It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'

Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.

In the middle-class United States, a veneer of "alternative lifestyles" disguises the reality that, here as everywhere, women's apparent "choices" whether or not to have children are still dependent on the far from neutral will of male legislators, jurists, a male medical and pharmaceutical profession, well-financed lobbies, including the prelates of the Catholic Church, and the political reality that women do not as yet have self-determination over our bodies and still live mostly in ignorance of our authentic physicality, our possible choices, our eroticism itself.

The moment of change is the only poem.

We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.

Even where love has run thin the child's soul musters strength... the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.

A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.