The moment you realize that you aren't creating a cut-and-paste version of yourself, but rather nurturing a stunningly unique individual with thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears and opinions and preferences and plans and interests of their own is the moment parenting becomes an adventure instead of a challenge. It's a simple shift in perspective that creates a world of difference.

What it's like to be a parent: It's one of the hardest things you'll ever do but in exchange it teaches you the meaning of unconditional love.

To be a parent is a great art. To give birth to children is nothing — any animal can do it; it is a natural, biological, instinctive process. To give birth to a child is nothing great, it is nothing special; it is very ordinary. But to be a parent is something extraordinary; very few people are really capable of being parents.

All great human deeds both consume and transform their doers. Consider an athlete, or a scientist, or an independent business creator. In service of their goals they lay down time and energy and many other choices and pleasures; in return, they become most truly themselves. A false destiny may be spotted by the fact that it consumes without transforming, without giving back the enlarged self. Becoming a parent is one of these basic human transformational deeds. By this act, we change our fundamental relationship with the universe- if nothing else, we lose our place as the pinnacle and end-point of evolution, and become a mere link. The demands of motherhood especially consume the old self, and replace it with something new, often better and wiser, sometimes wearier or disillusioned, or tense and terrified, certainly more self-knowing, but never the same again.

Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby- awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess.

The successful parents I saw were able to redefine who they were and renegotiate their needs and roles as humans, parents, and partners.

The artist and the mother are vehicles, not originators. They don't create the new life, they only bear it. This is why birth is such a humbling experience. The new mom weeps in awe at the little miracle in her arms. She knows it came out of her but not from her, through her but not of her.

one thing about having a baby is that each step of the way you simply cannot imagine loving him any more than you already do, because you are bursting with love, loving as much as you are humanly capable of- and then you do, you love him even more.

Becoming a parent doesn't make you less of a woman. You matter. Your happiness matters. Your health matters. Your dreams matter. Today do at least one thing for you. Take a walk in the rain. Meet a friend for coffee. Write in your journal. Read a book. Plan a trip. Hug a tree. Help a stranger. Create something. Grow something. Sing something. Learn something. Whatever it is that makes you smile, do a little of it each day. Your children are watching. Let them see you happy.

When you're a parent you have a new chance to grow.

Everybody has it wrong way round. Parents don't make children — children make parents. They shape our behavior from the first wail. Mold us into what they need. It can be a pretty rough process, too

A newborn baby has a powerful effect on character. But so does a toddler. A child. A preteen. A teenager. A mother changes with every stage. Some stages are within a mother's skill set. Some stages are like being told to scale a cliff using a rope attached to nothing.

Parenting is constant readjustment.

You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child.