Sublime

‘Motherhood is an obliteration of the self,’

Occasionally she would seem to become the sole focus of his interest, and he’d interrogate her with the attention of a student making notes: why did she have to wear a hat on Sundays? Why did she never wear jeans? Why didn’t she have a television? Was it true she’d never been to the cinema? When she answered, she said either it was because her fath

Matrescence. ‘The process of becoming a mother, which anthropologists call “matrescence,” has been largely unexplored in the medical community,’ Sacks writes. ‘Instead of focusing on the woman’s identity transition, more research is focused on how the baby turns out. But a woman’s story, in addition to how her psychology impacts her parenting, is i

Widowed at twenty-two, Laura had one daughter, Peggy, to whom she devoted her life. When Peggy was sixteen, she confided to her mother that she was pregnant and that the lover who had promised to marry her had deserted her. “Well-meaning friends” advised an abortion and told Smith, “There is a way. Hide this thing from sight, send her on a journey.

realized that my mum and dad had met at university, had both obtained degrees, and yet my mum had not had a job since she married my dad.