Motherhood Quote by Kathryn Stockett

Stockett’s line is disarmingly plain, and that’s the point: it recreates the soft-focus innocence that lets a whole social order run on autopilot. The child’s perspective is offered as explanation, almost as absolution. “We looked up to” signals real affection, even awe, but it also sneaks in a hierarchy: you can admire someone you’re still allowed to outrank. The phrasing “playing in some ways the role of our mothers” treats substitute mothering as a kind of performance, a job you can clock into, not an identity you’re entitled to claim.

The most revealing clause is “They were paid to be nice to us.” It frames care as purchased, kindness as a service rendered. Stockett doesn’t have to mention race or class for the power dynamics to thrum underneath; the pay relationship does that work. It’s a sentence that carries both gratitude and a faint chill, because it admits that intimacy is being outsourced while also being controlled. The child feels closeness; the adult reader hears contingency.

“Take time out of their day” lands with quiet entitlement: whose day was it to begin with? In the world her novels circle, domestic workers’ time is structurally spoken for. The final move, “an extension of your mother,” is psychologically accurate and politically charged. It highlights how families fold paid labor into “family-like” narratives, a sentiment that can soothe the employer’s conscience while erasing the worker’s own family, needs, and boundaries. The subtext isn’t just nostalgia; it’s the machinery of innocence that makes inequality feel like love.