Stepping Heavenward- On being a Mother

"My darling precious children! For their sakes I am continually constrained to seek after an amended, a sanctified life. What I want them to become, I must become myself. "
  

"People ask me how it happens that my children are all so promptly obedient and happy. As if it chanced that some parents have such children or chanced that some parents have not! I’m afraid it is only too true, as someone has remarked, that this is the age of obedient parents! What then will be the future of the children? How can they yield to God who have never been taught to yield to human authority? And how well fitted to run their own households will they be who have never learned to rule themselves?"

"If I required a little self-denial, I said cheerfully {to them}, 'This is hard, but doing it for our best Friend sweetens it'. If you do this cheerfully and pleasantly my darling, you do it for Jesus, and that will make Him smile upon you."

"When you speak contemptuously of the vocation of motherhood, you dishonor not only the mother who bore you, but the Lord Jesus Himself, who chose to be born of a woman and to be ministered to by her through a helpless infancy."

"I want to see little children adorning every home as flowers adorn every meadow and every wayside. I want to see them welcomed to the homes they enter, to see their parents grow less and less selfish, and more and more loving because they have come. I want to see God's precious gifts accepted, not frowned upon and refused."

[of her sickly daughter]

"Thank God for sparing her to us a year. If he should take her away, I should still rejoice that this life was mingled with ours and has influenced us. Yes, even an infant in an ever-felt influence in the household. What an amazing thought! I have given this precious little one to her Savior and mine, living or dying, she is His. "

~Stepping Heavenward by Mrs. E. Prentiss in the 1800s