Motherhood more than Marriage by Oscar Wilde

Men don't understand what mothers are. I am no different from other / women except in the wrong done me and the wrong I did, and my very heavy / punishments and great disgrace. And yet, to bear you I had to look on / death. To nurture you I had to wrestle with it. Death fought with me / for you. All women have to fight with death to keep their children. / Death, being childless, wants our children from us. Gerald, when you / were naked I clothed you, when you were hungry I gave you food. Night / and day all that long winter I tended you. No office is too mean, no / care too lowly for the thing we women love -- and oh! how _I_ loved _you_. / Not Hannah, Samuel more. And you needed love, for you were weakly, and / only love could have kept you alive. Only love can keep any one alive. / And boys are careless often and without thinking give pain, and we always / fancy that when they come to man's estate and know us better they will / repay us. But it is not so. The world draws them from our side, and / they make friends with whom they are happier than they are with us, and / have amusements from which we are barred, and interests that are not / ours: and they are unjust to us often, for when they find life bitter / they blame us for it, and when they find it sweet we do not taste its / sweetness with them. You made many friends and went into their / houses and were glad with them, and I, knowing my secret, did not dare to / follow, but stayed at home and closed the door, shut out the sun and sat / in darkness.

What should I have done in honest households? My past was / ever with me. And you thought I didn't care for the pleasant things / of life. I tell you I longed for them, but did not dare to touch them, / feeling I had no right. You thought I was happier working amongst the / poor. That was my mission, you imagined. It was not, but where else was / I to go? The sick do not ask if the hand that smooths their pillow is / pure, nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known the / kiss of sin. It was you I thought of all the time; I gave to them the / love you did not need: lavished on them a love that was not theirs. / And you thought I spent too much of my time in going to Church, and in / Church duties. But where else could I turn? God's house is the only / house where sinners are made welcome, and you were always in my heart, / Gerald, too much in my heart. For, though day after day, at morn or / evensong, I have knelt in God's house, I have never repented of my sin. / How could I repent of my sin when you, my love, were its fruit! Even now / that you are bitter to me I cannot repent. I do not. You are more to me / than innocence. I would rather be your mother -- oh! much rather! -- than / have been always pure. Oh, don't you see? don't you understand? It / is my dishonour that has made you so dear to me. It is my disgrace that / has bound you so closely to me. It is the price I paid for you -- the / price of soul and body -- that makes me love you as I do. Oh, don't ask me / to do this horrible thing. Child of my shame, be still the child of my / shame! -- _A Woman of No Importance_.