T.W.A

“I no longer call such tasks "housework". I call them the "domestic arts," paying attention to all the ways they return me to my senses.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

“Maternal love is our first experience of what love feels like, and the maternal care we receive informs how we feel about ourselves throughout life.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“If you were spanked as a child, you may feel disgusted by your body. It may be difficult to care for yourself (including pursuing medical care, dental care, regular exercise, and healthy nutrition) because your body has been a battleground. You may find it validating to know that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that parents avoid spanking children for any reason,”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother’s heartbeat. Actually, the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother’s blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear. Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother’s ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother’s womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother’s blood before she herself is born. . . .”
― Ashley Audrain, The Push