Angela Garbes > Quotes

“There is no right or wrong way to be pregnant, to become a mother, to make a family. There is only one way—your way, which will inevitably be filled with tears, mistakes, doubt, but also joy, relief, triumph, and love.”
― Angela Garbes, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy

“We are volcanoes,” wrote the American novelist Ursula K. Le Guin. “When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.”
― Angela Garbes, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy

“I'm not trying to romanticize or fetishize the past, but the simple fact is that for centuries, throughout the world, we lived communally. Having individual families siloed off from one another behind fences, out of sight and out of mind, is a relatively recent social structure that we accept. This model has been forced upon us, at a steep cost to parents and children.”
― Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

“When you become a mother, you engender life, endless possibilities. Mothering is creative in a very literal sense—it is cultivating all that potential, bringing a small person into consciousness.”
― Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

“I want more friends, more casual impromptu hangs, more dropping by with dinner, more walking and talking and advice sessions, more kids underfoot, more asking for and saying what we need, more hands to carry heavy boxes, more laughing and cackling and snorting, more children farting at the dinner table, more of what makes life messy, less painful, more sweet. I want to give and receive, to always be swapping Tupperware and food, all of us crowded together like curvy lumpen mangoes in a baking dish.”
― Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

“In pregnancy, developing babies are of the utmost importance, yes. But so are mothers. There are no babies without us. Without being allowed our autonomy–ownership of who we are, messiness, flaws, contradictions, and all–we can begin to fade into the background, a shadow to ourselves and our future children.”
― Angela Garbes, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy

“Throughout pregnancy, I liked to lie in bed and imagine all the changes happening inside me: cells splitting, fingernails and eyelashes growing, veins spreading, brain and gray matter forming and folding.”
― Angela Garbes, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy

“Doing this requires knowledge of the history of mothering and care work—how they came to be seen as naturally female, which is to say invisible and undervalued.”
― Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

“According to Hinde, when a baby suckles at its mother's breast, a vacuum is created. Within that vacuum, the infant's saliva is sucked back into the mother's nipple, where receptors in her mammary gland decipher it. This "baby spit backwash," as she delightfully described it, contains signals, information about the baby's immune system-including any infections it might be fighting.”
― Angela Garbes, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy

“I never really wanted to be a professional; all I knew was that I wanted whatever I did to matter. I believe writing matters, of course, but nothing has ever felt more real to me than the work of caring. That energy and effort to maintain—ourselves, our loved ones, our community—has always felt substantial, true, visceral, and, yes, real to me. I don’t believe care work has to wreck us. This labor can be shared, social, collective—and transformative.”
― Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

“There is no such standard protocol for the treatment of pelvic floor disorders, which affect up to 1.3 million of the 4 million American women who give birth annually.”
― Angela Garbes, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy

“As the poet Cathy Park Hong writes, “one characteristic of racism is that children are treated like adults and adults are treated like children. . .”
― Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change – A National Bestseller Manifesto on Caregiving, Equity, and the Filipino-American Experience

“exclusively on a dozen enslaved women, without the use of anesthesia. Their owners brought these women to Sims, only three of whom—Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy—were named in his records. Slaves were considered property and, as such, the women were never paid for their participation. Only after mastering his technique (he operated on Anarcha thirteen times) did Sims repair the fistulas of white women, all with anesthesia.6”
― Angela Garbes, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy

“In modern American culture, that sort of tight-knit community structure seems increasingly rare. For centuries, extended personal networks have been eroded, replaced with privatized jobs and small, isolated kin units. “The extended family and relationships that could sustain families were transformed and professionalized,” write Patel and Moore.3 A lack of shared responsibility and interconnectedness makes it difficult to find solutions for needs more easily addressed in community, such as childcare, meal preparation, and household maintenance. It leads to isolation and an every-family-for-themselves mentality. It leaves parents feeling common domestic strains as personal problems rather than structural ones.”
― Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change – A National Bestseller Manifesto on Caregiving, Equity, and the Filipino-American Experience

“The origins of the placenta can be traced back to a virus.”
― Angela Garbes, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy

“Mothering is sensual—endemic to the body and bringing both profound joy and fulfillment. It cultivates and nurtures a child’s life force and essence. It is labor that can bestow a primal sense of satisfaction to children and caregivers alike.”
― Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change – A National Bestseller Manifesto on Caregiving, Equity, and the Filipino-American Experience

“Hearing “I love you” is nothing compared to feeling it, your body absorbing the message from another. Before we learn verbal language, we communicate through our bodies. The only way a young child can comprehend love is physically.”
― Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change – A National Bestseller Manifesto on Caregiving, Equity, and the Filipino-American Experience

“We are volcanoes,” wrote the American novelist Ursula K. Le Guin. “When we women offer our experience as our truth”
― Angela Garbes, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy

“Mothering is creative in a very literal sense—it is cultivating all that potential, bringing a small person into consciousness.”
― Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change – A National Bestseller Manifesto on Caregiving, Equity, and the Filipino-American Experience

“I grew up with maids, Angela,” my mother says, dismissing the idea that it was a difficult decision. “They hear everything you say.” She wanted privacy, she says, and she wanted to be accountable to the family she was building with my father: “Whatever mistakes I made, whatever happens to my kids, it’s my responsibility.” She adds that she “didn’t want to be responsible for another persons.”
― Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

“Eventually, our experiences—with pregnancy loss, labor, birth, and motherhood—will reinforce to us that there is little we actually control.”
― Angela Garbes, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy

“More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible,” wrote Tillie Olsen in 1968.”
― Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

“What I didn’t know then was that due dates are bullshit. Or at least only a very rough idea of when you might give birth. According to the American Pregnancy Association, only about 5 percent of babies are actually born on their estimated due date.”
― Angela Garbes, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy

“Her enthusiasm for the organ is contagious. Enough to convince you that the alphabet posters in kindergarten classrooms should declare that "P" is for 'placenta'...”
― Angela Garbes, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy

“People look at me weird, or they say something, and I just can’t deal.” How many pregnant women have hidden out in their homes, fearing judgment from others who can’t handle them making decisions about their own bodies?”
― Angela Garbes, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy

“We are caught between how we were raised and how we really want to live.”
― Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

“understanding of freedom that we must rediscover. The words free and friend are derived from the Indo-European friya, which means “beloved.” Freedom, Birdsong writes, was originally “the idea that together we can ensure that we have all the things we need—love, food, shelter, safety.” Freedom is not an individual effort, but a collective one. “Being free,” writes Birdsong, “is achieved through being connected.”
― Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change – A National Bestseller Manifesto on Caregiving, Equity, and the Filipino-American Experience

“Weeks after talking to Kristen Swanson, I couldn't stop thinking about something she said- that birth and life and death exist in women's bodies simultaneously.
I picture pregnancy loss as a primordial river rushing through me; it carries forces so big, they eclipse my imagination. It runs through my femoral artery and vena cava, through my spleen, my brain, and the chambers of my heart. At first, this force is strong like rapids, flooding everything. With time it slows, but it never goes away. It rearranges my cells like stones in a riverbed. It never stops running, even after I can no longer see it or feel it.”
― Angela Garbes, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy

“As a result, our culture has adopted the belief that sacrifice and suffering—in silence—are simply the costs of becoming a mother.”
― Angela Garbes, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy

“Scientists know that the majority of pregnancy losses are caused by aneuploidy- chromosomal abnormalities that, for reasons we don't totally understand, result in forms of life that are incapable of being carried to term.”
― Angela Garbes, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy