My First Love, My Mother

Always smile back at little children.
To ignore them is to destroy their belief that the world is good.

Too many young folk have addiction to superficial things and not enough conviction for substantial things like justice, truth and love.
( Cornel West )

Motherhood –– All love begins and ends there.
( Robert Browning )

Be the type of parent that your child can go to when they have a problem because they know they won’t get yelled at or judged.
So many parents wonder why their child doesn’t come to them for help and the answer is you.
You showed them how you react to smaller problems thus they don’t come to you for bigger ones.

When kids look up to great scientists the way they do to great musicians and actors, civilisation will jump to the next level.
( Brian Greene )

Dear Mum,
I may not like you all the time, but I love you always.

It isn’t a coincidence that governments everywhere want to educate children.
Government education, in turn, is supposed to be evidence of the State’s goodness and its concern for our well-being.
The real explanation is less flattering.
If government’s propaganda can take root as children grow up, those kids will be no threat to the State apparatus.
They will fasten the claims to their own ankles.
( Lew Rockwell )

My mother gave me the most precious gift.
She believed in me.

Fifty-four years of love and tenderness and crossness and devotion and unswerving loyalty.
Without her I could only have achieved a quarter of what I have achieved, not only in terms of success and career, but in terms of personal happiness.
We have quarrelled, often violently, over the years, but she has never stood between me and my life, never tried to hold me too tightly, always let me go free.
For a woman of her strength of character this was truly remarkable.
There was no fear in her except for me.
She was a great woman to whom I owe the whole of my life.
( Noel Coward )

My first love, my mother.
There’s a place in my memory, my heart, my life, that you fill.
No other can take it, no one ever will.

Every sorrow or care in the dear days, gone by,
Was made bright by the light of the smile in your eye.
Like a candle that’s set in a window at night,
Your fond love has cheered me and guided me right.
( Rida Johnson Young )

The most precious jewels you will ever have around your neck are the arms of your children.

Know, I am never far from you, I bear you inwardly as you bore me.
As intimately too and as my flesh is of your own and our early mesh, woven one so you are still my own and everything about you, home, the features, eyes, the hands, your entire form are the past, present and to come, the familiarity, the ease of my living, and my peace.
( Pamela Chalkley )

A mother is someone who will love you unconditionally till her last breath.

I was meant to be named Kiera, after a Russian ice-skater my dad fancied.
But it was my mum who went to register my birth, and she accidentally spelled ‘ei’ instead of ‘ie’ because my mum is crap at spelling.
( Keira Knightley )

If I have children I will bring them up in England.
I will not have a baby call me ‘mom’.
( Kelly Osbourne )

When I was a boy on the Mississippi River there was a proposition in a township there to discontinue public schools because they were too expensive.
An old farmer spoke up and said if they stopped building the schools they would not save anything, because every time a school was closed a jail had to be built.
( Mark Twain )

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
( Antoine de Saint-Exupery )

The soul is healed by being with children.
( Fyodor Dostoyevsky )

When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it’s amazing what you can learn.
Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children.
( Greg Mortenson )

If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things.
( Norman Douglas )

My mother.
She is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel.
I want to grow old and be like her.
( Jodi Picoult )

Be a Mother who is committed to loving her children into standing on higher ground than the environment surrounding them.
Mothers are endowed with a love that is unlike any other love on the face of the earth.
( Marjorie Pay Hinckley )

Mothers and their children are in a category all their own.
There’s no bond so strong in the entire world.
No love so instantaneous and forgiving.
( Gail Tsukiyama )

Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn’t developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don’t expect to see.
( Douglas Adams )

Mother.
A title just above Queen.

Having a child fall asleep in your arms is one of the most peaceful feelings in the world.
( Eileen Hutchison, 1926-2008 )

Never complain about the things your parents couldn’t give you.
It was probably all they had.

‘Textbook for Midwives’ by Margaret Myles.
Published in 1953, this book advised pregnant women that less than ten cigarettes a day would probably do no harm to the foetus.
For home deliveries the bedroom should be thoroughly cleaned one month before the confinement date, including the bed, blankets, curtains, walls and the floor scrubbed.
Husbands were encouraged to lend a hand with housework during pregnancy, for example turning heavy mattresses and carrying coal.
When it came to the ‘date’ with the ‘stork’, the British husband apparently preferred to remain in the background during labour, having been known to faint.
Baby might cry at night during the first week and the new father shouldn’t grumble if meals were late and the standard of housework wasn’t up to the usual level.

Dear Mum,
Well done and thanks, I’m awesome.

It is the mothers, not the warriors, who create a people and guide their destiny.
( Luther Standing Bear, 1868-1939 )