a child and had always thought that she would love motherhood as much as she would love her babies. “I know that being a mom will be demanding,” she told me once. “But I don’t think it will change me much. I’ll still have my life, and our baby will be part of it.” She envisioned long walks through the neighborhood with Emily. She envisioned herself mastering the endlessly repeating three-hour cycle of playing, feeding, sleeping, and diaper changing. Most of all, she envisioned a full parenting partnership, in which I’d help whenever I was home—morning, nighttime, and weekends. Of course, I didn’t know any of this until she told me, which she did after Emily was born. At first, the newness of parenthood made it seem as though everything was going according to our expectations. We’ll be up all day and all night for a few weeks, but then we’ll hit our stride and our lives will go back to normal, plus one baby. Kristen took a few months off from work to focus all of her attention on Emily, knowing that it would be hard to juggle the contradicting demands of an infant and a career. She was determined to own motherhood. “We’re still in that tough transition,” Kristen would tell me, trying to console Emily at four A.M. “Pretty soon, we’ll find our routine. I hope.” But things didn’t go as we had planned. There were complications with breast-feeding. Emily wasn’t gaining weight; she wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t play. She was born in December, when it was far too cold to go for walks outdoors. While I was at work, Kristen would sit on the floor with Emily in the dark—all the lights off, all the shades closed—and cry. She’d think about her friends, all of whom had made motherhood look so easy with their own babies. “Mary had no problem breast-feeding,” she’d tell me. “Jenny said that these first few months had been her favorite. Why can’t I get the hang of this?” I didn’t have any answers, but still I offered solutions, none of which she wanted to hear: “Talk to a lactation consultant about the feeding issues.” “Establish a routine and stick to it.” Eventually, she stopped talking altogether. While Kristen struggled, I watched from the sidelines, unaware that she needed help. I excused myself from the nighttime and morning responsibilities, as the interruptions to my daily schedule became too much for me to handle. We didn’t know this was because of a developmental disorder; I just looked incredibly selfish. I contributed, but not fully. I’d return from work, and Kristen would go upstairs to sleep for a few hours while I’d carry Emily from room to room, gently bouncing her as I walked, trying to keep her from crying. But eventually eleven o’clock would roll around and I’d go to bed, and Kristen would be awake the rest of the night with her. The next morning, I would wake up and leave for work, while Kristen stared down the barrel of another day alone. To my surprise, I grew increasingly disappointed in her: She wanted to have children. Why is she miserable all the time? What’s her problem? I also resented what I had come to recognize as our failing marriage. I’d expected our marriage to be happy, fulfilling, overflowing with constant affection. My wife was supposed to be able to handle things like motherhood with aplomb. Kristen loved me, and she loved Emily, but that wasn’t enough for me. In my version of a happy marriage, my wife would also love the difficulties of being my wife and being a mom. It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d have to earn the happiness, the fulfillment, the affection. Nor had it occurred to me that she might have her own perspective on marriage and motherhood.

It is a balm to our worried heart to know that whatever struggle we are engaged in is part of the universal human story.

If we are struggling at any stage of parenting, think about the atmosphere in the house that we are creating. Is it one of anxiety or anger? Disapproval or judgment? Show your child warmth, support, tolerance, encouragement and praise. Be fair to them, provide them with security, focus on giving them approval and acceptance for their differences. Imagine the atmosphere in the house with this abundance of these things. Your child will feel safe, loved and confident, moving into the world a whole and grounded being.

Mothers of black boys survive by pushing fear down so it doesn't overflow, overwhelm our senses, paralyze us, and derail our ability to love, nurture and protect our black boys.

Reproductive justice, a phrase coined by Black feminists at a conference in 1994, remains elusive for African American women who struggle to access affordable health care due to social and economic inequalities. The abortion rate for Black women is nearly five times that for white women. African American women are three to four times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. Furthermore, health conditions that disproportionately affect Black women, such as uterine fibroids, receive very little government research funding. My hope is that this novel will provoke discussions about culpability in a society that still deems poor, Black, and disabled as categories unfit for motherhood.

I thought early motherhood would be gentle, beatific, pacific, tranquil: bathed in a soft light. But actually it was hard-core, edgy, gnarly. It wasn't pale pink; it was brown of shit and red of blood. And it was the most political experience of my life, rife with conflict, domination, drama, struggle, and power.

A mother who prioritizes her own desires and wealth over the needs and feelings of her children, neglecting her duties and responsibilities to nurture and support them, inflicts deep wounds and trauma. Her absence and disregard can lead to a lifetime of pain, isolation, and loneliness for her children, causing them to make harmful choices and struggle with relationship failures. The consequences of her selfishness can be devastating, leaving scars that may never fully heal.

If life were that easy, we wouldn’t have to struggle our way out of a sac, fighting to stay alive, covered in blood and attached to a cord. We made it then, and we will make it now!

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.

OH, CRY ME A RIVER Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. Colossians 3:13 So I wasn’t overly sympathetic. Can you blame me? I was talking to a young lady who was devastated after a Facebook comment dissed her appearance. “Umm, they didn’t like your new ‘do’?” I feigned understanding. “How many Facebook followers you got there?” “Three,” she said. OhDearLordJesusSpareMe. Big hurts and little hurts, we’ve all got ’em. I won’t bore you with my own bumps and bruises, but a wealth of “Palin stuff,” true or not, paraded before the world, seemingly on a regular basis, gives me experience to help others persevere. God can use indignities for His purposes! One way to survive is to keep your perspective. Kissing a firstborn goodbye—off to war; cradling a newborn struggling with special needs; preparing for a teenager’s pending motherhood; governing the nation’s largest state; and campaigning for vice president of those states . . . all at once, Lord? This, while ruthless rumormongers felt big by making others feel small. How to handle all that? My “sufferings” are minuscule compared to others: those who have lost a family member in military service, or lost a child, or who are single moms with no supportive family to help them. It’s hard for all of us to keep perspective. But one way to gain perspective is to get out there and help other people. SWEET FREEDOM IN Action Today, volunteer for people who are really hurting, hurting worse than you are. Don’t dwell on anything out of your control—especially don’t worry about what people say about you. Give it all to God. And, darling Piper, ignore Facebook slights about your purple hair.

Motherhood is a tricky business. And like all jobs, we each bring different skill sets to the table. So there are women out there who are better moms because they work. And there are moms who want to be at home, should be at home, and absolutely bask in the glow of all things maternal and sweet. And then there are the rest of us—struggling for the right answers, because what seems like the right answer one day only stands you on your head the next.

Indra believed that the birth of each of her sons had been accompanied by a sign... With Sarva, overnight her cascading black hair showed a thick clutch of grey. He was the child she would struggle most with.

Prayer Tonight my heart goes to all the survivors on Earth; my thoughts and tears are for the hurt, the ill, the stabbed, the abused, the hopeless and the helpless... I bow to the rescued and to those that didn't make it, to the resilience of human race, to the struggle, the hope and the amazing will of such frail creatures to hang on to their lives and fight for one more hour, one more day, one more month or one more year on Earth...God Bless You and Hang In There...It's ALL Worth It!   

The impulse to have a child is very often a response to the woman’s own childhood, as though her childhood has left her incomplete, or has taken a part of her that she is driven to find again. The struggle, which is sometimes a direct combat, between the search for completeness and the desire to create art therefore becomes a core part of the artist’s development.

Nothing will ever make you as happy, as sad, as tired, or as proud as motherhood. For nothing is as hard as helping a person develop their own individuality, while struggling to keep your own." Anonymous

That Is All I Ask Hold my trembling hand I am now ailing Do not let me fall Indeed, I am weak When I struggle to see afar Show me the way If I sometimes cry Wipe the tears on my cheeks Whilst words skip my lips Hear my voice as I whisper; “It is me! It is me! Please help me out.” For I am no longer young But old enough Would you take care of me? I require you to be there Like a child needs a parent Stand by me, time and again That is all I ask

Reproductive Justice - a phrase coined by black feminists at a conference in 1994, remains illusive for African American women, who struggle to access affordable healthcare due to social and economic inequalities. The abortion rate for black women is nearly 5 times that for white women. African American women are 3-4 times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. Furthermore, health conditions that disproportionately affect black women, such as uterine fibroids, receive very little government research funding. My hope is this novel will provoke discussions about culpability in a society that still deems poor, black, and disabled as categories unfit for motherhood.

Preventing her abortion was all they cared about. The bleak struggle of her life—the stark daily realities that made motherhood impossible—didn’t trouble them at all.

My job had always been a huge part of who I am, is a huge part of who I am, and I suppose in those first few months of motherhood, after the initial euphoria, the whole 'oh my God, look what I've created' feeling had worn off, I struggled to figure out the woman who was left.

My daughter emanates unprocessed human need where the world is at its most civilised; and while at first I am on the side of that world, which I have so recently left, and struggle to contain and suppress her, soon, like so many mothers, I come to see something inhuman in civilisation, something vain and deathly. I hate its precious, fragile trinkets, its greed, its lack of charity. Compassion worms its way into me: but whether it is just sentiment, an annexe of my love for my daughter, or a constitutional change I can't really say.

As moms living with sinful hearts in a broken world, we struggle and toil, but in Christ, we’re not left without hope. God overcomes the curse by giving people another way to experience birth—not through a physical womb, but through the Holy Spirit.8 While a mother gives birth through physical groaning, sweat and tears, her water breaking, and the shedding of her blood—Jesus makes a way for life through his physical torture, sweat and tears in the garden, water pouring from his side, and his pure, perfect blood shed for us on the cross. The story of the crucified Christ is the best birth story ever told, with elements that parallel the gospel picture in each labor and delivery room.

When it comes to Theresa’s struggle, we need to understand that shame is the voice of perfectionism. Whether we’re talking about appearance, work, motherhood, health or family, it’s not the quest for perfection that is so painful; it’s failing to meet the unattainable expectations that lead to the painful wash of shame.

What I do articulate throughout Back to the Breast is that the ideology of natural motherhood shaped the path of breast-feeding’s return to popularity in every way. The marriage of breastfeeding to the ideology of natural motherhood was an important component in the early back-to-the-breast movement and this fact has continued to have meaningful implications for breastfeeding practice up through today. While it has competed with other ideological constructions in shaping ideas and practices surrounding breastfeeding over much of the last century, natural motherhood has fundamentally influenced how Americans today have come to think about breastfeeding. In the chapters that follow, I focus on the persistence in the belief by countless Americans over the past century that breastfeeding holds value and meaning that transcends nutritional adequacy and infant survival. I trace the efforts, science, struggles, triumphs, and failures of the people and ideas behind the back-to-the-breast movement over much of the last century so that we might better imagine a society in which all mothers receive the support they need to make their experiences as mothers personally rewarding and fulfilling.

The silence that surrounds mom rage is filled with fear. This fear gets instilled in us through cultural messaging that tells us motherhood is just the best. And if anyone dare disagree? Shame! We worry if our shameful words hit the air, our monstrousness might be true. So many of us struggling with mom rage don't tell our partners. We are afraid our friends will think badly of us, or they won't relate. We are terrified that if we share how furious we've become since having babies, it will get twisted into "I hate being a mom," which will further twist into "I don't love my children." At the end of the a rage-filled day, we lie in bed curled in a fetal position, sobbing. We think of the softness of our babies' skin, the way our children have a dep knowing that our bodies are nests, and they snuggle in till everything's just right, like a cat turning circles before she settles down. Not loving our children? This couldn't be further from the truth. But the fear that someone might misunderstand takes our breath away. So we retreat - into our beds, our cars, our drinks, our screens, ourselves. We shut the windows. We lock the doors. We don't tell a soul.

if you don’t take some time for yourself during the course of a day and if your child struggles to fall asleep, you may be anxious and resentful. As the flight attendant tells us: Put on your own oxygen mask before you help your child put on hers.

Look at it, cold and wet like a newborn calf. I want to tell it everything—how we struggled, how we tore out our hair and thumbed through rusted nails just to stand for its birth. I want to say: look how far we’ve come. Promise our resolutions. But what does a baby care for oaths and pledges? It only wants to live.

Though self-abandonment is something most people struggle with in some way or another, motherhood is a breeding ground for this insidiously self-destructive behavior. From the time children are born, their needs are intense, relentless, and literally screamed in our faces. Luckily for them (and the human race) we are biologically wired to respond to their needs, even when it means setting aside our own. While our nurturing, self-sacrificial instincts are beautiful and life preserving, they’re also a fast track to burnout, resentment, exhaustion, and destruction, if we’re not careful. It’s natural to minimize our needs in the interest of the beautiful beings we love, but it’s not natural that we’re raising our children in isolation and that the bulk of their needs are falling on one person instead of a tribe of extended family members and friends. This, and other profoundly affecting gaps within our culture, makes self-awareness and self-nurturing that much more essential. Unfortunately for some of us, it isn’t until we’re so emotionally or physically wrecked by our self-abandonment that we realize how disconnected from crucial parts of ourselves we really are.

i believed we could do it bc we’re in this together but together never happened through the stress &the struggle i dealt with on my own your sleeping pattern never changed bc of the baby you wanted to have

None of us knows another mom’s truth. We don’t know her fears or insecurities. We don’t know how her morning went. We don’t know how she was brought up. That goes for the high-performing, control-freak moms, too. We don’t know what drives them, or the pressures they are under. We don’t know what goes on in their heads—or how they feel about themselves and their lives. So maybe we should just give everyone (including ourselves) a break.

You are one of those mediations of God in my life. You bear God to me, make God present to me. Because you are an image of the Messiah to me, to address myself to you is, indirectly, to address myself to the divine, to the way that divine life is making its way in me, the way I am striving with divine powers, receiving wounding and blessing. To address you and my loving struggle to help you give birth to your own free will is also to address myself to the God in whose likeness I long to be reborn. God has come to me in you to draw me out of death.

These are the things they don't tell you about motherhood. How after a lifetime of struggling to love yourself it will be an absolute miracle to love these babies so wholly and unconditionally, sure. But also how they will love themselves the same way, at least at first, and in that maybe you will find a level of healing that all the therapy and self-help in the world couldn't get you to because you will realize at some point you must have loved yourself the very same way. Or how seeing the way they are so comfortable in their own skin, the way they strut around so confident in the fact that they are the masterpiece we too believe them to be, will make all the wok we've done trying to suck it all in or hide it or simply avoid looking at it in the mirror seem kind of silly. Because of course it is. It's against everything we were born knowing.

...aber was weiß man schon, solange man keine Kinder hat? Nichts weiß man, man wandert mit anderen Ahnungslosen durch ein Tal der Ahnungslosigkeit, ich wusste früher auch nicht, wie das sein könnte, ich habe nicht gefragt, was tun diese Mütter den ganzen Tag?

I had an abortion… we didn’t need another fucking baby!” she hollered. “All you give a fuck about is me being a mother, and newsflash, the hood of motherhood hasn’t been easy for me, Capella. You never noticed, and I’m sick of the shit… sick of always having to be alright when I’m struggling. Being a mother has been a fuck⁠—

For those of us who were female, the body was also defined by its role as a potential mother. That’s true in every class but becomes more problematic in the context of financial struggle. Poverty makes motherhood harder, and motherhood makes poverty harder. Single mothers and their children are, by far, the poorest type of family in the United States.