A lot of people say that Eleanor Roosevelt wasn't a good mother. And there are two pieces to that story. One is, when they were very young, she was not a good mother. She was an unhappy mother. She was an unhappy wife. She had never known what it was to be a good mother. She didn't have a good mother of her own. And so there's a kind of parenting that doesn't happen.
Now, I am thrilled to be a wife and mother, and I hope to be as good of a mother as my own mother, Carole.
I am proud that I am a good mother to my children, a good daughter to my mother, a good sister to my sis (Ashley Judd) and a good wife to my new husband.
Childhood is so important. Without a loving one, you're vulnerable throughout your life. We're all the things our parents are - the good and the not so good. Thankfully, I have a wonderful wife who's a brilliant mother.
I've always wanted to have the ability to do what I want to do. And there are so many things that I want to do because I love acting, I love directing, I love producing, I love being a mother, I love being a wife. If I had to choose one, just would put me in the crazy house.
My fifth mother is Mother Nature - the things I had to learn on my own, the understanding I had to come to and still have to come to as a young woman, as a responsible mother, a responsible granddaughter and child. She teaches me willpower, honesty, and the things we need to heal ourselves from moment to moment.
I fully intend to make amends and get back to being a good mother, wife, daughter, and friend.
I have so much advice for men. They need to know that their mother is not their wife... and their wife will never be their mother.
It is easier for a woman to be a good wife than a good mother. A widow has two duties with contrary obligations: she is a mother and she must exercise paternal authority. Few woman are strong enough to understand and to play this role.
Self-honesty is not putting yourself down or feeling sorry for yourself. Self-honesty is looking at things as they are and then being compelled to make changes.
Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, a good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-dressed, well-groomed, and unaggressive.
It is one thing to be a man's wife - quite another to be the mother of his children. In fact, once you become a mother, being a wife seems like a game you once played or a self-help book you were overly impressed with as a teenager that on second reading is puffy with common ideas. This was one of the many things I had learned since crossing over into the middle place - that sliver of time when childhood and parenthood overlap.
If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.
Mother love has been much maligned. An over mothered boy may go through life expecting each new woman to love him the way his mother did. Her love may make any other love seem inadequate. But an unloved boy would be even more likely to idealize love. I don't think it's possible for a mother or father to love a child too much.
A pick-up artist gave me a good piece of advice: the three most important things in a relationship are honesty, trust and respect, and if you don't have those, you don't have love.
As you are not yet married, and as marriage is the fundamental state of life as well as the unity of the commonwealth, make up your mind whether you are called to this state. If you make up your mind to marry, do not marry merely a good wife: marry a good mother to your children.