Motherhood Quote by Alice Duer Miller

The sting of Miller's line is how it weaponizes domestic intimacy. She sets up the mother as the archetype of care - good food, vigilant concern, gentle help with homework - then swivels abruptly to a quieter cruelty: in one crucial dimension, she is "no more feeling than a wall". Not a villain, not even unkind. Just impermeable.

The intent isn't to accuse mothers of hypocrisy; it's to name a child's first encounter with the limits of being seen. Children are trained to read care as total comprehension: if someone tends your body and your schedule, surely they also understand your private self. Miller punctures that assumption. The "hidden inner world" is telling: the child has secrets, shame, fantasies, fears he can't articulate. The wall isn't just the mother's emotional distance; it's the architecture of family roles. A parent can be competent, loving, even tender, and still be locked out of the child's interior, partly because the child is locked inside it.

As a poet writing in an era when motherhood was romanticized as instinctive omniscience, Miller lets the sentence do the cultural critique. The long, accumulating list of nurturances mimics how a child inventories proof of love. The phrase "in some circumstance" slips in like a legal clause: there are conditions under which the maternal figure becomes unreachably adult, bound by propriety, fatigue, or her own unspoken life. The subtext is modern: emotional literacy isn't guaranteed by devotion. Sometimes the most familiar face is the one that can't cross the threshold.