Sublime

‘Motherhood is an obliteration of the self,’

duplicitous,

Tillie Olsen wrote: “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children . . . the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” It was a physical problem, a time problem; it was also a question of selfhood. “The obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential . . . contradicts and must

intransigence

ineradicable

predominated.

unprepossessingly

because what had been invisible was now visible; what had been useful was now redundant.