Favorite Quotes from Mama's Writing
A few words to help steer your ship in this new season.
Mama’s Writing is Raising Mothers’ monthly interview series, created by Deesha Philyaw and curated by
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To date, we have published over 40 profiles in our Mama’s Writing series. To start off 2025, we thought it would be a nice idea to remind you of who we are, where we’ve come from and where we’re headed. We’re sharing a few of our favorite quotes from some of our interviews below. Our hope is to encourage you and remind you that you aren’t alone.
My daughter and I began doing art recreations of paintings in NYC museums together. She’d pick out the paintings, be the model, and I’d help with staging the photo. I’d been feeling guilty (guilt comes up a lot for me) about not being able to write during the first half of the pandemic but working with my daughter on that project got me out of my own way. Activating another part of my creativity with her over the summer lit a fire under me again and got me out of the writing funk I’d been in.
Writing saved my life after I became a parent. Honestly, it probably saved my kids’ life too. I had pretty intense postpartum depression, and writing was one of the ways, well, the ONLY way I coped with it. Motherhood somehow opened me up and gave me permission to speak truths I didn't think I would ever speak, in ways I didn't even know I was capable of.
“If I could sit next to my before-motherhood-self, I would encourage her to honor her art and time—that a “good” mother is one who makes herself a priority, sometimes above her children’s needs and desires. I would tell her there’s no shame in asking for help, that mothers were meant to be in community, to be interwoven with others who share the same joy and burden of caring for children. I would tell her that her voice and story are important, that God created her to be an artist, that her work would comfort and inspire others, that she was a force of nature.”
Give yourself grace and release the guilt of carving out time for your dreams. Showing her children how to balance pursuing their goals without being completely self-sacrificing is one of the greatest gifts that we can give them.
“Becoming a mother and caring for my children every day has given me so much more empathy for myself as a daughter. Before, obviously, I knew I once was a child, but I get it so much more viscerally now—how vulnerable I was, how precious, how much I needed. I had a very painful childhood, and becoming a mother has made my heart break in new ways for the girl I was. I’ve become much more serious about my healing and conserving my energy since having children. That’s in part because I know my children need me. But I also see how much care and tenderness I still need.”
Slow and low, mama. Every little word counts towards the goal. Every writing block you carve out time for adds up. What you make will feed what you made. Your mothering, I think, is improved by the self-reflection that comes from writing. Your writing is improved by the humility that comes from mothering. Your joys feed your joys.
The phrase “it takes a village” took on deeper meaning as I realized my husband and I were parenting in isolation, without grandparents or siblings nearby to help provide some occasional relief and a sense of community.
Sometimes you might feel you’re falling behind and neglecting your creative goals. That’s likely because you are, and you shouldn’t berate yourself about it. You’re living your life and helping others live theirs. Caring for other human beings can be righteous, difficult work. We often think we should be able to do it while also engaging in rigorous intellectual work.
[Parenting] has brought clarity to my writing, and a sense of profound urgency. It didn’t occur to me until I became a parent that my writing is my legacy, and it is for my son. That was a real epiphany that happened for me in 2014, and I write about it in my memoir, Surviving the White Gaze. The day that Michael Brown was murdered by police in Ferguson, Missouri, and my then-9-year-old asked if he or I would get shot because we are Black, I knew that in addition to mothering him through my answer, I needed to also commit the truth of my answer, and its legacy — of police profiling and murdering Black boys and men — through writing.
“Parenting is a motivating force to write but it also prohibits me from having the time to do it. I am a single parent and am the first generation. I work several jobs to afford to live in The Bronx and to support my daughters. The role of mother keeps me busy even while I have bursts of empty nest mode when they are away at college. Parenting means I maintain two lives other than my own. It keeps me busy with survival mode tasks. All the while writing beckons me to make it one of those top tasks. I have found ways to have doses of writing make their way onto the page or a screen. The reality is though that parenting comes first until my daughters are set and out of college.”
Other writer-mothers have helped me to not feel like I’m not alone in feeling mom guilt when writing takes up my time or reminded me that the words would come back when it felt like pregnancy brain or postpartum depression stole them from me.
I didn’t grow up with many examples of mothers who considered their own needs as sacred. I’m trying to learn for myself and to normalize it for my kids.
I’ve always been interested in inheritance. It started long before my son was born, but my interest has only increased. Having a child also made me more empathetic for my parents and the big choices and sacrifices they had to make to ensure the safety of our family–choices that directly led to my loss of language and cultural fluency, creating a rupture I’ve been trying my whole life to mend.
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