Life & Wisdom Quote by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Bradley’s line doesn’t romanticize motherhood so much as itemize it: a blunt ledger where pleasure and pain are both real, both bodily, and neither politely discussed in public. “A babe at the breast” is intimate and specific, refusing euphemism; it plants the reader in the sensory fact of nursing, not in the abstract glow of “maternal joy.” Then comes the counterweight: “as much pleasure as the bearing is pain.” The sentence doesn’t claim the pain is redeemed or erased. It asserts equivalence, almost a moral arithmetic, as if arguing against a culture that either punishes women with sanctimony (“you chose this”) or flattens the experience into sentimental triumph.

The craft is in the symmetry. Bradley pairs two corporeal acts - bearing and breastfeeding - to insist that motherhood is not a single emotion but a cycle of costs and compensations. The subtext is autonomy: if pain is acknowledged without shame, pleasure can be claimed without apology. That matters coming from a fantasy writer whose work often re-centers women’s bodies, labor, and ritual as sources of power rather than decorative background. Read in the late-20th-century context of second-wave feminist debates around reproduction, choice, and the politics of domestic life, the line feels like a small rebellion against narratives written from the outside.

It also carries a quiet warning: if society demands the pain while denying the pleasure (or vice versa), it’s not honoring motherhood - it’s managing women.