As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.

My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.

As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.

I'm waiting for the day when my children cease to find my domestic propriety reassuring and actually find it annoying.

Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.

Parenthood, like death, is an event for which it is nearly impossible to be prepared. It brings you into a new relationship with the fact of your own existence, a relationship in which one may be rendered helpless.

How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?