Parenting & Family Quote by Carol Ann Duffy

Motherhood arrives here less like a choice than a renovation that reclassifies the whole property. Duffy’s first move is a quiet act of estrangement: “your previous life seems like someone else’s.” It’s not self-pity or nostalgia; it’s a poet’s blunt acknowledgment that identity isn’t a stable narrative you polish over time, it’s something that can be reassigned in an instant. The line carries a faint chill beneath the warmth: if the old life belongs to “someone else,” then the self you thought you were is, in a sense, dead. That’s the cost embedded in the tenderness.

Then Duffy pivots to a domestic metaphor that does two jobs at once. A house is intimate, familiar, supposedly knowable. Discovering an unknown room inside it suggests how unprepared even the most self-aware adult is for what a child rearranges. The “room” is both psychological and moral: a new capacity for attention, fear, patience, and awe. Calling it “full of treasure and light” risks sentimentality, but Duffy earns it by making the wonder architectural rather than abstract. The value isn’t the child as ornament; it’s the expansion of interior space.

As context, Duffy’s work often tests the boundaries of voice and selfhood, wary of tidy scripts around love, gender, and family. This quote keeps that skepticism while granting parenthood its genuinely disorienting radiance: not completion, but a sudden, irreversible widening.