10 Truths About Motherhood From Riverhead Authors

Motherhood is complex! Find an insight that speaks to your relationships from these wise, beautiful, and often funny memoirs and stories.

1.

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“Maybe what we say to each other is not so important after all, but just that we are alive together, and present for each other as best we can be.”

―Anne Lamott, Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son

2.

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“You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you’d given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless. You wouldn’t know the outcome for a long time.”

―Meg Wolitzer, The Ten-Year Nap

3.

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“[S]he was leaving the world as a woman who had love and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence...”

―Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

4.

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“I hear my mother in everything I do…. Choose whether to listen to your mother—was that even allowed?” —Patty Chang Anker, Some Nerve

5.

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“The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention….”

―Rachel Naomi Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom

6.

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“The young can exasperate, of course, and frighten, and condescend, and insult, and cut you with their still unrounded edges. But they can also drag you, as you protest and scold and try to pull away, right up to the window of the future, and even push you through.”

―Laura Moriarty, The Chaperone

7.

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“The greatest gift that anyone can give anyone else is life.”

―James McBride, The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother

8.

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"That’s the trouble with being old. No mother to make a fuss for you, when you are sick or dying, or just drowning in an imaginary sea.”

—Dina Nayeri, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea

9.

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“‘You’re only as happy as your least happy child,’ is the best description of motherhood I have ever read.”

—Sarah Payne Stuart, Perfectly Miserable

10.

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“Her mother…loved her intensely if not honestly.”

―Ann Brashares, My Name Is Memory