Motherhood Quote by Dorothy Hamill

"My mother stopped working when she had my brother. She was a full time mom until I started getting heavily into ice skating lessons, and it got to the point where they really needed my mom to earn an income"

Dorothy Hamill, Athlete

About this Quote

Hamill’s plainspoken recollection doubles as a quiet critique of how “supporting a kid’s dream” often depends on invisible labor and sudden financial triage. Ice skating isn’t just a sport here; it’s a costly ecosystem of lessons, rink time, equipment, travel, coaching. The moment she “started getting heavily into” it, the family’s budget stops being abstract and becomes a scheduling-and-paycheck problem with names and receipts attached.

The line that lands hardest is the unromantic logic: “they really needed my mom to earn an income.” It punctures the feel-good mythology of athletic success as pure talent plus grit. What sits underneath is the reality that elite youth sports are frequently subsidized by a parent’s flexibility, time, and earnings - and that those resources are often gendered. Hamill’s mother is “a full time mom” until the sport demands not just attention but capital; her role shifts from caretaker to financial engine because the pathway to competitive skating requires both.

There’s also a subtle class signal: the family can adapt. Not everyone can. Hamill frames it without melodrama, which is precisely why it resonates: it sounds like a practical decision, but it reveals the stakes. The quote captures the backstage infrastructure of achievement - the domestic recalibration, the mother’s work re-entry, the family’s collective investment - that rarely makes it into highlight reels, yet determines who gets to chase excellence in the first place.

Quote Details

Topic	Mother
Source	Help us find the source
Cite

More Quotes by Dorothy Add to List

About the Author

Dorothy Hamill (born July 26, 1956) is a Athlete from USA.

15 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

"Mothers, unless they were very poor, didn't work. Both of my parents had to leave education. My mother had to work in a cotton mill until 18 or 19, when she took some training in domestic science"

Roger Bannister, Athlete

Roger Bannister

"The most surprising thing for my mother and father was when I was actually earning more money than them by the time I was about 18. They thought I was going to be the ne'er do well, who they'd have to keep worrying about"

Diane Cilento, Actress

"My father, who was from a wealthy family and highly educated, a lawyer, Yale and Columbia, walked out with the benefit of a healthy push from my mother, a seventh grade graduate, who took a typing course and got a secretarial job as fast as she could"

George Weinberg, Psychologist

"I wasn't really aware that my father was working for quite a while. I thought it was my mother who had all the money!"

Peter Fonda, Actor

"My parents were working class folks. My dad was a bartender for most of his life, my mom was a maid and a cashier and a stock clerk at Walmart. We were not people of financial means in terms of significant financial means. I always told them, 'I didn't always have what I wanted. I always had what I needed.' My parents always provided that"

Marco Rubio, Politician

Marco Rubio

"I came from a broken home, so my mom was a major influence in my life"

Julius Erving, Athlete

"My mother opened a bank account for me when I made $60 on my first day of work as an extra. She's that kind of mother"

Laura Dern, Actress

"My mother raised three children on her own, and my dad was a doctor working 16 hours a day"

Christopher Meloni, Actor

"I always wanted to make sure my parents didn't have to work again for the rest of their lives"

Deion Sanders, Athlete

"Their educations ended with high school - my father going to work as a clerk and then salesman in a company dealing in printing and stationary, and my mother working as a secretary and then bookkeeper in a firm of wool merchants"

Martin Lewis Perl, Physicist

"My mother, brave woman, lost her whole family when she decided to marry a black man in the '60s. When the marriage fell apart, she had to come back to her family"

Lisa Bonet, Actress

Lisa Bonet

"My dad worked several jobs to pay for my expense in skating"

Nancy Kerrigan, Athlete

"Mom never quit on me. My only regret is that she didn't live long enough to share some of the money and comforts my work in show business has brought me"

Ethel Waters, Musician

"I was a single parent, and I was prohibited from working"

Alison Moyet, Musician

"My mother was a wonderful, wonderful woman with a lovely voice who hated housework, hated cooking even more, and loved her children. She was always arranging church activities such as a bazaar"

Maureen Forrester, Musician

Maureen Forrester

"My mother, she had a very good attitude toward money. I'm very grateful for the fact that we had to learn to save. I used to get like 50 pence a week, and I'd save it for like five months. And then I'd spend it on Christmas presents. I'd save up like eight pounds. It's nothing, but we did that"

Gemma Arterton, Actress

Gemma Arterton

"I never had, like, a nanny that took care of me. My mom always fed me breakfast, lunch, and dinner"

Miley Cyrus, Musician

Miley Cyrus

"My mother, at least twice, cancelled our family's subscription to the newspaper I was working on, because she was so mad about its treatment of my father"

Charles Kuralt, Journalist

"My son tried to work in films and he ultimately gave it up, he finally couldn't make a living, he couldn't support himself. He worked all the time and he didn't make enough money to have a house, have an apartment"

Jeffrey Jones, Actor

"From my parents, I learned a very strong work ethic, and all of my brothers and sisters all worked from the earliest days of life right through to the present time"

George J. Mitchell, Politician