Quotes about Motherhood

The fastest way to break the cycle of perfectionism and become a fearless mother is to give up the idea of doing it perfectly - indeed to embrace uncertainty and imperfection.

Throughout my 20s and early 30s, I had jobs that I loved. I worked in city government. I ran a youth organization. I served as an associate dean at a university. And I couldn't imagine how a baby would fit into all of that.

Most of us love a non-self, or something extrinsic and apart from our inner life; but a mother's love during the time she is a flesh-and-blood ciborium is not for a non-self but for one that is her very self, a perfect example of charity and love which hardly perceives a separation. Motherhood then becomes a kind of priesthood. She brings God to man by preparing the flesh in which the soul will be implanted; she brings man to God in offering the child back again to the Creator.

As the mother knows the needs better than the babe, so the Blessed Mother understands our cries and worries and knows them better than we know ourselves.

Our Lord was born not just of her flesh but also by her consent.

With the crib seen as a tabernacle and the child as a kind of host, then the home becomes a living temple of God. The sacristan of that sanctuary is the mother, who never permits the tabernacle lamp of faith to go out.

Here is the answer, after all these years, to the mysterious words in the Gospel of the Incarnation which stated that Our Blessed Mother laid her "firstborn" in the manger. Did that mean that Our Blessed Mother was to have other children? It certainly did, but not according to the flesh. Our Divine Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was the unique Son of Our Blessed Mother by the flesh. But Our Lady was to have other children, not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit!

When Whistler was complimented on the portrait of his mother, he said, "You know how it is; one tries to make one's Mummy just as nice as he can." When God became Man, He too, I believe, would make His Mother as nice as He could—and that would make her a perfect Mother.

As a mother cannot forget the child of her womb, so a speaker cannot forget the child of his brain.

But the Woman gave Our Lord His human nature. He asked her to give Him a human life—to give Him hands with which to bless children, feet with which to go in search of stray sheep, eyes with which to weep over dead friends, and a body with which to suffer—that He might give us a rebirth in freedom and love.

Mama grizzlies mate later than other bears. They have two cubs instead of four. They wait four years - about twice as long as other bears - between having cubs. And after they're pregnant, if winter is hard or their health is not good or the food supply is uncertain, they re-absorb the embryo into their body.

As motherhood is the greatest and most natural God-given gift for women for posterity, it would seem that the birth and rearing of children, in the way which to us seems most ideal, would be the most satisfying and the most rewarding career for a woman.