Nada

“To destroy the institution is not to abolish motherhood. It is to release the creation and sustenance of life into the same realm of decision, struggle, surprise, imagination, and conscious intelligence, as any other difficult, but freely chosen work.”
― Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

“Yet the more I think about it the more I realise that we women set impossible standards for ourselves. That we make life intolerable for one another. I cannot live up to your standards, senior wife. So I have to set my own.”
― Buchi Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood

“I was haunted by the stereotype of the mother whose love is 'unconditional'; and by the visual literary images of motherhood as a single-minded identity. If I knew parts of myself existed that would never cohere to those images, weren't those parts then abnormal, monstrous?”
― Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

“We learn, often through painful self-discipline and self-cauterization, those qualities which are supposed to be 'innate' in us: patience, self-sacrifice, the willingness to repeat endlessly the small, routine chores of socializing a human being.”
― Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution