Quotations About / On: BABY

Nothing ever prepares a couple for having a baby, especially the first one. And even baby number two or three, the surprises and challenges, the cosmic curve balls, keep on coming. We can't believe how much children change everything—the time we rise and the time we go to bed; the way we fight and the way we get along. Even when, and if, we make love.

That was the most horrible day of my detention. The whole day I could see my baby's face and wanted to call her name, "Dudu," "Dudu," but my mind was blank. I couldn't recollect it. "Can a mother forget her baby's name?" I wondered.

All adults who care about a baby will naturally be in competition for that baby.... Each adult wishes that he or she could do each job a bit more skillfully for the infant or small child than the other.

You sang:
Me an' muh baby gonna shine, shine
Me an' muh baby gonna shine.
The strong men keep a-comin' on
The strong men git stronger . . .

The invisible bond that gives the baby rein to discover his place in the world also brings the creeping baby back to home base.... In this way he recharges himself. He refuels on the loving energies that flow to him from his mother. Then he's off for another foray of adventure and exploration.

When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies. And now when every new baby is born its first laugh becomes a fairy. So there ought to be one fairy for every boy or girl.

From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful.

Mothers risk alienating their mates if they expect them to hold or care for the baby exactly as they do. Fathers who are constantly criticized or corrected may lose interest in handling the baby, and this is a loss for everyone. The cycle is a dangerous one. Now the same mother feels bitter because she is no longer getting any help at home.

Only when human sorrows are turned into a toy with glaring colors will baby people become interested—for a while at least. The people are a very fickle baby that must have new toys every day.

Let's just call what happened in the eighties the reclamation of motherhood . . . by women I knew and loved, hard-driving women with major careers who were after not just babies per se or motherhood per se, but after a reconciliation with their memories of their own mothers. So having a baby wasn't just having a baby. It became a major healing.