motherhood

I remind mothers everywhere of the sanctity of your calling. No other can adequately take your place. No responsibility is greater, no obligation more binding than that you rear in love and peace and integrity those whom you have brought into the world.

Sometimes, especially as women, we don't feel comfortable giving ourselves that credit. We're selfless in the best ways. But that can be dangerous too. You need to feel comfortable with affirming the greatness of who you are as a partner, a wife, a mother, a person. You are great. What you have to offer is great. When you give your time, your love, your respect, you deserve respect in return. You deserve comfort, you deserve honesty, and you deserve to feel safe. That's what relationships are supposed to be about - a place where you feel good, right?

These days, __etting lucky_ means drinking an entire cup of COFFEE while it__ still HOT!

I prayed in silence that perhaps even now, the queen might have a son and might know joy like this, such a strange, unexpected joy- the happiness of caring for a child whose whole life was in my hands.

Each day we do the best we can, and then tomorrow we try again!

It__ a good thing babies don__ give you a lot of time to think. You fall in love with them and when you realize how much they love you back, life is very simple.

Delirious as it can be, sex is only one kind of intimacy, and yet has become the cultural catchment area for all kinds of needs because our understanding of intimacy is so poor. Brutal work schedules, related geographic isolation, and the concomitant fracturing of families has meant that there is little time for intimacy, and even less to teach the necessary skills. But intimacy, the axis of romance, is slow, based on the sharing of a life rather than show. In terms of intimacy, folding laundry together or sharing the feeding of a child can have more impact than the most extravagant bouquet.

This is the book, then , and the book of Shakespeare. And every day you must read a page of each to your child--even though you yourself do not understand what is written down and cannot sound the words properly. You must do this that the child will grow up knowing of what is great---knowing that these tenements of Williamsburg are not the whole world."Katie: " The Protestant Bible and Shakespeare.

Burnout can be defined as a loss of enthusiasm, energy, idealism, perspective, and purpose; it has been described as trying to run a marathon at full speed. It's often the mothers who care the most who are the most prone to burnout.

Being a mother must be the saddest yet the most hopeful thing in the world, falling into a love that, once started, would never end.

Is she a good baby? People would ask me. Well, no, I'd say.That swirl of hair on the back of her head. We must have taken a thousand pictures of it.

I can imagine no heroism greater than motherhood.

My handsome husband and I didn__ make love for almost six months. I was enraptured, lost to my old life, and, in this obsession, disregarded author Ayelet Waldman _ who famously wrote of her 'smug well-being' and 'always vital, even torrid' sex life in the wake of childbirth: I ignored my husband as a man. Instead, I revelled in him as a different thing altogether, far more seductive and important, and infinitely more resonant. My husband was no longer just a man: he was the father of my child.

At the moment of giving birth to a child, is the mother separate from the child? You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child.

I would keep her, and raise her, and love her, even if she had to teach me how to do it.

Over time, we would learn each other, and I would learn to love her like a mother loves a daughter, imperfectly and without roots.

No children were harmed or neglected during the writing of this book.

I realized, listening to the silences that fell sometimes in my interview groups, that there are things that are sayable and unsayable about motherhood today. It is permissable, for example, to talk a lot about guilt, but not a lot about ambition. You can talk a lot about sex (or its lack) but not about the feelings that are keeping women from sleeping with their husbands. You can talk about society's lack of "appreciation" of mother's and the need for more social validation -- but not about policy that might actually make life better. You cannot really challenge the American culture of rugged individualism.