The Good Mother Myth Quotes

“This is the problem of looking for heroes and then looking at them too closely. There is no neat path for any of us to follow. There is still so much work for all of us to do. We are all building the road as we go.”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom

“It sometimes feels like every generation of mothers from Betty Friedan and Adrienne Rich on has been learning anew that the story we've been sold about the magical power of a mother's love is largely a way to draft us into an enormous amount of unpaid and undervalued labor.”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom

“I believe that looking to the past helps us see the present more clearly. Nothing about our current culture around motherhood is natural or inevitable or unchangeable. When we understand how the structures and policies and culture that constrain us came to be, we can see our way into changing them.”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom

“We're so often told that we need "mom friends," but the pace and structures of American life make it so that for most of us, our "village" is reduced to a group text or emojis tapped out in the comments of Instagram posts.”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom

“Those early months with Penn, he told me - how anxious and stressed-out I was - were really hard on him. He didn't know if he could do it again...In that moment, I was certain it was my fault: if I'd been a better mother when our baby was new, if I'd been less of a nightmare as a wife, he wouldn't be saying no now. If I could have just done better, been calmer, worked harder at being relaxed...Those months had been hard. They were hard for me, as I cried and raged and cried. I felt terrible, and I felt alone. When I was having a bad time, my husband was having his own bad time, too. I hadn't realized how alone he felt, too. How alone we'd both been.”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom

“...I'd wanted a child...and I also needed time and space to be a person apart from him. And once I had that space, ensured by daycare, baby dates with friends, a more reliable nap schedule and better sleep at night, I was more able to delight in being with the baby. I was more able to fully see him as a person and see the world he was beginning to explore.”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom

“So much of our present-day parenting culture insists that once you've become a mother, that's the most important thing about you.”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom

“Now that I have my own child, I've been thinking about how we learn to parent, how so often we seem to be aiming to heal the hurts of our own childhoods.”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom

“Spock is an essential part how we got here - believing that motherhood is a simple matter of love and instincts, but also wanting to double-check and cross-reference every decision with the best available data from trusted experts.”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom

“Every time I placed another stack of outgrown baby clothes in the basement in a labeled Rubbermaid, I thought about having another baby to wear them. With all I'd learned, I was certain, with the next baby I could really do everything right.”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom

“I knew parents who relished their time at home with their babies, and I'd certainly support longer paid leave and job protections to make that possible for anyone who wanted it, but I knew myself well enough by then to know that an extended maternity leave was not for me. I was desperate for those hours of work each week, the days on campus when I could transform back into a mind and not just an achy, nursing body.”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom

“But should I have been so sanguine? Other mothers I knew ached when their babies were away from them.”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom

“They were, we imagine, men of their time. They're not much older than my own grandfather, who told my mother almost proudly that he'd never changed a diaper.”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom

“But I thought about that other mother often through that fall. Her baby wasn't quite six weeks old when she died. Each time my own baby reached a new milestone, as he became more and more a person to me, as he began to know me, I thought of her. When he smiled, when he began to smack his doughy little hands in excitement, when he drifted off to sleep after nursing without drama, I thought, 'It gets so much better. And she'll never get to see this.”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom

“There's nothing magic about a specific gender or genetic relationship to a child: what counts is the care.”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom

“I'd heard babies cry before, at restaurants and parks, had registered the sound as a nuisance but not a catastrophe. This sound was new. It was an emergency inside my entire body.”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom

“I'll tell you how I survived: by asking for help and accepting it when it showed up. By being honest about how much I was struggling. By putting down the parenting advice manuals. By letting the baby cry it out so we could all finally get some sleep. By asking my husband to pitch in and letting him learn to parent in his own way. By giving up on the dream of being the perfect, self-sufficient totally capable mother. By finally realizing that there's no way to actually be a good mother, and that that's not what my kids need anyway.”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom

“It seems the best thing, for a woman with serious academic ambitions, would be to never marry; failing that, divorce can provide a boost.”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom

“she met her husband, Leonard Ainsworth, a veteran who was returning to school for his graduate work. They married in 1950, and they decided that, since it would be “uncomfortable” for Len to be a student in the program where Ainsworth was on faculty, they would move to London, where Len had been accepted into a doctoral program at University College London. This is the part that always stops my heart a little: Ainsworth resigned from a tenure-track position in a city she’d never wanted to leave, in a time when it was legal to refuse a woman employment simply because she was a woman, and moved across the Atlantic, with no job in sight, rather than risk her new husband experiencing a bit of discomfort. Ainsworth wouldn’t have another tenure-track job until 1958, after she’d moved continents two more times to support her husband’s career.”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom

“subsequent studies showed that if you had to choose between isolating a baby monkey with a perfectly adoring cloth mother and depriving the baby of a mother but giving it access to other same-age monkeys for play, the baby with companions turned out better. In other words, peers can produce a socially and psychologically normal monkey, even without a mother.”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom

“If the science just reaffirms sitcom clichés, how much faith do we want to put into that science?”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom

“A woman’s voice, telling the truth about her life, is a form of evidence, too. The science is worse for that inattention.”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom

“And that, I know now, is what love really is: the daily work of connecting and falling short and making repairs.”
― Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom