Subject: Motherhood
Quote: “They weren’t her own children,” Calgary pointed out.
“No,” said MacMaster. “That’s just where the trouble came in, I imagine. You’ve only got to look at any normal mother cat. She has her kittens, she’s passionately protective of them, she’ll scratch anyone who goes near them. And then, in a week or so, she starts resuming her own life. She goes out, hunts a bit, takes a rest from her young. She’ll still protect them, but she is no longer obsessed by them, all the time. She’ll play with them a bit; then when they’re a bit too rough, she’ll turn on them and give them a spank and tell them she wants to be let alone…. And as they grow up she cares less and less about them…. That’s what you might call the normal pattern of female life. I’ve seen many girls and women, with strong maternal instincts, keen on getting married but mainly, though they mayn’t quite know it themselves—because of their urge to motherhood. And the babies come; they’re happy and satisfied. Life goes back into proportion for them…. The maternal instinct, in a purely physical sense, is satisfied, you see.”
Character: Arthur Calgary and Dr. MacMaster
Chapter/Story: 7
Book Title/Copyright: Ordeal by Innocence, 1958
Subject: Parenting
Quote: “Later in life, when the boy has gone hopelessly wrong, the parents say, ‘If only I’d been stricter with him when he was young,’ or else they say, ‘I was too harsh, if only I’d been kinder.’ I don’t think myself it amounts to a penn’orth of difference. There are those who go wrong because they’ve had an unhappy home and essentially feel unloved. And again there are those who go wrong because at the least stress they’re going to go wrong anyway.”
Character: Dr. MacMaster
Chapter/Story: 7
Book Title/Copyright: Ordeal by Innocence, 1958Subject: School Holidays
Quote: “Two days,” she thought, “and they’ll be back at school. What a lovely, what a heavenly thought for a mother.”
She remembered vaguely some wicked remark by a woman columnist. Only six happy days in the year for a woman. The first and the last days of the holidays.
Character: Mrs. Ramsay
Chapter/Story: 10
Book Title/Copyright: The Clocks, 1963
Subject: Boys and Manners
Quote: But then, she reflected, she was the boys’ mother. She knew by hearsay that the boys, when they went out, behaved in a manner entirely different from at home. It was always mothers who got the worst of things. But perhaps, she reflected, one would rather have it like that. To have nice quiet attentive polite boys at home and to have little hooligans going out, creating unfavourable opinions of themselves, would be worse—yes, that would be worse.
Character: Mrs. Ramsay
Chapter/Story: 10
Book Title/Copyright: The Clocks, 1963
