"The most consistent gift and burden of motherhood is advice"
About this Quote
Advice is motherhood's stealth export: it slips out even when nobody asked, and it keeps moving long after the kids can drive themselves. Susan Chira nails the double bind in calling it both "gift and burden" and, crucially, "consistent". In a job defined by changing seasons - diapers to diplomas, scraped knees to broken hearts - advice is the one activity that doesn't age out. That consistency is comforting to the person giving it. It's proof of relevance, a way to stay tethered when a child's independence threatens to turn a parent into background noise.
The subtext is that advice is rarely just information. It's love wearing a hard hat. It's anxiety trying to pass as competence. It's a bid for control in a relationship that, if it's healthy, steadily moves out of your control. For mothers in particular, "advice" also stands in for the labor people don't want to name: the lifelong mental checklist, the emotional triage, the constant risk assessment that society praises as devotion and then punishes as meddling.
Chira, writing as a journalist, is attentive to how a private habit becomes a cultural script. Mothers are expected to be endlessly available, endlessly wise - and then are mocked as nagging, overbearing, "too much". The line lands because it captures that whiplash in a single breath: advice is the easiest way to care, and the easiest way to crowd someone. The gift is guidance; the burden is that you can't stop offering it, and they can't stop hearing what it implies: I still worry. I still know you. I still want a say.
The subtext is that advice is rarely just information. It's love wearing a hard hat. It's anxiety trying to pass as competence. It's a bid for control in a relationship that, if it's healthy, steadily moves out of your control. For mothers in particular, "advice" also stands in for the labor people don't want to name: the lifelong mental checklist, the emotional triage, the constant risk assessment that society praises as devotion and then punishes as meddling.
Chira, writing as a journalist, is attentive to how a private habit becomes a cultural script. Mothers are expected to be endlessly available, endlessly wise - and then are mocked as nagging, overbearing, "too much". The line lands because it captures that whiplash in a single breath: advice is the easiest way to care, and the easiest way to crowd someone. The gift is guidance; the burden is that you can't stop offering it, and they can't stop hearing what it implies: I still worry. I still know you. I still want a say.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mother |
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