Status Updates From Matrescence: On Pregnancy, ...

It was time now to be satisfied by constant, total, isolated caregiving. The aspirations, desires and pleasures of the past were in direct conflict with my new life. The more I shrank my self, I sensed, the better mother I would be.

This newfound ‘traditional’ code of intensive motherhood clashed with the capitalistic culture I had been instructed in: to be, first and foremost, a worker, an earner and a consumer.

Motherhood is an occupation in all senses of the word. Those who have occupied me are now living both outside and inside me. By which I mean, sometimes there is no membrane between us, despite appearances. They have annexed my consciousness

It is interesting that both the Qur’an and the Bible contain a much stronger sense of the physical and psychological experience of matrescence than our dominant secular discourse. As the scholar Irene Oh shows, the Qur’an tells Muslims to revere their mothers because of the ‘hardship’ they go through to give birth and wean children.