Motherhood Quote by Rita Dove

Rita Dove’s sentence is built like a family photograph with the background left sharply in focus. “My father is a chemist, my mother was a homemaker”: two roles that American culture loves to sort into hierarchies, the lab coat implicitly “professional,” the home implicitly “non-career.” Dove lays them down side by side without apology or sentimentality, then quietly reverses the expected valuation. The real prestige in this household isn’t the father’s title; it’s the parents’ shared project: making learning feel electric.

The phrasing “instilled in us the feeling” matters. She isn’t praising a stack of books or a strict regimen; she’s describing an emotional education, the conversion of curiosity into a durable appetite. Learning becomes not self-improvement as moral duty, but excitement as a practiced sensation. That’s a poet’s move: she’s naming the affective engine behind intellectual life, the part that keeps you returning when no grade or credential is on the line.

Then comes the democratic mic drop: “and it never ends.” In one clause, Dove slips past the usual gatekeeping that treats education as a phase (school) or a possession (degrees). The line also reframes class and gender narratives without lecturing: a chemist and a homemaker can jointly author a life of the mind; the home can be the first university. In the context of Dove’s career - a Black woman navigating institutions that have historically rationed “learning” - the quote reads as both gratitude and strategy: joy as resistance, curiosity as lifelong citizenship.