Anyway, she now realized, the military histories she’d read had left out the most important part; they never told what happened to people’s babies. - Lois McMaster Bujold

All great human deeds both consume and transform their doers. Consider an athlete, or a scientist, or an artist, 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.

“I was just a little taken aback. That—that wasn’t the proposition I was expecting, is all. Excuse me. I fear I am become incurably low-minded.”
“You can’t help that, I’m sure,” Ethan said tolerantly. “Being female, and all that.”

She wondered when not dull had become her prime criterion for mate selection.