"The most consistent gift and burden of motherhood is advice"
About this Quote
Advice shadows motherhood from the first positive test through the last child leaving home. It arrives as tenderness and as interference, as a lifeline and as a chorus of second-guessing. The double edge is the point: counsel keeps families afloat while also weighing on the person asked to carry it.
As a gift, advice is how knowledge about care survives. Grandmothers teach swaddles and soups; friends pass along pediatricians, hacks, and the reassurance that sleeplessness ends. Generations marked by scarcity and risk distilled practical wisdom to keep babies alive and mothers sane. Even now, when books and experts proliferate, the most valuable guidance often comes with a story attached, a reminder that others have stood here, made mistakes, and endured. Advice creates community in an experience that can be isolating.
As a burden, it polices. Strangers in grocery aisles, comment sections, and clinic waiting rooms offer prescriptions that encode class, culture, and morality: breastfeed but do not shame; return to work but never miss a moment; be vigilant yet relaxed. The edicts collide, and the mother becomes the site where contradictory ideals are enforced. Medicalization shifted authority from kin to experts; social media multiplied the voices. The result is a steady drip of critique that can erode confidence and drown out intuition.
Susan Chira, a journalist attentive to gender and power, captures how advice operates as social infrastructure. It is the means by which communities transmit care and also the mechanism by which they surveil and judge. Its consistency matters. The advice does not stop when diapers do; it morphs into counsel on schools, screens, sex, mental health, and money, then circles back when the mother becomes the elder offering her own words.
To mother is to navigate this paradox: to need counsel and to be shaped by it, to be strengthened by a lineage of know-how and constrained by the expectations it carries. The task is discerning which advice binds you to others in love and which only binds.
As a gift, advice is how knowledge about care survives. Grandmothers teach swaddles and soups; friends pass along pediatricians, hacks, and the reassurance that sleeplessness ends. Generations marked by scarcity and risk distilled practical wisdom to keep babies alive and mothers sane. Even now, when books and experts proliferate, the most valuable guidance often comes with a story attached, a reminder that others have stood here, made mistakes, and endured. Advice creates community in an experience that can be isolating.
As a burden, it polices. Strangers in grocery aisles, comment sections, and clinic waiting rooms offer prescriptions that encode class, culture, and morality: breastfeed but do not shame; return to work but never miss a moment; be vigilant yet relaxed. The edicts collide, and the mother becomes the site where contradictory ideals are enforced. Medicalization shifted authority from kin to experts; social media multiplied the voices. The result is a steady drip of critique that can erode confidence and drown out intuition.
Susan Chira, a journalist attentive to gender and power, captures how advice operates as social infrastructure. It is the means by which communities transmit care and also the mechanism by which they surveil and judge. Its consistency matters. The advice does not stop when diapers do; it morphs into counsel on schools, screens, sex, mental health, and money, then circles back when the mother becomes the elder offering her own words.
To mother is to navigate this paradox: to need counsel and to be shaped by it, to be strengthened by a lineage of know-how and constrained by the expectations it carries. The task is discerning which advice binds you to others in love and which only binds.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mother |
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