babies

Congratulations is a societal burp that follows a positive act. When you graduate AA, you get a congratulations. When you throw back three bottles of whiskey in one night, you do not. For a species that is interested in furthering its kind, no one will congratulate you for succeeding in one more day of spinsterhood. If you follow the Congratulation Super Highway, you will get engaged, married and then have children. Getting a congratulations has never been so easy. Just have some unprotected sex.

Smile at the Fates and you will feel less their Slave.

Nick and the CandlestickI am a miner. The light burns blue. Waxy stalactitesDrip and thicken, tearsThe earthen wombExudes from its dead boredom. Black bat airsWrap me, raggy shawls, Cold homicides.They weld to me like plums.Old cave of calcium Icicles, old echoer.Even the newts are white,Those holy Joes.And the fish, the fish ----Christ! they are panes of ice,A vice of knives, A piranha Religion, drinkingIts first communion out of my live toes. The candleGulps and recovers its small altitude,Its yellows hearten.O love, how did you get here? O embryoRemembering, even in sleep, Your crossed position. The blood blooms cleanIn you, ruby. The painYou wake to is not yours.Love, love,I have hung our cave with roses, With soft rugs ----The last of Victoriana. Let the starsPlummet to their dark address,Let the mercuric Atoms that cripple drip Into the terrible well,You are the oneSolid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.

When my friends began to have babies and I came to comprehend the heroic labor it takes to keep one alive, the constant exhausting tending of a being who can do nothing and demands everything, I realized that my mother had done all of these things for me before I remembered. I was fed; I was washed; I was clothed; I was taught to speak and given a thousand other things, over and over again, hourly, daily, for years. She gave me everything before she gave me nothing.

We are all born rude. No infant has ever appeared yet with the grace to understand how inconsiderate it is to disturb others in the middle of the night.

Memory loss is the key to human reproduction. If you remembered what new parenthood was actually like you wouldn__ go around lying to people about how wonderful it is, and you certainly wouldn__ ever do it twice.

Go on, glare your eyes at me, and cry and plead, and talk tome about money and what it can buy. But it can't buy back a child once he's dead!

When I see an evil person, I cannot believe that once he was an innocent and sweet baby.

Being nearly four years old, she was certainly a child: and children are human (if one allows the term "human" a wide sense): but she had not altogether ceased to be a baby: and babies are of course not human--they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes: the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid, since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates. In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind.It is true that they look human--but not so human, to be quite fair, as many monkeys.Subconsciously, too, every one recognizes they are animals--why else do people always laugh when a baby does some action resembling the human, as they would at a praying mantis? If the baby was only a less-developed man, there would be nothing funny in it, surely.

Look at you, standing there in your iron- gray dress, feeling piousand self- righteous while you starve small children!

Still the most magical day of my life was the day I became a mom.

So many people think that they are not gifted because they don__ have an obvious talent that people can recognize because it doesn__ fall under the creative arts category__riting, dancing, music, acting, art or singing. Sadly, they let their real talents go undeveloped, while they chase after fame. I am grateful for the people with obscure unremarked talents because they make our lives easier---inventors, organizers, planners, peacemakers, communicators, activists, scientists, and so forth. However, there is one gift that trumps all other talents__eing an excellent parent. If you can successfully raise a child in this day in age to have integrity then you have left a legacy that future generations will benefit from.

But the lucidity of her old age allowed her to see, and she said so many times, that the cries of children in their mothers' wombs are not announcements of ventriloquism or a faculty for prophecy but an unmistakable sign of an incapacity for love.

In infancy, our blood is strong and our energy is plentiful. Mind and body, thought and action are one. Everything we do is in harmony with the natural order. The infant is not affected by things that happen around him. Virtue and ethics cannot restrain his will. Naked and free of social conventions, he follows the natural path of the heart.

He's fine. He's fine,' he kept saying as the baby became ever more cranky and bewildered; screaming in terror if she tried to put him down.'Why should he be unhappy?' she wanted to say. 'He has had so few days in this world. Why should the unhappiness start here?

Every woman who chooses - joyfully, thoughtfully, calmly, of their own free will and desire - not to have a child does womankind a massive favour in the long term. We need more women who are allowed to prove their worth as people; rather than being assessed merely for their potential to create new people. After all, half those new people we go on to create are also women - presumably themselves to be judged, in their futures, for not making new people. And so it will go on and on...

You may hate being pregnant, but the minute the baby is born, she is God's precious child, given to you as a gift.

Our baby gives herself to me completely. There is no hesitation, no reservation, no holding back, no coldness, no craft, no tremor or fear in her love. Although our relationship may encompass tears, frustration, even fury, it is an utterly reliable bond. As it grows, her love is literally unadulterated. Her love is wholly of the child, pure in its essence as children are in their direct passions. Children do not love wisely, but perhaps they love the best of all.