Alfre Woodard Quotes

Whenever I write about motherhood - and I write about it a lot - I am drawing on my experiences as a mother and also my experiences as a daughter.

Like every mom, you try to juggle, but I also want people to know that you don't have to be a superhero. I'm not a superhero; I have a team of people who help me. I have a great family support system.

I felt like I had never really heard of a story that reflected the stuff I was going through as a mom. I came up with an idea for a story about motherhood that I would want to read.

I grew up with my mom; it was just the two of us.

My mom, for all intents and purposes, was a single parent.

I think I've become more like my mom just because of what we're both interested in, children and teaching and writing.

I think the Mama people remember is from 'Mama's Family.' She really turned into a pretty cool character. The sketches from the 'Burnett' show, if people are old enough to remember, were written by writers who all hated their mothers.

I'm all right, not as good as my mom is. Maybe because I don't have kids.

No influence is so powerful as that of the mother.

I felt differently about her [Gypsy Rose Lee] during every phase of the research and writing process. Often, I felt incredibly sorry for her; she had an extremely difficult childhood and a complicated 'to say the least' relationship with her family, her mother especially.

And in the same way, FDR's not much of a father. Although the children in all their memoirs really talk about what a fun-loving guy Dad was, and how brooding and unhappy Mom was. The children sort of blame it all on the mother. Well, this is kind of standard and typical, and aggrieved Eleanor Roosevelt that she was not a happier mother. She wanted to be a happier mother. And I must say, she was a happier grandmother.

On one thing professionals and amateurs agree: mothers can't win.

Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.

I was a poor kid, and my mom was a single mother of three.

I was suppose to write a book about being a mom, to organize my thoughts into chapters and figure out a structure to hang them on, to make a lasting point, but somehow I decided to go ahead and become a mother instead.

Honestly, I believe that the mother-daughter relationship is magical, complex, potentially dangerous, profoundly powerful, and deeply transformative. To put it simply, all of us have this relationship, and in a very real way, "none of us comes out alive." We are all formed first as daughters and then tested as mothers. There's nothing like motherhood to make us reassess how we were as daughters.

A lot of writing about being a mother is not so much writing about the kids themselves. They become placeholders for the shift that happens when you're suddenly in charge of other people.

My mom had four kids, one with special needs. She had a full-time job, and she still came home and made dinner for us every night, from scratch. It was amazing.

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.

What writing ROOM taught me was that I know exactly how to be the perfect mother, but I'm not willing to do it for more than ten minutes at a time.

It's the child who's supposed to cry, and the mom who makes it all better, not the other way around, which is why mothers will move heaven and earth to hold it together in front of their own kids.

Women who miscalculate are called mothers.

Once, I was my mother's daughter. Now I am my daughter's mother.

I have found being a mother has made me emotionally raw in many situations. You heart is beating outside your body when you have a baby.

I think that, especially as the kids are growing up, they have so much stuff going on in their own lives, they don't really know how much they're looking at their mom as the big problem