Motherhood Quote by Christian Morgenstern

A supposedly practical tip that collapses into a logical trap: you can "choose a good mother" only before you exist. That impossible instruction is the point. Morgenstern, a poet steeped in German literary play and philosophical whimsy, uses the deadpan tone of a handbook to smuggle in a joke about fate. It reads like advice, but it functions like a riddle: the most important variable in your life is set before you have agency, and all later parenting manuals are, to some degree, theater.

The line also needles the culture of expertise around child-rearing. By calling this the "first principle", Morgenstern mimics the confident hierarchy of rules common to bourgeois self-improvement literature of his era, then undercuts it with a principle no one can follow. The wit is not just cute; it's corrosive. It suggests that we blame parents (especially mothers) for outcomes that are deeply structural: class, health, stability, education, sheer luck. The humor lands because it sounds like something a smug authority might actually say, revealing how often "good parenting" is treated as a moral achievement rather than an accident of circumstance.

There's a sharper gendered subtext, too. The mother is made the primary determinant of the child's fate, reflecting early 20th-century assumptions about domestic responsibility. Morgenstern isn't endorsing that burden so much as exposing it: if you're going to reduce a child's future to one factor, notice how quickly society reaches for "the mother" as both origin story and scapegoat.