"I was not a classic mother. But my kids were never palmed off to boarding school. So, I didn't bake cookies. You can buy cookies, but you can't buy love!"
About this Quote
Then she pivots to the part that matters: her children “were never palmed off to boarding school.” That phrase has bite. “Palmed off” implies disposal, a magic trick of convenience, a way of outsourcing intimacy under the cover of respectability. Welch isn’t claiming sainthood; she’s drawing a boundary around presence. For a working actress in an era that treated female ambition as suspect, that’s the quiet flex.
The closer lands because it reframes value in an aggressively consumerist language she expects her audience to understand. You can buy cookies. You cannot buy love. She’s not romanticizing motherhood; she’s arguing that care isn’t measured by domestic output but by relational investment. The subtext is also industry-specific: a woman whose labor was literally packaged and sold insists that the one thing that can’t be commodified is the thing she prioritized at home. It’s a tidy, culturally savvy rebuttal to the idea that maternal love must look like a kitchen.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mother |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Welch, Raquel. (2026, February 18). I was not a classic mother. But my kids were never palmed off to boarding school. So, I didn't bake cookies. You can buy cookies, but you can't buy love! FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-was-not-a-classic-mother-but-my-kids-were-never-64258/
Chicago Style
Welch, Raquel. "I was not a classic mother. But my kids were never palmed off to boarding school. So, I didn't bake cookies. You can buy cookies, but you can't buy love!" FixQuotes. February 18, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-was-not-a-classic-mother-but-my-kids-were-never-64258/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I was not a classic mother. But my kids were never palmed off to boarding school. So, I didn't bake cookies. You can buy cookies, but you can't buy love!" FixQuotes, 18 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-was-not-a-classic-mother-but-my-kids-were-never-64258/. Accessed 24 Feb. 2026.





