If you’re looking for a little pick-me-up, these women have some wise and witty words to get you through the next nursing session, the next day, and the next sleepless night. Screenshot on your phone to scroll back to when you need them!

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“If we wear our nursing covers backwards like capes, then everyone can see we’re breastfeeding superheroes.”

― Cassi Clark, Breastfeeding Is a Bitch: But We Lovingly Do it Anyway

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“You know how your brain turns to mush? How it starts when you’re pregnant? You laugh, full of wonder and conspiracy, and you chide yourself, Me and my pregnancy brain! Then you give birth and your brain doesn’t return? But you’re breast-feeding, so you laugh, as if you’re a member of an exclusive club? Me and my nursing brain! But then you stop nursing and the terrible truth descends: Your good brain is never coming back. You’ve traded vocabulary, lucidity, and memory for motherhood. You know how you’re in the middle of a sentence and you realize at the end you’re going to need to call up a certain word and you’re worried you won’t be able to, but you’re already committed so you hurtle along and then pause because you’ve arrived at the end but the word hasn’t? And it’s not even a ten-dollar word you’re after, like polemic or shibboleth, but a two-dollar word, like distinctive, so you just end up saying amazing?

Which is how you join the gang of nitwits who describe everything as amazing.”

― Maria Semple, Today Will Be Different

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“I’ve been melted into something

too easy to spill. I make more

and more of myself in order

to make more and more of the baby.

He takes it, this making. And somehow

he’s made more of me, too.”

― Brenda Shaughnessy, Our Andromeda

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“In my experience nursing is waiting. The mother becomes the background against which the baby lives, becomes time. I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby’s continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against. I was the warmth and milk that was always there for him, the agent of comfort that was always there for him.

My body, my life, became the landscape of my son’s life. I am no longer merely a thing living in the world; I am a world.”

― Sarah Manguso, The Two Kinds of Decay

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“There are three reasons for breast-feeding: the milk is always at the right temperature; it comes in attractive containers; and the cat can’t get it.”

― Irena Chalmers

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“You are not a failure. Your worth as a mother is not measured in ounces. Say it out loud. Write it on the inside of your pump bag. You’re a great mom doing a hard job, and I hope you’re really proud of yourself.”

― Jessica Shortall, Work. Pump. Repeat.: The New Mom’s Survival Guide to Breastfeeding and Going Back to Work

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“Go hug a nursing mom — but not too hard. Her boobs may hurt.”

― Cassi Clark, Breastfeeding is a Bitch: But We Lovingly Do It Anyway