Motherhood

“So for good or bad, she knew, to call yourself a mother the only thing you had to do was show up for the job. And stay.

And some are saints and some are martyrs.

Some are victims.

Some are vanished.

Some are walls.

Some emit more light than they absorb, creating their own planetary systems.

Some are sole survivors of the war against themselves. Some are slaves.

And some are furies.

Some are cold, and some are tender.

Few are blameless.

All have names.

Each must answer for her child’s existence.

[…] Still, she kept wishing. For years she’d taken future motherhood, her future in maternity, for granted. Look around – all you see are mothers, women born to it, women who have children just as casually as breathing, women who have babies hanging off their hips like fruit.”

(Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen, 239-240)