Quotes about mothers
Rebecca Makkai - The Borrower
Very few writers thank their mothers for keen editorial insight I'm happy to be the exception.
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah -
The heart of a good mother is as big as the ocean accommodating all kind of things and sweeping all unwanted things to its shores!
Amanda Downum - The Drowning City
The daughter prays the mother listens.
Sandra Chami Kassis -
Motherhood is when eating chicken soup the kids get the chicken and you get the soup and you would still feel happily stuffed.
Amy Heckerling -
Babies don't need fathers, but mothers do. Someone who is taking care of a baby needs to be taken care of.
C. JoyBell C. -
The best love in the world, is the love of a man. The love of a man who came from your womb, the love of your son! I don't have a daughter, but maybe the love of a daughter is the best, too. I am first and foremost me, but right after that, I am a mother. The best thing that I can ever be, is me. But the best gift that I will ever have, is being a mother.
Marcel Proust -
Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be ine
Jodi Picoult -
My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.
Martha Gellhorn - Selected Letters
I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.
Erma Bombeck - When God Created Mothers
When God Created Mothers"When the Good Lord was creating mothers, He was into His sixth day of "overtime" when the angel appeared and said. "You're doing a lot of fiddling around on this one." And God said, "Have you read the specs on this order?" She has to be completely washable, but not plastic. Have 180 moveable parts...all replaceable. Run on black coffee and leftovers. Have a lap that disappears when she stands up. A kiss that can cure anything from a broken leg to a disappointed love affa
Kristin Hannah - Summer Island
As mothers and daughters, we are connected with one another. My mother is the bones of my spine, keeping me straight and true. She is my blood, making sure it runs rich and strong. She is the beating of my heart. I cannot now imagine a life without her.
Kristin Cashore - Fire
Well then," Roen said briskly, "are you sleeping?""Yes.""Come now. A mother can tell when her son lies. Are you eating?""No," Brigan said gravely. "I've not eaten in two months. It's a hunger strike to protest the spring flooding in the south.""Gracious," Roen said, reaching for the fruit bowl. "Have an apple, dear.
Calvin Trillin -
The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.
Mabel Hale - Beautiful Girlhood: A Timeless Guide for Christian Adolescense
Womanhood is a wonderful thing. In womankind we find the mothers of the race.There is no man so great, nor none sunk so low, but once he lay a helpless, innocent babe in a woman's arms and was dependent on her love and care for his existence. It is woman who rocks the cradle of the world and holds the first affections of mankind. She possesses a power beyond that of a king on his throne....Womanhood stands for all that is pure and clean and noble. She who does not make the world better for havin
Neil Gaiman - Coraline
How do I know you'll keep your word?" asked Coraline."I swear it," said the other mother. "I swear it on my own mother's grave.""Does she have a grave?" asked Coraline."Oh yes," said the other mother. "I put her in there myself. And when I found her trying to crawl out, I put her back.
Erma Bombeck -
When your mother asks, "Do you want a piece of advice?" it's a mere formality. It doesn't matter if you answer yes or no. You're going to get it anyway.
Amy Sedaris - I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence
My mother always said 'Don't bother other people.' I think that's good advice.
Jeffrey R. Holland -
You are doing God's work. You are doing it wonderfully well. He is blessing you, and He will bless you, --even--no, -especially--when your days and your nights may be most challenging. Like the woman who anonymously, meekly, perhaps even with hesitation and some embarrassment, fought her way through the crowd just to touch the hem of the Master's garment, so Christ will say to the women who worry and wonder and weep over their responsibility as mothers, `Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith h
Jodi Picoult -
I always wondered why God was supposed to be a father," she whispers. Fathers always want you to measure up to something. Mothers are the ones who love you unconditionally, don't you think?
Margaret Dilloway - How to Be an American Housewife
Mothers were the only ones you could depend on to tell the whole, unvarnished truth.
Conrad Richter - & The Town
The Awakening Land" p628 A strange, uneasy feeling ran over him. If he had been wrong about his mother in this, might he by any chance have been wrong in other things about her also? Could it be even faintly possible that the children of pioneers like himself, born under more benign conditions than their parents, hated them because they themselves were weaker, resented it when their parents expected them to be strong, and so invented all kinds of intricate reasoning to prove that their parents w
Unknown -
Empowered women empower women.
Erma Bombeck -
Everyone is guilty at one time or another of throwing out questions that beg to be ignored, but mothers seem to have a market on the supply. "Do you want a spanking or do you want to go to bed?" Don't you want to save some of the pizza for your brother?" Wasn't there any change?
Anna Godbersen - The Luxe
Girls," their mother interjected, "you must both stop being strange - it is unattractive. And don't forget your hats. It would be absolutely the end for me if you two came down with freckles at a time like this.
Georgette Heyer - Devil's Cub
You will like her," he persisted. "Egad, she's after your own heart, maman! She shot me in the arm.""Voyons, do you think that is what I like?
Edward Carpenter - The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women
In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are obviously suffused and inspired by a romantic sentiment, there is hardly one of his female figures that is so,—the latter being mostly representative of woman in her part as mother, or sufferer, or prophetess or poetess, or in old age, or in any aspect of strength or tenderness, except that which ass
John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
Ma was heavy, but not fat; thick with child-bearing and work. She wore a loose Mother Hubbard of gray cloth in which there had once been colored flowers, but the color was washed out now, so that the small flowered pattern was only a little lighter gray than the background. The dress came down to her ankles, and he strong, broad, bare feet moved quickly and deftly over the floor. Her thin, steel-gray hair was gathered in a sparse wispy knot at the back of her head. Strong, freckled arms were bar
Camilla Way - Watching Edie
As my heart begins to return to normal, I look down at -- and feel such an intense rush of love and relief it takes my breath away. "I will never let you put of my sight again," I promise --
Sunday Adelaja -
So many mothers are unable to let their children go into the adult life and become literally attached to them giving rise to codependency
Sunday Adelaja -
A lot of mothers incorrectly see the meaning of their lives as being the designer or creator of their child’s life
Raquel Cepeda - Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
If it weren’t for her setting me free, I may still be a caged bird today, holding my own daughter captive on a shit-laden perch.
Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees
For years afterward, I had dreams in which my mother appeared in strange forms, her features sewn onto other beings in combinations that seemed both grotesque and profound: as a slippery white fish at the end of my hook, with a trout’s gaping, sorrowful mouth and her dark, shuttered eyes; as the elm tree at the edge of our property, its ragged clumps of tarnished gold leaves replaced by knotted skeins of her black hair; as the lame gray dog that lived on the Mueller’s property, whose mouth, her
Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children
And eventually in that house where everyone, even the fugitive hiding in the cellar from his faceless enemies, finds his tongue cleaving dryly to the roof of his mouth, where even the sons of the house have to go into the cornfield with the rickshaw boy to joke about whores and compare the length of their members and whisper furtively about dreams of being film directors (Hanif's dream, which horrifies his dream-invading mother, who believes the cinema to be an extension of the brothel business)
Jodi Picoult - Keeping Faith
I wonder if other mothers feel a tug at their insides, watching their children grow up into the people they themselves wanted so badly to be.
C.J. Milbrandt - Into the Hills: A Zane Johns Adventure
Zane sighed. Jovan and Mother were just the same. “Maybe later” meant no.
Eleanor of Aquitaine -
Pitiful and pitied by no one, why have I come to the ignominy of this detestable old age, who was ruler of two kingdoms, mother of two kings? My guts are torn from me, my family is carried off and removed from me. The young king [crown prince Henry, †1183] and the count of Britanny [prince Geoffrey, †1186] sleep in dust, and their most unhappy mother is compelled to be irremediably tormented by the memory of the dead. Two sons remain to my solace, who today survive to punish me, miserable and co
Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front
And be very careful at the front, Paul.”Ah, Mother, Mother! Why do I not take you in my arms and die with you. What poor wretches we are!
Lailah Gifty Akita -
My special possessions are my sacred family.
David Jackson -
My wife is a thief...She takes the last cookieTakes forever to get readyShe takes her time in the showerTakes all of the hot waterShe takes my favorite seat on the couchTakes the high road when I lose controlMy wife is a thief...She took my last nameTook the time to get to know me, love meShe took the back seat and let me leadTook on motherhood and the emotional toll that it bringsShe took care of me the many times that I've gotten sickTook on the pain of pregnancy so that the Jackson legacy wou
Amby C. Ezem -
And when you lay in bed with your wife,are you mentally there or with the women on TV? Or the women who you've been intimate with though the screens? You not only compare your wife to these women but also love her as though she was someone elsePhysically present when making love to her but mentally absent from herYou kiss her lips while your heart kisses the "screen woman
Patricia Briggs - Bone Crossed
I don’t know who you think you are” — my mother’s voice was low and dangerous — “but if you don’t get out of my way right this instant, it won’t matter.”Adam was the Alpha werewolf in charge of the local pack. He was tough. He could be mean when he had to — and he wouldn’t stand a chance against my mom.
V.C. Andrews - Flowers in the Attic
We all have to love you, and believe inyou, and think you are looking out for our best interests. But look at us, Momma, and really see us.
Randy Susan Meyers - The Murderer's Daughters
In the end, Mothers are always right. No one else tells the truth.
Jason Worthley -
When it comes to broken trust, women are the master masons, building barriers that not even love can breach. But mothers…they are the architects.
Samuel R. Delany - The Motion Of Light In Water: Sex And Science Fiction Writing In The East Village
Those moments when we learn that mothers rage and fathers kill, that friends betray and authority is fallible, or that our own blank, innocent ignorance can destroy the pure, the good, and the loved are moments the very memory of which constitutes the beginning of a strategy to live in a world where such horrors exist.
Lorna Crozier - Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir
Who but my mother held those small pieces of my childhood? Where would they go when she was gone?
Lorna Crozier -
Mom, mom, mom, mom! A yowl rose from my gut, my bowels, my womb, raw as a birth cry but with no hope in it, a maddening howl, a roar, the water a wailing wall shattering around me. Unsyllabled, thoughtless, the cry rose from the oldest cells in my body. I hadn't known grief could be so primal, so crude. The violence shook me. When it stopped, I fell to my knees in the shower, and the water called to the water in me; I wanted to melt, to run down the drain and under the city to the creek and then
Lailah Gifty Akita -
The wonder of life begins in the womb of a woman.
Gillian Marchenko - Still Life: A Memoir of Living Fully with Depression
I may not be the best mom. I may not even get back to being the average mother I once claimed to be. But I'm here. I'm getting back up. I'm not leaving. And I'm the mom God ordained for these fours souls, and therefore I am their best mom.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Billy covered his head with his blanket. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward - always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high school education.She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone through so much trouble to give him life, and to k
Andrew Galasetti - These Colors Don't Run
Ain’t nothing worse to a mama than losing her baby—
Joyce Maynard - The Usual Rules
Ten years from now, her mother might not even recognize her. Already she was different, but the day would come when she'd be this person her mother had never seen. There would be other people - someone like Carolyn or Alan, or even Violet - who had known her longer than her mother ever did.
Kaitlyn Greenidge - Charlie Freeman
I missed my one true friend, my mother. She and I were close in a way I don't think many other mothers and daughters were. I slept beside her every night of my childhood: so near to her back, I could probably sketch the constellation of moles and freckles on her skin there. When I was a very little girl, every morning I would wake before her and arrange myself so that when she woke, we were eye-to-eye. I miss her, with a never-ending ache that I did not think was possible, that crowds out any ot
Ted Kooser - Delights and Shadows
MOTHER – By Ted KooserMid April already, and the wild plumsbloom at the roadside, a lacy whiteagainst the exuberant, jubilant greenof new grass and the dusty, fading black of burned-out ditches. No leaves, not yet,only the delicate, star-petaledblossoms, sweet with their timeless perfume.You have been gone a month todayand have missed three rains and one nightlongwatch for tornadoes. I sat in the cellarfrom six to eight while fat spring cloudswent somersaulting, rumbling east. Then it poured,a s
Thomas Hardy - Far from the Madding Crowd
She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises.
Virginia Woolf -
For we think back through our mothers if we are women.
G. Willow Wilson - Alif the Unseen
How dense and literal it is. I thought it had a much more sophisticated brain." "Your mother is dense," Alif said wearily. "My mother was an errant crest of sea foam. But that is neither here nor there.
Michelle Franklin - and the worl
Why are you wailing away? What is the matter with you?”“I was playing and—“ and her lip quivered as she spoke, “—and it was cloudy, and then—“ a sniff, “—and then, as I was playing, the sun came out.”I gave her a flat look. “You’re crying because the sun came out?”“Yes,” she moped, wiping the tears from her eyes, “the sun came out, and now—“ she heaved, “—and now, it’s hot! I don’t like it when it’s hot. Being hot is dumb!”I immediately absolved her of all previous sins. I slumped over the sill
WISDOM KWASHIE MENSAH (WKM) -
What a MOTHER means to me;Multitask personality whoOverwork to Offer Opportunities to everyone withTender heartedness Holy Spirit filled, Healthy and Holistic teacher and trainer whoEncourages people to take a risk in for them to be Reliable and Respected by humanity.
Madeleine Brent - Stranger at Wildings
Its quietness was the quietness of strength. And the eyes were those of one who had walked through many a dark valley without flinching.
Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance
He is a young man with a future of power and opportunity and we are young women destined to be either wives and mothers at the very best, or spinster parasites at the worst.
Uma Shanker -
Multi-tasking is a skill. It may be stressful but a woman’s capacity to handle stress helps her to multi task
Edward Carpenter - The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women
In its various forms, so far as we know them, Love seems always to have a deep significance and a most practical importance to us little mortals. In one form, as the mere semi-conscious Sex-love, which runs through creation and is common to the lowest animals and plants, it appears as a kind of organic basis for the unity of all creatures; in another, as the love of the mother for her offspring—which may also be termed a passion—it seems to pledge itself to the care and guardianship of the futur
Toni Sorenson -
There’s still a little girl inside every grown woman who would love to be able to fall into the arms of her mother and cry her eyes out every now and then.
Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum
To join the company of women, to be adults, we go through a period of proudly boasting of having survived our own mother's indifference, anger, overpowering love, the burden of her pain, her tendency to drink or teetotal, her warmth or coldness, praise or criticism, sexual confusions or embarrassing clarity. It isn't enough that she sweat, labored, bore her daughters howling or under total anesthesia or both. No. She must be responsible for our psychic weaknesses the rest of her life. It is alri
Joan C. Williams - Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter
The ideal-worker standard and norm of work devotion push mothers to the margins of economic life. And a society that marginalizes its mothers impoverishes its children. That is why the paradigmatic poor family in the United States is a single mother and her child.
Jeanette Winterson - Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read in school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It
Jodi Picoult - My Sister's Keeper
Taking a deep breath, I shake my head and find Judge staring at me. "Reason number 106 why dogs are smarter than humans," I say. "Once you leave the litter, you sever contact with your mothers.
Karen Swallow Prior - Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me
From that moment, and for the rest of my life, my mother's words--perceptive and many others--have helped me to be the thing she saw and named in me.
Christine de Pizan -
By nature man without woman can feel no joy. She is his mother, his sister, his loving friend. She is seldom his enemy.
Chauncey Mitchell DePew -
In all ages woman has been the source of all that is pure, unselfish, and heroic in the spirit and life of man.....poetry and fiction are based upon woman's love, and the movements of history are mainly due to the sentiments or ambitions she has inspired......there is no aspiration which any man here to-night entertains, no achievement he seeks to accomplish, no great and honorable ambition he desires to gratify, which is not directly related to either or both a mother or a wife. From the hearth
Lea Carpenter - Eleven Days
Anyone who met him today would say, *Soldier. Fighter.* They would want him on their team. As a mother she was willing to engage in pride over fear and to admit the possibility that his sacrifice was hers, too. His sacrifice was something she had been able to give her country.
Andrea O'Reilly - and the Struggle to Raise Our Sons
The "new" Anglo-American feminist theory argues that too little mothering, and, in particular, the absence of mother-son connection, is what engenders both sexism and traditional masculinity in men. (...) This perspective positions mothering as central to feminist politics in its insistence that true and lasting gender equality will occur only when boys are raised as the sons of mothers. As the early feminist script of mother-son connection required the denial of the mother's power and the displ
Brandon Kelly -
...take down your baby bump photos from Facebook, take down pictures of your kids too. It is your job to protect your children and not parade them around like little circus freaks or glorified mini-you’s.
Sara Sheridan -
I'm not sure how much easier it is for a mother to balance her life now - have we simply swapped one set of restrictions for another?
Alice von Hildebrand - The Privilege of Being a Woman
One thing is certain: When the time has come, nothing which is man made will subsist. One day, all human accomplishments will be reduced to a pile of ashes. But every single child to whom a woman has given birth will live forever, for he has been given an immortal soul made to God's image and likeness. In this light, the assertion of de Beauvoir that 'women produce nothing' becomes particularly ludicrous.
J.K. Rowling -
Very early on in writing the series, I remember a female journalist saying to me that Mrs Weasley, 'Well, you know, she’s just a mother.' And I was absolutely incensed by that comment. Now, I consider myself to be a feminist, and I’d always wanted to show that just because a woman has made a choice, a free choice to say, 'Well, I’m going to raise my family and that’s going to be my choice. I may go back to a career, I may have a career part time, but that’s my choice.' Doesn’t mean that that’s a
Toni Sorenson -
If you have no armsTo hold your crying child but your own armsAnd no legs but your own to run the stairs one more timeTo fetch what was forgottenI bow to youIf you have no vehicleTo tote your wee one but the wheels that you driveAnd no one else to worry, “Is my baby okay?”When you have to say goodbye on the doorsteps of daycareor on that cursed first day of schoolI bow to youIf you have no skill but your own skillTo replenish an ever-emptying bank accountAnd no answers but your own toSatisfy the
Diane Samuels - Kindertransport: A Drama
Cheer up and give them out there a good reason to be happy.
Rivera Sun - Treadmills and Shooting Stars - a story of our times -
The woman looked out at the madness of the world and dared to hope. Her eyes were burning coals of stars.
Dash Shaw - BodyWorld
Living is suffering, Billy. Now give your mom a nice big hug.
Patrick White - The Vivisector
It was Sunday, and Mumma had gone next door with Lena and the little ones. Under the pepper tree in the yard Pa was sorting, counting, the empty bottles he would sell back: the bottles going clink clink as Pa stuck them in the sack. The fowls were fluffing in the dust and sun: that crook-neck white pullet Mumma said she would hit on the head if only she had the courage to; but she hadn't.
Emma Joy Crone - Garden Variety Dykes: Lesbian Traditions in Gardening
My grandmother, a dim, stern figure, named her children Lily and Violet, which I guess from seeing a picture of my mother's paved, ugly backyard, was the nearest she came to a garden.
Peter Hedges -
In the living room, the consensus among the guests was that Scotty’s looks favored his father, but the Judge was quick to disagree: ‘He doesn’t look a thing like me. He looks like an hors d'oeuvre.’Hearing this, Joan thought the following, and pledged it to herself, as both prayer and promise: You will be loved, Scotty Ocean.And while the guests laughed at the Judge’s remark, Joan leaned over and softly whispered to her newborn son, 'You will be loved.
Sylvia Plath - Letters Home
Between Sylvia and me there existed as between my own mother and me - a sort of psychic osmosis which, at times, was very wonderful and comforting; at other times an unwelcome invasion of privacy (words from Aurelia Plath from the Introduction)
Caroline Kennedy - She Walks in Beauty: A Woman's Journey Through Poems
Our mothers are our first teachers, and we teach others the same lessons we learn from them. As a child, when your mother believes in you, you believe in yourself, and when that happens, there is nothing you can’t do. As a mother, that is the greatest gift we can give to a child.
Louisa May Alcott - Jo's Boys
I think this power of living in our children is one of the sweetest things in the world…
Jeanette Winterson - Sexing the Cherry
When Jordan was a baby he sat on top of me much as a fly rests on a hill of dung. And I nourished him as a hill of dung nourishes a fly, and when he had eaten his fill he left me.Jordan...I should have named him after a stagnant pond and then I could have kept him, but I named him after a river and in the flood-tide he slipped away.
Franny Billingsley - Chime
I have a theory about how she might have managed to pull off such a feat. It comes in the form of an equation: Love + Fear = Herculean Strength. It’s how mothers come to fling runaway motorcars from their children.
Shannon L. Alder -
It takes a female to have a baby,It takes a woman to raise a child,It takes a mother to raise them correctly,It takes a warrior to show them how to change the world.
Caitlin Moran - How to Be a Woman
But deciding not to have children is a very, very hard decision for a woman to make: the atmosphere is worryingly inconducive to saying, "I choose not to," or "it all sounds a bit vile, tbh." We call these women "selfish" The inference of the word "childless" is negative: one of lack, and loss. We think of nonmothers as rangy lone wolves--rattling around, as dangerous as teenage boys or men. We make women feel that their narrative has ground to a halt in their thirities if they don't "finish thi
Louisa May Alcott - Jo's Boys
…she rejoiced as only mothers can in the good fortunes of their children.
Catherynne M. Valente - The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
Because she did not look behind, September did not see the smoky-glass casket close itself primly up again. She did not see it bend in half until it cracked, and Death hop up again, quite well, quite awake, and quite small once more. She certainly did not see Death stand on her tiptoes and blow a kiss after her, a kiss that rushed through all the frosted leaves of the autumnal forest, but could not quite catch a child running as fast as she could. As all mothers know, children travel faster than
J.M. Barrie -
It is the custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake (but of course you can’t) you would see your own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite like tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering humorously over some of your contents, won
Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care
Sometimes, mothers say and do things that seem like they don't want their kids... but when you look more closely, you realize that they're doing those kids a favor. They're just trying to give them a better life.
Debra Ginsberg -
Through the blur, I wondered if I was alone or if other parents felt the same way I did - that everything involving our children was painful in some way. The emotions, whether they were joy, sorrow, love or pride, were so deep and sharp that in the end they left you raw, exposed and yes, in pain. The human heart was not designed to beat outside the human body and yet, each child represented just that - a parent's heart bared, beating forever outside its chest.
Andrew Galasetti - These Colors Don't Run
Mamas are always crying about how one day they see you as a baby, and the next morning, they see you growed up.
Mandy Hale - and a Dash of Sass
Single moms: You are a doctor, a teacher, a nurse, a maid, a cook, a referee, a heroine, a provider, a defender, a protector, a true Superwoman. Wear your cape proudly.
Kifah Shah -
We gotta start teaching our daughters to be somebodies instead of somebody's.