All artists give birth. It's alchemy and it's really an amazing process.

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed but the mother, never. A mother is something new."

If you really want to give yourself as a woman ànd as a mother - completely - it is not possible to make your own creative work. That is, of course, a struggle. Being a mother is also creating, daily - even when children are grown-up - but I have always been able to connect it with my work; I have the children involved in it.. ..[Mrs. Harrenstein-Schräder: To be a mother gives you much satisfaction, I think?].. ..Yes indeed, certainly because there is also something of creation in it, and because I love the driving force that generates from the new, young [life] around you. With a child you experience the whole life in a concise way, that is something so beautiful and so pure.

I’ve been blessed to know a lot of artists who are also mothers, who don’t necessarily go the cliché route of “motherhood ruins you.” It has always been more nuanced conversations, about the joy found in some aspects of parenting, how this perspective does and doesn’t inform creative life, and how one has a full community life as an artist even if one isn’t as a mother.

Creating — that is the great salvation from suffering, and life's alleviation. But for the creator to appear, suffering itself is needed, and much transformation. Yea, much bitter dying must there be in your life, ye creators! Thus are ye advocates and justifiers of all perishableness. For the creator himself to be the new-born child, he must also be willing to be the child-bearer, and endure the pangs of the child-bearer.

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.

in giving birth to Gabriel, I gave birth to myself as a mother-a role for which I was unprepared but which I try to carry out as best I can. Mother and poetess do not rhyme, but they go together rather well.

Birthing your dreams is like. . . . giving birth. Conceiving the idea is the fun part (hopefully), then you go through insane amounts of fear and excitement and dreaming and planning and vomiting and growing and thinking you’re crazy and thinking you’re awesome and stretching and shape shifting until you’re practically unrecognizable to everyone, even your own self. Along the way you clean up your puke and massage your aching back and apologize to all the people whose heads your ripped of in a hormonal killing spree, but you stay the course because you know this baby of yours is going to be the bomb. Then, finally, just when you can see a light at the end of the tunnel, labor starts. Your innards twist and strangle and force you to stumble around hunched over in the shape of the letter “C” while you breathe and pray and curse and just when you think it can’t get any more out-of-your-mind painful, a giant baby head squeezes out of a tiny hole in your body. Then. A full-blown miracle appears.

People proclaim that "the experience of parenthood is extraordinary" and recommend it to all (and denigrate those who have not gone through it). But we can wonder: "Extraordinary for whom?" It is certainly extraordinary for the parents. When they say that not only they will be happy and satisfied with the experience but also their children, they do not realize the immense asymmetry and mismatch between these two experiences, the experience of creating and of being created. The created child is compelled to accept the experience, to make it good and interesting (and even extraordinary); what other option would they have? This obligation is not present in the parents, where the "extraordinary" nature of the experience is part of an engaging and unilateral project. The situations of both parties are not comparable. Thus, when some reply: "There is no sense in you wanting to show that life is bad; you cannot decide for your child; maybe they will like to live," what does that mean? Of course, in a sense, they are compelled to like life! But this "liking" will always be a desperate acceptance. The created child is not in a position of really liking life. They could like it if they had really chosen to come into being. Faced with the fait accompli, they are forced to cling desperately to life. Either they "like it" or they will be destroyed (by a mental illness, or by the hostility of others).

The birth of a child instantly changes how we define ourselves. Women become mothers. Men become fathers. Couples become parents. Our priorities shift in fundamental ways. Parenting may be the most rewarding experience, but it is also the hardest and most humbling.

No artist's masterpiece can match a mother's creation of a successful child, one who has been freed to explore and to grow. ... Success is measured not only by who we are, but by what gifts we give. As the old chief said, "The gift is not complete until it is given again." Ah, the mother whose gift to the world is a person!

Don't be afraid. Human birth is full of suffering and one has to endure everything patiently, taking the Name of God. None, not even God in human form can escape the sufferings of the body and mind.

The creative act is primitive. Its principles are of birth and genesis. Babies are born in blood and chaos; stars and galaxies come into being amid the release of massive primordial cataclysms. Conception occurs at the primal level. I’m not being facetious when I stress, throughout this book, that it is better to be primitive than to be sophisticated, and better to be stupid than to be smart. The most highly cultured mother gives birth sweating and dislocated and cursing like a sailor. That’s the place we inhabit as artists and innovators. It’s the place we must become comfortable with. The hospital room may be spotless and sterile, but birth itself will always take place amid chaos, pain, and blood.

When a child who has been conceived in love is born to a man and a woman, the joy of that birth sings throughout the universe. The joy of writing or painting is much the same, and the insemination comes not from the artist himself but from his relationship with those he loves, with the whole world. All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is not such thing as a non-religious subject.