The Call of Motherhood

"This job has been given to me to do. Therefore, it is a gift. Therefore, it is a privilege. Therefore, it is an offering I may make to God. Therefore, it is to be done gladly, if it is done for Him. Here, not somewhere else, I may learn God’s way. In this job, not in some other, God looks for faithfulness."
— Elisabeth Elliot

"What a traditional woman did that made her home warm and alive was not dusting and laundry.... Her real secret was that she identified herself with her home, [and]...it is illuminating to think about what happened when things went right. Then her affection was in the soft sofa cushions, clean linens, and good meals; her memory in well-stocked storeroom cabinets and the pantry; her intelligence in the order and healthfulness of her home; her good humor in its light and air. She lived her life not only through her own body, but through the house as an extension of her body; part of her relation to those she loved was embodied in the physical medium of the home she made. My own experience convinces me that there is still no other way to make a good home than to have attitudes toward home and domesticity modeled on those of that traditional woman.... Advertisements and television programs offer degraded images of household work and workers. DIscussions of the subject in magazines and newspapers follow a standard formula.... It is scarcely surprising, then, that so many people imagine housekeeping to be boring, frustrating, repetitive, unintelligent drudgery. I cannot agree. (In fact, having kept house, practiced law, taught, and done many other sorts of work, low- and high-paid, I can assure you that it is actually lawyers who are most familiar with the experience of unintelligent drudgery.)"
~ Cheryl Mendelson, Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, pages 9-10.

"Women are told today they can have it all-career, marriage, children. You need a total commitment to make it work. Take a close look at your child. He doesn’t want you to be bright, talented, chic, or smart-any of those things. He just wants you to love him. He will be the one who pays the price for your wanting to have it all. Think carefully about having that baby. Not to have it would be a great loss. To have it too late greatly increases the health hazards for you and the child. To have it without a commitment to it would be a great tragedy."
~ Beverly Sills, addressing a graduating class of Barnard College in New York.

"So long as we insist upon defining our identities only in terms of our work, so long as we try to blind ourselves to the needs of our children and harden our hearts against them, we will continue to feel torn, dissatisfied, and exhausted…. The guilt we feel for neglecting our children is a byproduct of our love for them. It keeps us from straying too far from them, for too long. Their cry should be more compelling than the call from the office."
~ Danielle Crittenden, What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us, page 143.