motherhood

Unfeeling thing that I was, the sensibilities of the maternal heart were Greek and Hebrew to me.

She has had any number of foals. I yield to her judgement.

I don't ever want to make the mistake of needing him as much as or more than he needs me. But there's no denying that sometimes, when we sleep together in the dark cavern of the bottom bunk, his big brother thrashing around on top, the white noise machine grinding out its fake rain, the green digital clock announcing every hour, Iggy's small body holds mine.

...in the midst of the tumult, part ecstasy and part panic, into which all first-time mothers are thrown by sleep deprivation and headlong identity realignment.

I have often observed that the state of motherhood can turn quite ordinary females into heroines . . .

Later, when I was a new mother, I recognized her somewhat awestruck fascination with me. When you are fully immersed in the daily care and quirks and habits of a small, dependent child, an older kid who is articulate, civilized, and capable of moving around in the world without getting itself killed can seem as supernatural as a wizard.

I can absolutely assure you that birth is nothing like holding an ice cube in your hand for a minute and breathing through the "pain.

How naive Lore had been, despite being the daughter of a father no one spoke of, despite the strange, incomplete conversations at her mother__ deathbed; how again and again she was caught up short by the discovery that other people had stories they didn__ tell, or told stories that weren__ entirely true. How mostly you got odd chunks torn from the whole, impossible truly to understand in their damaged form.

An unemployed father is always considered more detrimental to the family than an unemployed mother, and at the same time, child psychologists kept coming up with new responsibilities for parents that seemed to fall to the mother alone.

I definitely haven__ been in the best place while working on this book, but I can say this much: Where there is pain in this book, it is real pain; where there is anger, it is real anger; where there is love, it is real love. You__e been taking this journey with me, and you__e always going to get the best of what I__e got. That__ what my mother would want.

Though breastfeeding is supposed to the most natural thing ever, it seems like a rich-people sport for all the stuff we buy to help.

You are lucky, Renisenb. You have found the happiness that is inside everybody's own heart. To most women, happiness means coming and going, busied over small affairs. It is care for one's children and laughter and conversation and quarrels with other women and alternate love and anger with a man. It is made up of small things strung together like beads on a string.

But I realize now that the toughest choices, the ones that will haunt us for the rest of our lives, are ones that my mom is still sheltering me from.

This thing, growing inside and filling her breasts with promise, this thing was the same as her. It matched her better than anything or anyone she'd known.

I'm blessed and I couldn't be more grateful. Do you want to know why? Because I'm a mother, but that's only half of it. I'm blessed because, when I need to, I can still just be a daughter. I get the feeling that there is nothing more precious than to have both of these roles, simultaneously.

Caro's right. She should be scared. Everything's out of her hands now. All the things coming Ava's way they won't be able to control, things she won't always ask for because she's a girl. She doesn't even know how hard it's going to be yet, but she will, because all girls find out. And I know it's going to be hard for Ava in ways I've never had to or will ever have to experience and I want to apologize to her now, before she finds out, like I wish someone had to me. Because maybe it would be better if we all got apologized to first. Maybe it would hurt less, expecting to be hurt.

Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could n ever manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers . . . shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips.

Mothers' bodies are not their own. The happiest ones seem to have forgotten what it is like to want themselves back at all.