On October 28th, 1887, I became the mother of a girl baby, the very image of its father, at least that is what he said, but who has the temper of its mother.
As a girl my temper often got out of bounds. But one day when I became angry at a friend over some trivial matter, my mother said to me, Elizabeth, anyone who angers you conquers you.
I barely saw my mother, and the mom I saw was often angry and unhappy. The mother I grew up with is not the mother I know now. It's not the mother she became after my father died, and that's been the greatest prize of my life.
Other people--grandparents, sisters and brothers, the mother's best friend, the next-door neighbor--get to be familiar to the baby. If the mother communicates her trust in these people, the baby will regard them as delicious novelties. Anybody the mother trusts whom the baby sees often enough partakes a bit of the presence of the mother.
My mother - both my mother and father had very successful careers. My mother's an English professor and my father is a scientist and physician. They worked at the same jobs for their entire life, 50 years each.
My mother saw her mother... her father walked out when they were very young and it was a lot of, I'd say more verbal abuse than physical, but it was the same. And my mother, back in the 70s, became an advocate for victims of domestic violence way before anybody in the Legislature was talking about it.
My mother's mother is Jewish and African, so I guess that would be considered Creole. My mother's father was Cherokee Indian and something else. My dad's mother's Puerto Rican and black, and his father was from Barbados.
There have been systems of religion where the mother is the prime parent, the source, and she's really a more immediate parent than the father, because one is born from the mother...so that the image of the woman is the image of the world.
My mother, in the last years of her life, became very negative, and it's hard to listen. I remember one day, I said to her, 'It's October 1 today,' and she said, 'I know, isn't it dreadful?' It's hard to listen when somebody's that negative.
I am opposed to the idea of a child growing up with two gay parents. A child needs a mother and a father. I could not imagine my childhood without my mother. I also believe that it is cruel to take a baby away from its mother.
We're very enthused about the idea that in the third trimester we actually give the mother a vaccine and her antibodies, the protective things that the immune system makes, actually pass through to the baby, both when the baby is born, and through the mother's milk. Because the baby's immune system is actually not very strong for that first few months, using the mother's immune system to do this - it's a very exciting idea and something that we're investing heavily in.
When I began to study baby delivery, when I was about to have a baby, I became very into it and fascinated and what our body does and how a mother's body temperature will rise the minute that the baby touches her chest because she needs to get warmer.
The great constructive energies of the child ... have hitherto been concealed beneath an accumulation of ideas concerning motherhood. We used to say it was the mother who formed the child; for it is she who teaches him to walk, talk, and so on. But none of this is really done by the mother. It is an achievement of the child. What the mother brings forth is the baby, but it is the baby who produces the man. Should the mother die, the baby still grows up and completes his work of making the man.
There is no theoretical study of motherhood. You know, before I became a mother, I did play a mother, but I was like - I was more thinking of my own mother. I was doing my mother.
From the moment of birth, when the Stone-Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence called love, as its father and mother and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potential.
My father was one of 11. He was an attorney. My mother worked for the Syracuse newspaper as a columnist before she became a stay-at-home mother.
My father died when I was 10; my sister got polio a couple of years later and was paralyzed. So there I was - my sister in a wheel chair, my father gone, and my mother a quiet little mouse. You see, it was the '30s in the South, so my mother was not prepared to cope. So I was scared to death. And being that scared, everything afterward became a struggle not to go down the drain. Struggling became a way of life for me.