“If you're like us -mothers with an attitude problem- you may be getting increasingly irritable about this chasm between the ridiculous, honey-hued ideals of perfect motherhood in the mass media and the reality of mothers' everyday lives.”

“After all, the media have been and are the major dispenser of the ideals and norms surrounding motherhood: Millions of us have gone to the media for nuts-and-bolts child-rearing advice. Many of us, in fact, preferred media advice to the advice our mothers gave us. We didn't want to be like our mothers and many of us didn't want to raise our kids the way they raised us (although it turns out they did a pretty good job in the end). Thus beginning in the mid-1970s, working mothers became the most important thing you can become in the United States: a market. And they became a market just as niche marketing was exploding--the rise of cable channels, magazines like Working Mother, Family Life, Child, and Twins, all supported by advertisements geared specifically to the new, modern mother. Increased emphasis on child safety, from car seats to bicycle helmets, increased concerns about Johnny not being able to read, the recognition that mothers bought cars, watched the news, and maybe didn't want to tune into one TV show after the next about male detectives with a cockatoo or some other dumbass mascot saving hapless women--all contributed to new shows, ad campaigns, magazines, and TV news stories geared to mothers, especially affluent, upscale ones. Because of this sheer increase in output and target marketing, mothers were bombarded as never before by media constructions of the good mother. The good mother bought all this stuff to stimulate, protect, educate, and indulge her kids. She had to assemble it, install it, use it with her child, and protect her child from some of its features.”

“While Motherhood is not perfect, we have the opportunity to share many beautiful and perfect moments with our children everyday. We just need to be awake to those moments and attuned to them so we can more fully enjoy them. ~ Mothering with Spiritual Power by Debra Sansing Woods”

“New mothers enter the world of parenting feeling much like Alice in Wonderland.- Being a mother is one of the most rewarding jobs on earth and also one of the most challenging.- Motherhood is a process. Learn to love the process.- There is a tremendous amount of learning that takes place in the first year of your baby’s life; the baby learns a lot, too.- It is sometimes difficult to reconcile the fantasy of what you thuoght motherhood would be like, and what you thought you would be like as a mother, with reality.- Take care of yourself. If Mommy isn’t happy, no one else in the family is happy either.- New mother generally need to lower their expectations.- A good mother learns to love her child as he is and adjusts her mothering to suit her child.”

“There is no greater good in all the world than motherhood. The influence of a mother in the lives of her children is beyond calculation.”

“Hu-man, Hu-mility, Hu-manity, is a title of nobility of the Perfected One, one who has knowledge of its self, and living its essence”