Maternity Sayings And Quotes

People say that when a baby is crying the paternal grandmother will say, "The baby is crying, you should feed her," and the maternal grandmother will say, "Why is that baby crying so much, making her mom so tired?

I KNEW IT WAS OVER when tonight you couldn't make the phone ring when you used to make the sun rise when trees used to throw themselves in front of you to be paper for love letters that was how i knew i had to do it swaddle the kids we never had against january's cold slice bundle them in winter clothes they never needed so i could drop them off at my mom's even though she lives on the other side of the country and at this late west coast hour is assuredly east coast sleeping peacefully her house was lit like a candle the way homes should be warm and golden and home and the kids ran in and jumped at the bichon frise named lucky that she never had they hugged the dog it wriggled and the kids were happy yours and mine the ones we never had and my mom was grand maternal, which is to say, with style that only comes when you've seen enough to know grace like when to pretend it's christmas or a birthday so she lit her voice with tiny lights and pretended she didn't see me crying as i drove away to the hotel connected to the bar where i ordered the cheapest whisky they had just because it shares your first name because they don't make a whisky called baby and i only thought what i got was what i ordered i toasted the hangover inevitable as sun that used to rise in your name i toasted the carnivals we never went to and the things you never won for me the ferris wheels we never kissed on and all the dreams between us that sat there like balloons on a carney's board waiting to explode with passion but slowly deflated hung slave under the pin- prick of a tack hung heads down like lovers when it doesn't work, like me at last call after too many cheap too many sweet too much whisky makes me sick, like the smell of cheap, like the smell of the dead like the cheap, dead flowers you never sent that i never threw out of the window of a car i never really owned

[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.

Besides intercourse (when the Image-repertoire goes to the devil), there is that other embrace, which is a motionless cradling: we are enchanted, bewitched: we are in the realm of sleep, without sleeping; we are within the voluptous infantilism of sleepiness: this is the moment for telling stories, the moment of the voice which takes me, siderates me, this is the return to the mother ("in the loving calm of your arms," says a poem set to music by Duparc). In this companionable incest, everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled. Yet, within this infantile embrace, the genital unfailingly appears; it cuts off the diffuse sensuality of the incestuous embrace; the logic of desire begins to function, the will-to-possess returns, the adult is superimposed upon the child. I am then two subjects at once: I want maternity and genitality. (The lover might be defined as a child getting an erection: such was the young Eros.)

It's 5:22pm you're in the grocery checkout line. Your three-year-old is writhing on the floor, screaming, because you have refused to buy her a Teletubby pinwheel. Your six-year-old is whining, repeatedly, in a voice that could saw through cement, "But mommy, puleeze, puleeze" because you have not bought him the latest "Lunchables," which features, as the four food groups, Cheetos, a Snickers, Cheez Whiz, and Twizzlers. Your teenager, who has not spoken a single word in the past foor days, except, "You've ruined my life," followed by "Everyone else has one," is out in the car, sulking, with the new rap-metal band Piss on the Parentals blasting through the headphones of a Discman. To distract yourself, and to avoid the glares of other shoppers who have already deemed you the worst mother in America, you leaf through People magazine. Inside, Uma thurman gushes "Motherhood is Sexy." Moving on to Good Housekeeping, Vanna White says of her child, "When I hear his cry at six-thirty in the morning, I have a smile on my face, and I'm not an early riser." Another unexpected source of earth-mother wisdom, the newly maternal Pamela Lee, also confides to People, "I just love getting up with him in the middle of the night to feed him or soothe him." Brought back to reality by stereophonic whining, you indeed feel as sexy as Rush Limbaugh in a thong.

Typically, the daughter of a narcissistic mother will choose a spouse who cannot meet her emotional needs. Even though our intuition will tell us in some way when something is not right for us, we tend to block it out if it isn’t saying what we want to hear. When the hope for love blossoms, we override the intuitive inner voice or gut feeling. Years of treating and interviewing daughters with maternal deprivation have shown me that we have a deep sense of intelligent intuition, but it seems to be accompanied by a special brand of “deafness.” In the desperate search for love that did not exist in her childhood, the daughter chooses not to pay attention to the red flags that may be waving. We do know. We just don’t listen. In

Jezebel’s wearing a pair of electric blue maternity pants and a black bedazzled maternity shirt that says ‘Bitch’ across her large breasts.

Women are so careful with each other’s feelings. We know the world shoots poison daggers into our egos—and we shoot them into ourselves—and so we rush to each other’s sides for triage: Yes, you were fine last night; yes, you are perfect exactly as you are. (Classic Onion headline: Female Friends Spend Raucous Night Validating the Living Shit Out of Each Other.) We become such reliable yes-women that any negative feedback is viewed as a betrayal, and the only place we feel comfortable being honest is behind each other’s back. Did you hear what she said last night? Did you see what she wore? These are the paths of least resistance—the unswerving praise, the gossip dressed up as maternal concern—and it can be very tricky to break rank and say, out loud, to each other: No, you weren’t fine at all.

A romantic painting shows a heap of icy debris in a polar light; no man, no object inhabits this desolate space; but for this very reason, provided I am suffering an amorous sadness, this void requires that I fling myself into it; I project myself as a tiny figure, seated on a block of ice, abandoned forever. "I'm cold," the lover says, "Iet's go back"; but there is no road, no way, the boat is wrecked. There is a coldness particular to the lover, the chilliness of the child (or of any young animal) that needs maternal warmth.

Aristotle didn't have a problem with abortion," she says. "Oh, well, good, that's a comfort," I say.

My maternal grandmother was not a philosopher, and she used to say that “words have no bones, but they can break bones.” She knew what we all know: a word can cause more pain, more damage than the sharpest knife. As far as she was concerned, saying something and doing something were exactly the same.

What is this history of Fantine? It is society purchasing a slave. From whom? From misery. From hunger, cold, isolation, destitution. A dolorous bargain. A soul for a morsel of bread. Misery offers; society accepts. The sacred law of Jesus Christ governs our civilization, but it does not, as yet, permeate it; it is said that slavery has disappeared from European civilization. This is a mistake. It still exists; but it weighs only upon the woman, and it is called prostitution. It weighs upon the woman, that is to say, upon grace, weakness, beauty, maternity. This is not one of the least of man's disgraces.

I mean to say, I know perfectly well that I've got, roughly speaking, half the amount of brain a normal bloke ought to possess. And when a girl comes along who has about twice the regular allowance, she too often makes a bee line for me with the love light in her eyes. I don't know how to account for it, but it is so." "It may be Nature's provision for maintaining the balance of the species, sir."... "At breakfast this morning, when I was eating a sausage, she told me I shouldn't, as modern medical science held that a four-inch sausage contained as many germs as a dead rat. The maternal touch, you understand; fussing over my health.... What's to be done, Jeeves?" "We must think, sir." "You think. I haven't the machinery." "I will most certainly devote my very best attention to the matter, sir, and will endeavour to give satisfaction." Well, that was something. But I was ill at east. Yes, there is no getting away from it, Bertram was ill at ease.

Looking down at her fingernails, she also asked me had I not in my family a certain strange strain. I countered by inquiring whether she would still want to marry me if my father’s maternal grandfather had been, say, a Turk.

Today, what's normal is being redefined: from vaginal birth to surgical birth; from 'My water broke,' to 'Let's break your water;' from 'It's time' to 'It's time for the induction.' As medical anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd writes, 'in the early twenty-first century, we do not know what normal birth is.' Most practicing obstetricians have never witnessed an unplugged birth that wasn't an accident. Women are even beginning to deny normal birth to themselves: if 'normal' means being induced, immobilized by wires and tubes, sped up with drugs, all the while knowing that there's a good chance of surgery, well, might as well just cut to the chase, so to speak. 'Just give me a cesarean,' some are saying. And who can blame them? They want to avoid what they think of as normal birth.

When ACOG (American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists) claims that home birth and midwives are unsafe, they imply that the women who choose it and the midwives that provide it are acting irresponsibly and selfishly. They stigmatize normal birth just as the political right has stigmatized abortion. And they stigmatize women. "Our country has created a mythology of women who are irresponsible and don't care," says Paltrow. "We talk about welfare queens, crack moms, and murderous women who have abortions." A culture that allows such language to permeate our national subconscious inevitably dehumanizes all women, including mothers. Lyon argues that this thinking perpetuates a phrase often invoked in exam rooms and delivery rooms: The goal is to have a healthy baby. "This phrase is used over and over and over to shut down women's requests," she says. "The context needs to be that the goal is a healthy mom. Because mothers never make decisions without thinking about that healthy baby. And to suggest otherwise is insulting and degrading and disrespectful." What's best for women is best for babies. ... The goal is to have a healthy family.

God, I miss weed. The maternity books never prepare you for how badly you’re going to miss weed.” “Sounds like there’s a hole in the market,” I say. “I’ll keep an eye out.” “The Pothead’s Guide to Pregnancy,” Libby says. “Marijuana Mommy,” I reply. “And its companion, Doobie Daddies.

I will feel the pang of separation when she is two, when she is twelve, when she is twenty. My daughter will tackle other more important milestones, other more difficult accomplishments that she must achieve on her own. And I, who once shared a blood supply with her, who once had her all to myself, must wait and watch and smile, and continue this exploration of motherhood, this bittersweet experience of maternal love, this continual process of bravely saying goodbye.

But my quarrel with the concept of maternal instinct isn’t why I never had kids myself. I was never particularly opposed to the idea of having kids—let no one say that I don’t love kids! It always seemed like an interesting future possibility, the same way that joining the Peace Corps someday seemed like an interesting future possibility.

When a man loves a woman, the child in him comes out. And when a woman loves a man, her maternal instinct comes out.

Oh, dear," thought Meg, "married life is very trying, and does need infinite patience as well as love, as Mother says." The word 'Mother' suggested other maternal counsels given long ago, and received with unbelieving protests.

The feminist story, she reminded me, is a counternarrative, a narrative of disobedience, a chronicle of battle, nto of surrender. Women who do not fit the mold are too often maneuvered, manipulated, and mangled into some culturally safe archetype. The makers of history transformed perpetua intoa cold, unfeeling mother - a villan of sorts. But who is to say that becoming a mother didn't also push Perpetua to become a martyr, didn't cause her to passionatley uphold her religious ideals because she wanted to offer her son the greatest gift she could - an ideal? Maybe, in the end, Perpetua's maternal instincts were precisely what gave her the strength to confront the burliest Roman gladiator and the to lie down with dignity?

You can begin a story in the middle and create confusion by striking out boldly, backward and forward. You can be modern, put aside all mention of time and distance and, when the whole thing is done, proclaim, or let someone else proclaim, that you have finally, at the last moment, solved the space-time problem. Or you can declare at the very start that it is impossible to write a novel nowadays, but then, behind your own back so to speak, give birth to a whopper, a novel to end all novels. I have also been told that it makes a good impression, an impression of modesty so to speak, if you begin by saying that a novel can't have a hero anymore because there are no more individualists, because individuality is a thing of the past, because man- each men and all men together- is alone in his loneliness and no one is entitled to individual loneliness, and all men lumped together make up a "lonely mass" without names and without heroes. (...) I shall begin far away from me, for no one ought to tell the story of his life who hasn't the patience to say a word or two at least half of his grandparents before plunging into his own existence. And so to you personally, dear reader, who are no doubt leading a muddled life outside this institution, to you my friends and weekly visitors, I introduce Oskar's maternal grandmother

Did you know that when the baby starts moving that it’s called the quickening?” Hope says. I snicker. “So she’s going to burst out of my stomach with a sword declaring there can be only one?” “Possibly. Women have died in childbirth, right? The baby is essentially a parasite. It lives off your nutrients, saps your energy.” She taps the bottom of a hanger against her lip. “So yeah, I think the Highlander motto could fit.” Carin and I look at her in horror. “Hopeless, you can shut up any time now,” Carin orders. “I was just saying, from a medical standpoint, it’s a possible theory. Not here, but maybe in other less developed nations.” She reaches over and pats my belly. “Don’t worry. You’re safe. You should’ve gotten more maternity clothes,” she says, moving on to another topic while I’m still digesting that my baby is a parasite.

In recent years, only their hatred had true intimacy, meaning that when they fought, they were able to say the most specifically cruel things they’d mined from years of experience with each other. He trod hard on her extraordinary maternal inconsistency; she went for his masculinity like it was an artery. But when they weren’t fighting, the intimacy was gone. Their conversations were so cold and distant that if you’d overheard them in a restaurant on one of their forced date nights, you would have wondered if they’d known each other for more than a few weeks.

Kristin comes down the stairs, and the pressure on my chest snaps. I take a moment to turn away, inhaling deeply, blinking away tears. She sets the plate on a table behind the couch, and half tiptoes back up the stairs. Thank god. I don’t think I could have handled maternal attention right this second. My body feels like it’s on a hair trigger. I need to get it together. This is why people avoid me. Someone asks if I want a drink and I have a panic attack. “You’re okay.” Declan is beside me, and his voice is low and soft, the way it was in the foyer. He’s so hard all the time, and that softness takes me by surprise. I blink up at him. “You’re okay,” he says again. I like that, how he’s so sure. Not Are you okay? No question about it. You’re okay. He lifts one shoulder in a half shrug. “But if you’re going to lose it, this is a pretty safe place to fall apart.” He takes two cookies from the plate, then holds one out to me. “Here. Eat your feelings.” I’m about to turn him down, but then I look at the cookie. I was expecting something basic, like sugar or chocolate chip. This looks like a miniature pie, and sugar glistens across the top. “What . . . is that?” “Pecan pie cookies,” says Rev. He’s taken about five of them, and I think he might have shoved two in his mouth at once. “I could live on them for days.” I take the one Declan offered and nibble a bit from the side. It is awesome. I peer up at him sideways. “How did you know?” He hesitates, but he doesn’t ask me what I mean. “I know the signs.” “I’m going to get some sodas,” Rev says slowly, deliberately. “I’m going to bring you one. Blink once if that’s okay.” I smile, but it feels watery around the edges. He’s teasing me, but it’s gentle teasing. Friendly. I blink once. This is okay. I’m okay. Declan was right. “Take it out on the punching bag,” calls Rev. “That’s what I do.” My eyes go wide. “Really?” “Do whatever you want,” says Declan. “As soon as we do anything meaningful, the baby will wake up.” Rev returns with three sodas. “We’re doing something meaningful right now.” “We are?” I say. He meets my eyes. “Every moment is meaningful.” The words could be cheesy—should be cheesy, in fact—but he says them with enough weight that I know he means them. I think of The Dark and all our talk of paths and loss and guilt. Declan sighs and pops the cap on his soda. “This is where Rev starts to freak people out.” “No,” I say, feeling like this afternoon could not be more surreal. Something about Rev’s statement steals some of my earlier guilt, to think that being here could carry as much weight as paying respects to my mother. I wish I knew how to tell whether this is a path I’m supposed to be on. “No, I like it. Can I really punch the bag?” Rev shrugs and takes a sip of his soda. “It’s either that or we can break out the Play-Doh

But does it mean that everything-everything-that is in us can go on to the Mountains? Nothing, not even the best and noblest, can go on as it now is. Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. Flesh and blood cannot come to the Mountains. Not because they are too rank, but because they are too weak. What is a Lizard coma red with a stallion? Lust is poor, weak, whimpering, whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when list has been killed….Excess of love, did ye say? There was no excess, there was defect. She loved her son too little, not too much. If she had loved him more there'd be no difficulty. I do not know how her affair will end. But it may well be that at this moment she's demanding to have him down with her in Hell. That kind is sometimes perfectly ready to plunge the soul they say they love in endless misery if only they can still in some fashion possess it. No, no. Ye must draw another lesson. Ye must ask, if the risen body even of appetite is as a grand a horse as ye saw, what would the risen body of maternal love or friendship be?

Happy for all her maternal feelings was the day on which Mrs. Bennet got rid of her two most deserving daughters. With what delighted pride she afterwards visited Mrs. Bingley, and talked of Mrs. Darcy, may be guessed. I wish I could say, for the sake of her family, that the accomplishment of her earnest desire in the establishment of so many of her children produced so happy an effect as to make her a sensible, amiable, well-informed woman for the rest of her life; though perhaps it was lucky for her husband, who might not have relished domestic felicity in so unusual a form, that she still was occasionally nervous and invariably silly.

Libby snorts. “You wish you knew how to roll a joint. God, I miss weed. The maternity books never prepare you for how badly you’re going to miss weed.” “Sounds like there’s a hole in the market,” I say. “I’ll keep an eye out.” “The Pothead’s Guide to Pregnancy,” Libby says. “Marijuana Mommy,” I reply. “And its companion, Doobie Daddies.

The French magazine Parents says that if a baby is scared of strangers, his mother should warn him that a visitor will be coming over soon. Then, when the doorbell rings, ‘Tell him that the guest is here. Take a few seconds before opening the door . . . if he doesn’t cry when he sees the stranger, don’t forget to congratulate him.’ I hear of several cases where, upon bringing a baby home from the maternity hospital, the parents give the baby a tour of the house.9 French parents often tell babies what they’re doing to them: I’m picking you up, I’m changing your nappy, I’m going to give you a bath. This isn’t just to make soothing sounds; it’s to convey information. And since the baby is a person like any other, parents are often quite polite about all this. (Plus it’s apparently never too early to start instilling good manners.)

As the weekend goes on, more information about Marian Wallace emerges. She attended Harvard on scholarship. She was a Massachusetts State Champion swimmer, and an avid creative writer. She was from Roxbury. Her mother is dead—cancer when Marian was thirteen. The maternal grandmother died a year later of the same cause. Her father is a drug addict. She spent her high school years in and out of foster care. One of her foster mothers remembers young Marian always with her head in a book. No one knows who the father of her baby is. No one even remembers her having a boyfriend. She was put on academic leave from college because she failed all her classes the previous semester—the demands of motherhood and a rigorous academic schedule having become too much to bear. She was pretty and smart, which makes her death a tragedy. She was poor and black, which means people say they saw it coming.

Truth to tell, I have a very high opinion of fantasy. To me, it is actually the maternal creative side of the masculine spirit. When all is said and done, we are never proof against fantasy. It is true that there are worthless, inadequate, morbid and unsatisfying fantasies whose sterile nature will be quickly recognized by every person endowed with common-sense; but this of course proves nothing against the value of creative imagination. All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination? In the ordinary, course of things, fantasy does not easily go astray; it is too deep for that, and too closely bound up with the tap-root of human and animal instinct. In surprising ways it always rights itself again. The creative activity of the imagination frees man from his bondage to "nothing but" and liberates in him the spirit of play. As Schiller says, man is completely human only when he is playing.

Your short understanding, your clipped mind, your hollow heart, will make more of mankind than it has the power to become. Make of a man what you will, yet he cannot be more than this I say to you, with the leave of all pure women: a human is conceived in sin, nourished with impure, unspeakable feculence in the maternal body, born naked and smeared like a beehive; a mass of refuse, a churn of filth, a dish for worms, a stinkhouse, a repulsive washtub, a rancid carcass, a mildewed crate, a bottomless sack, a perforated pocket, a bellows, a rapacious maw, a reeking flagon of urine, a malodorous pail, a deceptive marionette-show, a loamy robber’s den, an insatiably slaking trough, a painted delusion. Let recognise who will: every human created to completion has nine holes in his body; out of all these there flows such repellent filth that nothing could be more impure. You would never see human beauty, if you had the eyes of a lynx, and your gaze could penetrate to the innards; you would shudder at the sight. Strip the dressmaker’s colouring from the loveliest of ladies, and you will see a shameful puppet, a hastily withering flower, a sparkle of little durance and a soon decomposing clod of earth! Show me a handful of beauty of all the belles who lived a hundred years ago, excluding those painted on the wall, and you shall have the Kaiser’s crown! Let love flow away, let grief flow away! Let the Rhine run its course like other waters, you wise lad from Assville!

One day in the 1980s, my maternal grandfather was sitting in a park in suburban London. An elderly British man came up to him and wagged a finger in his face. “Why are you here?” the man demanded. “Why are you in my country?” “Because we are the creditors,” responded my grandfather, who was born in India, worked all his life in colonial Kenya, and was now retired in London. “You took all our wealth, our diamonds. Now we have come to collect.” We are here, my grandfather was saying, because you were there.

One can fully own a manufactured thing—a toaster, say, or a pair of shoes. But in what reasonable sense can one fully "own" and have "rights" to do whatever we want to land, water, air, and forests, which are among the most valuable assets in humanity's basic endowments? To say, in the march of eons, that we own these things into which we suddenly, fleetingly appear and from which we will soon vanish is like a newborn laying claim to the maternity ward, or a candle asserting ownership of the cake; we might as well declare that, having been handed a ticket to ride, we've bought the train. Let's be serious.

A profound depression came upon her. These were the moments in a mother's life about which nobody ever warned you, about which everybody kept a deceitful silence, the fine books and the speakers who had so much to say about the sacredness of maternity. They never told you that there were moments of arid clear sight when you saw helplessly that your children would never measure up to your standard, never would be really close to you, because they were not your kind of human beings, because they were not your children, but merely other human beings for whom you were responsible. How solitary it made you feel!

A single day is not enough, to honor all that’s you; You gave me a lifetime, a gift to which none can compare. A million stars, with all their might, could never shine so true; As your pure heart, and lovely smile, when speaking words of care. Nurturing hands, you brought up life, maternal sacrifice, When days of darkness set, you help to see the dawn gleam. You’re the strength I lean on, when my own does not suffice, Wisdom laden grace, you’ve shown the light for much to be seen. So I’ll take this day, to speak loud from heart, of all that’s true; I love you, mom. Is all I’ll say, for nothing more will ever do.

Hypothetically, then, you may be picking up in someone a certain very strange type of sadness that appears as a kind of disassociation from itself, maybe, Love-o.’ ‘I don’t know disassociation.’ ‘Well, love, but you know the idiom “not yourself” — “He’s not himself today,” for example,’ crooking and uncrooking fingers to form quotes on either side of what she says, which Mario adores. ‘There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them.’ ‘Engulf means obliterate.’ ‘I am saying that such persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as persons. As existing at all. This interpretation is “existential,” Mario, which means vague and slightly flaky. But I think it may hold true in certain cases. My own father told stories of his own father, whose potato farm had been in St. Pamphile and very much larger than my father’s. My grandfather had had a marvelous harvest one season, and he wanted to invest money. This was in the early 1920s, when there was a great deal of money to be made on upstart companies and new American products. He apparently narrowed the field to two choices — Delaware-brand Punch, or an obscure sweet fizzy coffee substitute that sold out of pharmacy soda fountains and was rumored to contain smidgeons of cocaine, which was the subject of much controversy in those days. My father’s father chose Delaware Punch, which apparently tasted like rancid cranberry juice, and the manufacturer of which folded. And then his next two potato harvests were decimated by blight, resulting in the forced sale of his farm. Coca-Cola is now Coca-Cola. My father said his father showed very little emotion or anger or sadness about this, though. That he somehow couldn’t. My father said his father was frozen, and could feel emotion only when he was drunk. He would apparently get drunk four times a year, weep about his life, throw my father through the living room window, and disappear for several days, roaming the countryside of L’Islet Province, drunk and enraged.’ She’s not been looking at Mario this whole time, though Mario’s been looking at her. She smiled. ‘My father, of course, could himself tell this story only when he was drunk. He never threw anyone through any windows. He simply sat in his chair, drinking ale and reading the newspaper, for hours, until he fell out of the chair. And then one day he fell out of the chair and didn’t get up again, and that was how your maternal grandfather passed away. I’d never have gotten to go to University had he not died when I was a girl. He believed education was a waste for girls. It was a function of his era; it wasn’t his fault. His inheritance to Charles and me paid for university.’ She’s been smiling pleasantly this whole time, emptying the butt from the ashtray into the wastebasket, wiping the bowl’s inside with a Kleenex, straightening straight piles of folders on her desk.

We found out that Chris would be deploying very soon after Bubba was due. I was so thrilled about being a mother that doing it on my own for six months or so didn’t scare me. The fact that Chris wouldn’t be there to share his early days weighed on my heart, but otherwise I was confident and ready. Right? You may suspect where this is going. I planned to stay out on maternity leave as long as possible, then get some help once I had to go back to work. I remained on the job until a couple of weeks before my due date. I was as big as a house and twice as hungry. Bubba-Chris’s nickname for our son-would move around every so often. Like most moms-to-be, I wanted to share the sensation with my husband. And like many fathers-to-be, Chris was just a little nervous about that. “He’s moving,” I’d tell Chris. “Want to feel?” “No, no, I’m good.” Here’s a guy who is totally calm under fire, who can deal with all sorts of difficult physical situations, to say nothing of severe wounds-but put a pregnant belly in front of him and he turns to timid mush. Men. “I don’t know what that thing is,” he said, trying to explain his squeamishness. “When the baby’s born, that’s my baby.” There’s a reason women are the ones who have the babies. Though I will admit that seeing my stomach move and poke out on its own did remind me of the movie Alien.

In a world where women do not say no, the man is never forced to settle down and make serious choices. His sex drive--the most powerful compulsion in his life--is never used to make him part of civilization as the supporter of a family. If a woman does not force him to make a long-term commitment--to marry--in general, he doesn't. It is maternity that requires commitment. His sex drive only demands conquest, driving him from body to body in an unsettling hunt for variety and excitement in which much of the thrill is in the chase itself. The man still needs to be tamed. His problem is that many young women think they have better things to do than socialize single men.

Wenner began a campaign to get his parents back together. Sim told her son she wanted him to call only every other week to reduce her phone bills. “Your demand that Dad and I be something to each other that we’re not, is basically a child’s demand,” she wrote to him in 1959, when Wenner was thirteen. “One stamps one’s foot and says, ‘Change the world and I will be all right!’ and it’s a nice comforting thought to have, but the world can’t be changed, families can’t be changed, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers…There is only one thing that can be changed, or rather, only one thing that you can change, and that is yourself.” (“Maternally yours,” she signed the letter.)

Consuelo's appearance set her apart from the others, and the nuns, sure that this was not accidental but a sign of benevolent divine will, spared no effort in cultivating her faith, in the hope she would decide to take her vows and serve the Church; al their efforts, however, came to naught before the girl's instinctive rejection. She made the attempt in good faith, but never succeeded in accepting the tyrannical god the nuns preached to her about; she preferred a more joyful, maternal, and compassionated god. "That is the Most Holy Virgin Mary," the nuns explained to her. "She is God?" "No, she is the Mother of God." "Yes, but who has the say in heaven, God or his Mama?

You said somewhere that you would like to write in one of the Nordic languages because they have more vowels, and vowels are more serious.’ You: ‘Did I say that? But Latin languages have more vowels than Nordic ones! I think what I meant was that I would like to write in one of those ancient northern tongues which were almost entirely made up on vowels. I’ve always felt it had something to do with the climate. They were hot languages, insulated by all those heaped up vowels.’ Me: ‘Ancient Hebrew only had consonants. Presumably so that there was no risk of them accidentally writing the secret name of God.’ You: ‘Or perhaps that was to do with the climate too. Consonants were more open and airy, more suited to a language of the desert.’ ‘You also said that you hated sans serif typefaces.’ ‘Oh, yes, they’re terrible! All those naked letters, reduced to their stark scaffolding. No-one can possibly recognise their mother tongue when printed in a Futura typeface. It lacks maternal warmth, it lacks friendliness.’ ‘I fear Cuervo may be right: we are somewhat unscientific.’ ‘And prejudiced too. Vowels can be dispensed with. A text written solely using vowels would be illegible, but in a text using only consonants, one could guess the vowels. A text in which X replaced all the Os, as in that story by Poe, might prove difficult to read, but would, ultimately, be decipherable.

Lara Jean, can I ask you a question?” “You can ask me anything,” I say. “It’s about boys.” I try not to look too eager as I nod. Boys! So we’re here already. All right. “I’m listening.” “And you promise you’ll answer honestly? Sister swear?” “Of course. Come sit by me, Kitty.” She sits down next to me on the floor and I put my arm around her, feeling generous and warm and maternal. Kitty really is growing up. She looks up at me, doe-eyed. “Are you and Peter doing it?” “What?” I shove her away. “Kitty!” Gleefully she says, “You promised you’d answer!” “Well, the answer is no, you sneaky little fink. God! Get out of my room.” Kitty skips off, laughing like a mad hyena. I can hear her all the way down the hallway.

Everyone has been overjoyed with the birth of their first son, bringing celebratory sweets, new clothes for the baby, fennel tea to bolster her milk supply. They have showered on her all the traditional gifts, as if this is her first baby, their first child. What about the other times I’ve carried a baby in my womb, given birth, held my child in my arms? But no one acknowledges this, not even Jasu. Only Kavita has an aching cavity in her heart for what she’s lost. She sees the pride in Jasu’s eyes as he holds his son and forces herself to smile while saying a silent prayer for this child. She hopes she can give him the life he deserves. She prays she will be a good mother to her son, prays she has enough maternal love left in her heart for him, prays it didn’t die along with her daughters.

MANO: There's no question in my mind that we've always felt, in the heart of our Western, Christian culture, that Jesus was very much female. That is why the representations of Jesus with long hair have always been predominant in art. The Virgin Mary was later presented as a harmless sort of woman to whom we can address our need for a maternal outlet in prayer, as a safer way of dealing with the fact that Jesus was as much a woman as a man, particularly when he died. DOOR: You said that if men don't overcome their wanting of women, society will crack. MANO: We are coming to a point where the genders are clumsily engaging in civil war with each other. There's a lot of unpleasantness in the land. Men feel terribly threatened. Women have been crucified for many years, so they understand it and have their axes to grind as well. The truth of the matter is, Jesus on the cross is the female being exploited in every which way. I mentioned intercourse being, at its best, an act of penetration, but there are many other ways in which women have been sacrificed, whether from childbirth or being sold as wives or whatever, through history. So when the male S&M devotee binds a woman to a cross, he has to realize, if he's a Christian-- DOOR: Uh, just how many Christian S&M devotees are there? MANO: Even if he's not a Christian, he ought to realize that he is essentially binding Jesus again, because Jesus contains in him the female--very, very strongly--but almost mystically hidden, I think, because the truth is too painful to deal with. I don't know. I've never heard anyone else say what I'm saying now.

O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you, I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul,) I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and that they are my poems, Man’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s, father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems, Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears, Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or sleeping of the lids, Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges, Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition, Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue, Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the ample side-round of the chest, Upper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones, Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, finger-joints, finger-nails, Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side, Ribs, belly, backbone, joints of the backbone, Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root, Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above, Leg fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg, Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel; All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body, male or female, The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean, The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame, Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity, Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman, The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings, The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud, Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming, Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening, The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes, The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair, The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body, The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out, The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees, The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones, The exquisite realization of health; O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul, O I say now these are the soul!

about society buying itself a slave. Who from? From destitution. From hunger, from cold, from loneliness, from abandonment, from dire poverty. A painful bargain. A soul for a bit of bread. Destitution makes an offer, society gives the nod. The sacred law of Jesus Christ governs our civilization, but it has not yet managed to permeate it. They say slavery has vanished from European civilization. That is wrong. It still exists, but it now preys only on women, and it goes by the name of prostitution. It preys on women, meaning on grace, on weakness, on beauty, on the maternal. It is not the least of man’s shameful secrets. At the point we have reached in this doleful drama, there is nothing left of the Fantine of the past. In becoming trash she turned to marble. Whoever touches her feels cold. She wafts into view, she goes along with you yet knows nothing about you; she is the face of dishonor and severity. Life and the social order have had their final say. All that can happen has happened to her. She has felt everything, accepted everything, experienced everything, suffered everything, lost everything, cried over everything. She is resigned with a resignation that resembles indifference just as death resembles sleep. Nothing is too awful for her now. She fears nothing. Let the sky fall on her head, let the whole ocean crash over her! What does she care? She is a sponge already completely soaked. That, at least, is what she believes, but it is a mistake to imagine that you can exhaust fate or that you ever hit rock bottom—in anything. Alas! What are all these lives driven willy-nilly? Where are they going? Why are they like this? He who knows the answer to that, sees the darkness as a whole. He is alone. His name is God.

in Dumfries his moral career was downwards. Heron, who had some acquaintance with the matter, says, “His dissipation became still more deeply habitual; he was here more exposed than in the country to be solicited to share the revels of the dissolute and the idle; foolish young men flocked eagerly about him, and from time to time pressed him to drink with them, that they might enjoy his wit. The Caledonia Club, too, and the Dumfries-shire and Galloway Hunt, had occasional meetings in Dumfries after Burns went to reside there: and the poet was of course invited to share their conviviality, and hesitated not to accept the invitation. In the intervals between his different fits of intemperance, he suffered the keenest anguish of remorse, and horribly afflictive foresight. His Jane behaved with a degree of conjugal and maternal tenderness and prudence, which made him feel more bitterly the evil of his misconduct, although they could not reclaim him.” This is a dark picture—perhaps too dark.

Thus, besides the will, which is entirely dependent on its content, man has a further auxiliary in the unconscious, that maternal womb of creative fantasy, which is able at any time to fashion symbols in the natural process of elementary psychic activity, symbols that can serve to determine the mediating will. I say “can” advisedly, because the symbol does not of its own accord step into the breach, but remains in the unconscious just so long as the energic value of the conscious contents exceeds that of the unconscious symbol. Under normal conditions this is always the case; but under abnormal conditions a reversal of value sets in, whereby the unconscious acquires a higher value than the conscious. The symbol then rises to the surface without, however, being taken up by the will and the executive conscious functions, since these, on account of the reversal of value, have now become subliminal. The unconscious, on the other hand, has become supraliminal, and an abnormal state, a psychic disturbance, has supervened.

But I love [America] the way you love a wife of many years: not because you have a sentimental notion of her perfection, but because you know her thoroughly, from the courage of the maternity room to the pettiness of her morning moods; from seeing her sit for weeks by her dying mother's bedside, to watching her worry about which shoes to wear to a cocktail party given by a person she does not like. You know she has the capacity to get up at five in the morning and make you pancakes before you set off on a particularly arduous business trip, and you know she also has the capacity to say things, in the heat of an argument, that she should not say, to sneak the last piece of chocolate cake, to lose track of time and keep the rest of the family waiting for an hour, at the beach, on a burning hot afternoon. You know everything from what flavor lip gloss she likes to what books she would bring with her to the proverbial desert island and what she believes the meaning of life to be. And then, always, there is a part of her you do not know.

A good upbringing is necessary for a long life, but sometimes the patience of the young trees is sorely tested. As I mentioned in chapter 5, "Tree Lottery," acorns and beechnuts fall at the feet of large "mother trees." Dr. Suzanne Simard, who helped discover maternal instincts in trees, describes mother trees as dominant trees widely linked to other trees in the forest through their fungal-root connections. These trees pass their legacy on to the next generation and exert their influence in the upbringing of the youngsters. "My" small beech trees, which have by now been waiting for at least eighty years, are standing under mother trees that are about two hundred years old -- the equivalent of forty-year-olds in human terms. The stunted trees can probably expect another two hundred years of twiddling their thumbs before it is finally their turn. The wait time is, however, made bearable. Their mothers are in contact with them through their root systems, and they pass along sugar and other nutrients. You might even say they are nursing their babies.

What are you going to say to the Maternal Organism?” Dinah asked, as Ivy rummaged in the back of a storage bin for her bottle of tequila. Ivy stiffened for a moment, then pulled out the bottle and swung it toward Dinah’s head like a club. Dinah didn’t flinch, just watched it glide to a halt above her head. “What?” “I can’t believe that the Morg has so taken over my wedding that the first thing that comes into your mind is how she’s going to react.” Dinah looked mildly sick. “Don’t worry about it,” Ivy said, “you forgot.” To put on your makeup. “Sorry, baby. I was just thinking . . . you and Cal are still going to get married, and have a great life, no matter what.” “But the Morg is going to take the hit,” Ivy said, nodding, as she poured tequila into a pair of small plastic cups. “Having to reschedule everything.” “Sounds like she’s kind of in her element doing that, though,” Dinah said. “Not to minimize it or anything.” “Totally.” “To the Morg.” “The Morg.” Dinah and Ivy tapped their plastic cups together and sipped at the tequila. One of the fringe benefits that came of being in the torus was that you could drink normally instead of sucking everything through tubes. The lower gravity took some getting used to, but they were old hands at it by now. “What’s

Obviously the most enduring way to make this commitment is through marriage. Yet because sexual liberals deny the differences between the sexes, their explanations of why there are marriages and why marriage is needed and desired ignore the central truth of marriage: that it is built on sex roles. Pressed to explain the institution, they respond vaguely that human beings want "structure" or desire "intimacy." But however desirable in marriage, these values are not essential causes or explanations of it. In many cultures, the wife and husband share very few one-to-one intimacies. Ties with others of the same sex--or even the opposite sex--often offer deeper companionship. The most intimate connections are between mothers and their children. In all societies, male groups provide men with some of their most emotionally gratifying associations. Indeed, intimacy can deter or undermine wedlock. In the kibbutz, for example, where unrelated boys and girls are brought up together and achieve a profound degree of companionate feeling, they never marry members of the same child-rearing group. In the many cultures where marriages are arranged, the desire for intimacy is subversive of marriage. Similarly, man's "innate need for structure" can be satisfied in hundreds of forms of organization. The need for structure may explain all of them or none of them, but it does not tell us why, of all possible arrangements, marriage is the one most prevalent. It does not tell us why, in most societies, marriage alone is consecrated in a religious ceremony and entails a permanent commitment. As most anthropologists see it, however, the reason is simple. The very essence of marriage, Bronislaw Malinowski wrote, is not structure and intimacy; it is "parenthood and above all maternity." The male role in marriage, as Margaret Mead maintained, "in every known human society, is to provide for women and children." In order to marry, in fact, Malinowski says that almost every human society first requires the man "to prove his capacity to maintain the woman." Marriage is not simply a ratification of an existing love. It is the conversion of that love into a biological and social continuity. . . . Regardless of what reasons particular couples may give for getting married, the deeper evolutionary and sexual propensities explain the persistence of the institution. All sorts of superficial variations--from homosexual marriage to companionate partnership--may be played on the primal themes of human life. But the themes remain. The natural fulfillment of love is a child; the fantasies and projects of the childless couple may well be considered as surrogate children.

For Hal, the general deal with his maternal uncle is that Tavis is terribly shy around people and tries to hide it by being very open and expansive and wordy and bluff, and that it’s very excruciating to be around. Mario’s way of looking at it is that Tavis is very open and expansive and wordy, but so clearly uses these qualities as a kind of protective shield that it betrays a frightened vulnerability almost impossible not to feel for. Either way, the unsettling thing about Charles Tavis is that he’s possibly the openest man of all time. Orin and Marlon Bain’s view was always that C.T. was less like a person than like a sort of cross-section of a person. Even the Moms Hal could remember relating anecdotes about how as a teenager, when she’d taken the child C.T. or been around him at Québecois functions or gatherings involving other kids, the child C.T. had been too self-conscious and awkward to join right in with any group of the kids clustered around, talking or plotting or whatever, and so Avril said she’d watch him just kind of drift from cluster to cluster and lurk around creepily on the fringe, listening, but that he’d always say, loudly, in some lull in the group’s conversation, something like ‘I’m afraid I’m far too self-conscious really to join in here, so I’m just going to lurk creepily at the fringe and listen, if that’s all right, just so you know,’ and so on.

After wandering the world and living on the Continent I had long tired of well-behaved, fart-free gentlemen who opened the door and paid the bills but never had a story to tell and were either completely asexual or demanded skin-burning action until the morning light. Swiss watch salesmen who only knew of “sechs” as their wake-up hour, or hairy French apes who always required their twelve rounds of screwing after the six-course meal. I suppose I liked German men the best. They were a suitable mixture of belching northerner and cultivated southerner, of orderly westerner and crazy easterner, but in the post-war years they were of course broken men. There was little you could do with them except try to put them right first. And who had the time for that? Londoners are positive and jolly, but their famous irony struck me as mechanical and wearisome in the long run. As if that irony machine had eaten away their real essence. The French machine, on the other hand, is fuelled by seriousness alone, and the Frogs can drive you beyond the limit when they get going with their philosophical noun-dropping. The Italian worships every woman like a queen until he gets her home, when she suddenly turns into a slut. The Yank is one hell of a guy who thinks big: he always wants to take you the moon. At the same time, however, he is as smug and petty as the meanest seamstress, and has a fit if someone eats his peanut butter sandwich aboard the space shuttle. I found Russians interesting. In fact they were the most Icelandic of all: drank every glass to the bottom and threw themselves into any jollity, knew countless stories and never talked seriously unless at the bottom of the bottle, when they began to wail for their mother who lived a thousand miles away but came on foot to bring them their clean laundry once a month. They were completely crazy and were better athletes in bed than my dear countrymen, but in the end I had enough of all their pommel-horse routines. Nordic men are all as tactless as Icelanders. They get drunk over dinner, laugh loudly and fart, eventually start “singing” even in public restaurants where people have paid to escape the tumult of the world. But their wallets always waited cold sober in the cloakroom while the Icelandic purse lay open for all in the middle of the table. Our men were the greater Vikings in this regard. “Reputation is king, the rest is crap!” my Bæring from Bolungarvík used to say. Every evening had to be legendary, anything else was a defeat. But the morning after they turned into weak-willed doughboys. But all the same I did succeed in loving them, those Icelandic clodhoppers, at least down as far as their knees. Below there, things did not go as well. And when the feet of Jón Pre-Jón popped out of me in the maternity ward, it was enough. The resemblances were small and exact: Jón’s feet in bonsai form. I instantly acquired a physical intolerance for the father, and forbade him to come in and see the baby. All I heard was the note of surprise in the bass voice out in the corridor when the midwife told him she had ordered him a taxi. From that day on I made it a rule: I sacked my men by calling a car. ‘The taxi is here,’ became my favourite sentence.

At first glance, professionalism tries to convince you it’s a neutral word, merely meant to signify a collection of behaviors, clothing, and norms “appropriate” for the workplace. We just ask that everyone be professional, the cis white men will say, smiles on their faces, as if they’re not asking for much. We try to maintain a professional office environment. But never has a word in the English language been so loaded with racism, sexism, heteronormativity, or trans exclusion. Whenever someone is telling you to “be professional,” they’re really saying, “be more like me.” If you’re black, “being professional” can often mean speaking differently, avoiding black cultural references, or not wearing natural hair. If you’re not American, “being professional” can mean abandoning your cultural dress for Western business clothes. If you’re not Christian, “being professional” can mean potentially removing your hijab to fit in, sitting by while your officemates ignore your need for kosher or halal food, sucking up the fact that your office puts up a giant Christmas tree every year. If you’re low-income or working class, “being professional” can mean spending money you don’t have on work clothes—“dressing nicely” for a job that may not pay enough for you to really afford to do so. If you’re a woman, “being professional” can mean navigating a veritable minefield of double standards. Show some skin, but don’t be a slut. Wear heels, but not too high, and not too low, either. Wear form-fitting clothes, but not too form-fitting. We offer maternity leave, but don’t “interrupt your career” by taking it. And if you’re trans like me, “being professional” can mean putting your identity away unless it conforms to dominant gender norms.

Mother! You know what I have got to say to Miss Hale, to-morrow?” The question came upon her suddenly, during a pause in which she, at least, had forgotten Margaret. She looked up at him. “Yes! I do. You can hardly do otherwise.” “Do otherwise! I don’t understand you.” “I mean that, after allowing her feelings so to overcome her, I consider you bound in honour—” “Bound in honour,” said he, scornfully. “I’m afraid honour has nothing to do with it. ‘Her feelings overcome her!’ What feelings do you mean?” “Nay, John, there is no need to be angry. Did she not rush down, and cling to you to save you from danger?” “She did!” said he. “But, mother,” continued he, stopping short in his walk right in front of her, “I dare not hope. I never was fainthearted before; but I cannot believe such a creature cares for me.” “Don’t be foolish, John. Such a creature! Why, she might be a duke’s daughter, to hear you speak. And what proof more would you have, I wonder, of her caring for you? I can believe she has had a struggle with her aristocratic way of viewing things; but I like her the better for seeing clearly at last. It is a good deal for me to say,” said Mrs. Thornton, smiling slowly, while the tears stood in her eyes; “for after to-night, I stand second. It was to have you to myself, all to myself, a few hours longer, that I begged you not to go till to-morrow!” “Dearest mother!” (Still love is selfish, and in an instant he reverted to his own hopes and fears in a way that drew the cold creeping shadow over Mrs. Thornton’s heart.) “But I know she does not care for me. I shall put myself at her feet—I must. If it were but one chance in a thousand—or a million—I should do it.” “Don’t fear!” said his mother, crushing down her own personal mortification at the little notice he had taken of the rare ebullition of her maternal feelings—of the pang of jealousy that betrayed the intensity of her disregarded love. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, coldly. “As far as love may go she may be worthy of you. It must have taken a good deal to overcome her pride. Don’t be afraid, John,” said she, kissing him, as she wished him good-night. And she went slowly and majestically out of the room.

My cold-weather gear left a lot to be desired: black maternity leggings under boot-cut maternity jeans, and a couple of Marlboro Man’s white T-shirts under an extra-large ASU sweatshirt. I was so happy to have something warm to wear that I didn’t even care that I was wearing the letters of my Pac-10 rival. Add Marlboro Man’s old lumberjack cap and mud boots that were four sizes too big and I was on my way to being a complete beauty queen. I seriously didn’t know how Marlboro Man would be able to keep his hands off of me. If I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the feed truck, I’d shiver violently. But really, when it came right down to it, I didn’t care. No matter what I looked like, it just didn’t feel right sending Marlboro Man into the cold, lonely world day after day. Even though I was new at marriage, I still sensed that somehow--whether because of biology or societal conditioning or religious mandate or the position of the moon--it was I who was to be the cushion between Marlboro Man and the cruel, hard world. That it was I who’d needed to dust off his shoulders every day. And though he didn’t say it, I could tell that he felt better when I was bouncing along, chubby and carrying his child, in his feed truck next to him. Occasionally I’d hop out of the pickup and open gates. Other times he’d hop out and open them. Sometimes I’d drive while he threw hay off the back of the vehicles. Sometimes I’d get stuck and he’d say shit. Sometimes we’d just sit in silence, shivering as the vehicle doors opened and closed. Other times we’d engage in serious conversation or stop and make out in the snow. All the while, our gestating baby rested in the warmth of my body, blissfully unaware of all the work that awaited him on this ranch where his dad had grown up. As I accompanied Marlboro Man on those long, frigid mornings of work, I wondered if our child would ever know the fun of sledding on a golf course hill…or any hill, for that matter. I’d lived on the ranch for five months and didn’t remember ever hearing about anyone sledding…or playing golf…or participating in any recreational activities at all. I was just beginning to wrap my mind around the way daily life unfolded here: wake up early, get your work done, eat, relax, and go to bed. Repeat daily. There wasn’t a calendar of events or dinner dates with friends in town or really much room for recreation--because that just meant double the work when you got back to work. It was hard for me not to wonder when any of these people ever went out and had a good time, or built a snowman. Or slept past 5:00 A.M.

The same lesson can be learned from one of the most widely read books in history: the Bible. What is the Bible “about”? Different people will of course answer that question differently. But we could all agree the Bible contains perhaps the most influential set of rules in human history: the Ten Commandments. They became the foundation of not only the Judeo-Christian tradition but of many societies at large. So surely most of us can recite the Ten Commandments front to back, back to front, and every way in between, right? All right then, go ahead and name the Ten Commandments. We’ll give you a minute to jog your memory . . . . . . . . . . . . Okay, here they are:        1. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.        2. You shall have no other gods before Me.        3. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.        4. Remember the Sabbath day, to make it holy.        5. Honor your father and your mother.        6. You shall not murder.        7. You shall not commit adultery.        8. You shall not steal.        9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.       10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, nor your neighbor’s wife . . . nor any thing that is your neighbor’s. How did you do? Probably not so well. But don’t worry—most people don’t. A recent survey found that only 14 percent of U.S. adults could recall all Ten Commandments; only 71 percent could name even one commandment. (The three best-remembered commandments were numbers 6, 8, and 10—murder, stealing, and coveting—while number 2, forbidding false gods, was in last place.) Maybe, you’re thinking, this says less about biblical rules than how bad our memories are. But consider this: in the same survey, 25 percent of the respondents could name the seven principal ingredients of a Big Mac, while 35 percent could name all six kids from The Brady Bunch. If we have such a hard time recalling the most famous set of rules from perhaps the most famous book in history, what do we remember from the Bible? The stories. We remember that Eve fed Adam a forbidden apple and that one of their sons, Cain, murdered the other, Abel. We remember that Moses parted the Red Sea in order to lead the Israelites out of slavery. We remember that Abraham was instructed to sacrifice his own son on a mountain—and we even remember that King Solomon settled a maternity dispute by threatening to slice a baby in half. These are the stories we tell again and again and again, even those of us who aren’t remotely “religious.” Why? Because they stick with us; they move us; they persuade us to consider the constancy and frailties of the human experience in a way that mere rules cannot.

Blessed Man” is a tribute to Updike’s tenacious maternal grandmother, Katherine Hoyer, who died in 1955. Inspired by an heirloom, a silver thimble engraved with her initials, a keepsake Katherine gave to John and Mary as a wedding present (their best present, he told his mother), the story is an explicit attempt to bring her back to life (“O Lord, bless these poor paragraphs, that would do in their vile ignorance Your work of resurrection”), and a meditation on the extent to which it’s possible to recapture experience and preserve it through writing. The death of his grandparents diminished his family by two fifths and deprived him of a treasured part of his past, the sheltered years of his youth and childhood. Could he make his grandmother live again on the page? It’s certainly one of his finest prose portraits, tender, clear-eyed, wonderfully vivid. At one point the narrator remembers how, as a high-spirited teenager, he would scoop up his tiny grandmother, “lift her like a child, crooking one arm under her knees and cupping the other behind her back. Exultant in my height, my strength, I would lift that frail brittle body weighing perhaps a hundred pounds and twirl with it in my arms while the rest of the family watched with startled smiles of alarm.” When he adds, “I was giving my past a dance,” we hear the voice of John Updike exulting in his strength. Katherine takes center stage only after an account of the dramatic day of her husband’s death. John Hoyer died a few months after John and Mary were married, on the day both the newlyweds and Mary’s parents were due to arrive in Plowville. From this unfortunate coincidence, the Updike family managed to spin a pair of short stories. Six months before he wrote “Blessed Man,” Updike’s mother had her first story accepted by The New Yorker. For years her son had been doing his filial best to help get her work published—with no success. In college he sent out the manuscript of her novel about Ponce de León to the major Boston publishers, and when he landed at The New Yorker he made sure her stories were read by editors instead of languishing in the slush pile. These efforts finally bore fruit when an editor at the magazine named Rachel MacKenzie championed “Translation,” a portentous family saga featuring Linda’s version of her father’s demise. Maxwell assured Updike that his colleagues all thought his mother “immensely gifted”; if that sounds like tactful exaggeration, Maxwell’s idea that he could detect “the same quality of mind running through” mother and son is curious to say the least. Published in The New Yorker on March 11, 1961, “Translation” was signed Linda Grace Hoyer and narrated by a character named Linda—but it wasn’t likely to be mistaken for a memoir. The story is overstuffed with biblical allusion, psychodrama, and magical thinking, most of it Linda’s. She believes that her ninety-year-old father plans to be translated directly to heaven, ascending like Elijah in a whirlwind, with chariots of fire, and to pass his mantle to a new generation, again like Elijah. It’s not clear whether this grand design is his obsession, as she claims, or hers. As it happens, the whirlwind is only a tussle with his wife that lands the old folks on the floor beside the bed. Linda finds them there and says, “Of all things. . . . What are you two doing?” Her father answers, his voice “matter-of-fact and conversational”: “We are sitting on the floor.” Having spoken these words, he dies. Linda’s son Eric (a writer, of course) arrives on the scene almost immediately. When she tells him, “Grampy died,” he replies, “I know, Mother, I know. It happened as we turned off the turnpike. I felt

A sob pops in my throat. I choke it, and look around for a harmless visual distraction, but all I see is a stocky young woman with a baby, a few seats up. The baby is pulling the woman's hair, and she is faking this look of terror. 'Oh no', she says, 'How can you do that to mommy?' She pretends to bawl, but the baby laughs and gurgles like a psycho, and pulls even harder. I'm witnessing a fresh knife being laid into a brand-new soul. A training dagger. A maternity blade. Here's his mom quietly opening up the control incision, completely innocent in her dumbness to the world. 'Oh no, you've killed Mommy, Mommy's gone!' She plays dead. The little guy giggles for a minute, but only that long. Then he senses something's wrong. She ain't waking up. He killed her, she abandoned him, just like that, over a pull of hair. He pokes her with his finger, he gets ready to bawl. And there you have it: he takes the handle into his own tiny hands and pulls in his first blade, right up to the hilt. Just to bring her back. And sure enough, with the splash of his first tear, she wakes right up. 'Ha, ha, I'm still here! Ha, ha it's Mommy!' Ha, ha, that's the Scheme of Things.

Always,’ said Evie and Max together. Points for harmony. In truth, in the six years she’d known him, Max had barely mentioned his mother other than to say she’d never been the maternal type and that she set exceptionally high standards for everything; be it a manicure or the behaviour of her husbands or her sons. ‘No engagement ring?’ queried Caroline with the lift of an elegant eyebrow. ‘Ah, no,’ said Evie. ‘Not yet. There was so much choice I, ah...couldn’t decide.’ ‘Indeed,’ said Caroline, before turning to Max. ‘I can, of course, make an appointment for you with my jeweller this afternoon. I’m sure he’ll have something more than suitable. That way Evie will have a ring on her finger when she attends the cocktail party I’m hosting for the pair of you tonight.’ ‘You didn’t have to fuss,’ said Max as he set their overnight cases just inside the door beside a wide staircase. ‘Introducing my soon-to-be daughter-in-law to family and friends is not fuss,’ said Max’s mother reprovingly. ‘It’s expected, and so is a ring. Your brother’s here, by the way.’ ‘You summoned him home as well?’ ‘He came of his own accord,’ she said dryly. ‘No one makes your brother do anything.’ ‘He’s my role model,’ whispered Max as they followed the doyenne of the house down the hall. ‘I need a cocktail dress,’ Evie whispered back. ‘Get it when I go ring hunting. What kind of stone do you want?’ ‘Diamond.’ ‘Colour?’ ‘White.’ ‘An excellent choice,’ said Caroline from up ahead and Max grinned ruefully. ‘Ears like a bat,’ he said in his normal deep baritone. ‘Whisper like a foghorn,’ his mother cut back, and surprised Evie by following up with a deliciously warm chuckle. The house was a beauty. Twenty-foot ceilings and a modern renovation that complemented the building’s Victorian bones. The wood glowed with beeswax shine and the air carried the scent of old-English roses. ‘Did you do the renovation?’ asked Evie and her dutiful fiancé nodded. ‘My first project after graduating.’ ‘Nice work,’ she said as Caroline ushered them into a large sitting room that fed seamlessly through to a wide, paved garden patio.

Tony: Listen... I need to... Um... Say... I mean... I know we only met earlier... And I know I nearly set you on fire... And we're both going out with other people. Obviously that's quite tricky. But... Well... You are the most beautiful woman I have ever laid eyes on in my entire life. I saw you and my heart leapt. You make me want to change my life. To... participate. I know it's not possible and that you have a boyfriend and we're not compatible or whatever but... I just... I know it's stupid... But maybe just hear me out for a second and the. You can tell me I'm an idiot and we'll both go back in and pretend this never happened but... I want to travel the world with you. I want to bring the ice cold Amstel to your Greek shore. And sit in silence and sip with you. I want to go to Tesco's with you of a Sunday. Watch you sleep, scrub your back, suck your toes. I want to write crap poetry about you, lay my coat over puddles for you. I want to get drunk and bore my friends about you, I want them to phone up and moan about how little they see me because I'm spending so much time with you. I want to feel the tingle of our lips meeting, the lock of our eyes joining, the fizz of our fingertips touching. I want to touch your fat tummy and tell you you look gorgeous in maternity dresses, I want to stand next to you wide-eyed and hold my nose as we open that first used nappy, I want to watch you grow old and love you more and more each day. I want to fall in love with you. I think I could. And I think it would be good. And I want you to say yes. You might feel the same. Could you? Maybe?

One result of active imagination, according to some reports, is an increase in synchronistic and paranormal phenomena. 32 This was certainly true of Jung. In 1916, Jung again felt that something within wanted to get out. An eerie restlessness seemed to permeate his home. Jung, I have to say, was lucky to have his house in Küsnacht, where he retired to a room, his “intellectual cave,” decorated in colored glass, to commune with his interior voices; he demanded and got absolute silence, and neither his children nor Emma—nor even the maid—were allowed to enter.33 As his maternal grandfather did, Jung felt the presence of the dead. His children seemed to feel it, too. One daughter saw a strange white figure; another had her blankets snatched from her at night. His son drew a picture of a fisherman he had seen in a dream: a flaming chimney rose from the fisherman’s head, and a devil flew through the air, cursing the fisherman for stealing his fish. An angel warned the devil that he couldn’t hurt the fisherman because he only caught bad fish. Jung had yet to mention Philemon the Kingfisher to his family. Then, on a Sunday afternoon, the doorbell rang loudly when it was clear no one was there. The pressure increased and Jung finally demanded “What in the world is this?” Then he heard the voices. “We have come back from Jerusalem,” they said, “where we found not what we sought,” the beginning of one of the strangest works of “automatic writing,” Jung’s Seven Sermons to the Dead, which he attributed to “Basilides in Alexandria, the City where the East toucheth the West.

I was going through The Box the other day, the one that's moved with me since college containing all of my important stuff, and I found some old letters and cards from relationships gone by. As I read them I got all misty and nostalgic, and suddenly I realized something for the first time in the month I've been married. I can no longer date. I shared this revelation with my husband, asking, "Did you know this? That you can't date anyone else? Ever? For the rest of your life?" He laughed and replied, "Well, yes, I did." He paused. "You didn't?" "Of course I did . . . theoretically," I said, " but I guess the reality didn't hit me until now. I mean, our vows didn't specifically say 'No More Dating Other People.'" He kind of glared at me this time. "It's implied." OK, fine. I don't want to date anyone else anyway. It's just hard sometimes to let go of the past, and the older I get, the more past I have to let go of. But since I've always found it helpful to bare my soul to complete strangers, I will take this opportunity to give my deceased dating life a decent burial.

Let me begin by saying that no, I am not crazy. I had no intention of initiating this little trauma with one child while giving birth to another. In fact, I was thinking middle school was probably a good target for the whole process. But he, apparently, had other plans. "I go potty!" he said. We were standing at the sink brushing our teeth. "What?" I asked, looking around to see if there was someone else in the room. "I go potty!" he said again. He got down from his little stepstool and stood adamantly before the toilet. "Well, OK, little guy," I replied, hesitantly, "I mean, sure, if that's what you want to do . . . " I certainly couldn't discourage him without being the focus of therapy for years to come. And besides, what kind of mother says, "No, honey, I'd really rather you stayed in diapers until you're old enough to date"? I dutifully took off his diaper and pants, popped in his little potty seat, and lifted him up. "All done!" he squealed with delight. "What?" I practically screamed. "What do you mean, all done? You haven't been up there ten seconds!" "All done!" he said again, and started to hop down. He stood there in the middle of the bathroom, looking very proud of himself, and proceeded to pee on the floor. OK, I said to myself. It's just going to take some time. "Good job, honey! Nice try! We'll get 'em next time!" I said cheerfully. I then put a clean diaper on him, put his pants back on, cleaned up the floor, and started down the stairs. "I go potty!" he called after me. "I go potty again!

Someone had told her once that mothers existed to blunt the existential loneliness of being a person. If that was true then her biggest maternal responsibility was simply companionship. You bring a child into this fractious, chaotic world out of the heat of your womb, and then spend the next ten years walking beside them while they figure out how to be a person. Fathers, on the other hand, were there to toughen children up, to say Walk it off when mothers would hold them if they fell. Mothers were the carrot. Fathers were the stick.

John took our Blessed Mother into his own home, loving her and being loved by her.  Mother Mary’s maternal care for John enabled him to embrace the will of God until the end of his life.  We, too, must take our Blessed Mother into the home of our hearts and embrace her as our own.  She, in turn, will embrace us and point us to her divine Son. Reflect, today, upon these beautiful words of Jesus.  Hear them spoken to you.  Hear Jesus say to you, “Behold your mother.”  Behold the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God and the Queen of Heaven and Earth.  Turn to her, love her and receive her motherly guidance and care.  Allow her to embrace you and to welcome you into her heart. My dearest Mother and Queen, as you stood before the Cross of your Son, the one thing that drew your eyes from your Son was the invitation from Jesus to behold your new child in grace.  I am that child, dear Mother, and I thank you for the gaze of love you bestow upon me. My dear Mother, I accept you into the home of my heart to be my spiritual mother in the order of grace.  I accept you as my queen and seek your maternal care and guidance.  Draw me to your divine Son, dear Mother, and pray for me that I may seek Him above all else in life.

Rio. Not only are the Blacks and the Indians slaves to the technology of the Whites, but they also have to be slaves of their nostalgia for origins. They have to fill the role of ancestor to the human race and bear witness to its mysterious and ritualistic origins. A division of labour: some exploit them physically, while others exploit them culturally, feeding on their music, their dance and their description within anthropology. There is no contradiction in this. Indeed it is quite the reverse: the slaves collude in all this themselves. In hunting, the whole animal is put to use: meat, horns, hair, blood and fur - even the entrails will serve to read the future and the mask will serve as emblem of the deity. There are of course happier things you can say about Brazil. In particular, that a part of the happiness and the sensuality, the vital languor and the maternal seduction of everything here - in spite of the objective misery - derives precisely from that coupling of master and slave, which extends as far as the abduction of women and vital energy and as far as the absorption by all of the ritual signs of servitude. This is the revenge of the cultural order on the political, something which no longer occurs within Western societies, perhaps for want of sufficiently subtle slaves. Here time maintains a unity, is a time that lends itself to living, in its monotonous, languorous unfolding, the bodies all mingling together, both the master's and the slave's, even though the master tortures the slave and the slave devours the master. But perhaps all this is merely due to the heat. The heat is like an objective sleep. There is no need for sleep here because it already envelops you like a dream, like a veiled form of the unconscious. Nothing is repressed. Everything is in the insane agitation of molecules. This is the way it is in the Tropics: violence itself is lazy and the subconscious takes on the form of dance. Hence the absurdity of psychoanalysis in these latitudes. It is a parody connected with European privilege, part of the colonial heritage. But in fact, what is the state of the unconscious for us, in Europe itself?

Yá’át’ééh,” I say, using my formal voice. “My name is Nizhoni Begay. My mother’s clan is Towering House. My father’s clan is Bitter Water. My maternal grandfather’s clan is the Mud People clan, and my paternal grandfather’s clan is the Crystal Rock people.

We say in America that we love motherhood, but that's a cruel joke. A woman is about twice as likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth in America as in Britain--because the British make a real effort to save moms' lives, and we don't. Indeed, the maternal mortality rate actually began rising again in the United States around the year 2000, even as it was falling in the rest of the world. Today one of the most dangerous places in the advanced world to become pregnant is the American South, where women die in childbirth at far higher rates than, say, Spain or Sweden.

An incapacitous patient who becomes pregnant may be forced, against her will, to have an abortion. The judgment will typically be expressed in the language of the best interests both of the mother and of the welfare (were it to be born) of the child. What’s happening here? The maternal best interests part of the analysis is fairly straightforward. This isn’t really an abortion against the mother’s will. She’s got no (rightly directed) will. But what about the interests of the putative child? A couple of points. First: it is given a voice in the debate (although for other purposes it has no legal existence) because it is convenient for it to have it. It will obligingly deliver a speech saying that it doesn’t want to exist, and will then shut up. It’s allowed no other speech. Second: in the law of the UK and in many other jurisdictions a child cannot bring a claim based on the assertion ‘It were better that my mother had not borne me.’ It’s regarded as offensive to public policy: see, for instance, McKay v Essex AHA (1982).

If we were to take another example, and apply the same rules, it becomes obvious just how inappropriate and harmful this trope is. For some (not all) trans people, one element of being trans is the physical process of transition. It can be joyful, it can be painful, it can be messy, and it can involve surgery. The same could be said of parenthood. Conception, pregnancy, and childbirth are necessary parts of making a family for the majority of people. Like medical transition, it is vital that we're educated about these processes if there's a chance we'll find ourselves personally affected. And luckily, in both of these cases, the medical information is freely and easily available online, through public health initiatives, in libraries, and from the relevant medical authorities. But it would never be appropriate to approach a new mother in a cafe and say, 'so, did you rip your vagina giving birth to that one?' When greeting a colleague returning to the office after maternity leave, we don't ask if we can examine the stretch marks and possible scars, or ask about hemorrhaging and post-natal incontinence. If we're close friends or family, we might well talk about the most personal physical aspects of creating and delivering a baby - the same is true of transition. But the need to be honest and close with our loved ones doesn't make the intrusion of strangers okay.

The first of these pillars is mirroring, and as the name suggests, it has to do with a person’s being seen and reflected in another. In mirroring, one’s strengths and vulnerabilities are seen and appreciated in equal measure. The phrase that has emerged to describe this reciprocal interconnectedness is “the gleam in the mother’s eye.” Though the experience need not—and does not—transpire only between mother and child, it is the idea of the loving maternal gleam that translates: a readable gaze that says “I see you and I love you” without demanding perfection.

Damn,” he grunts. A grin tugs at the corners of my lips. “Something wrong?” I ask. “I like it when you kiss me, but I don’t like it when you use your kisses to evade my questions,” he says quietly. He squeezes me in a gentle hug. “I wasn’t evading,” I choke out. But I swallow hard trying to get past the lump in my throat. “Yes, you were. And I don’t hate it.” He chuckles softly. “I might even understand it, if you’d let me in. But don’t use my feelings for you as a smoke screen for what’s really going on between us, okay?” He squeezes me again. “What’s going on between us?” I ask, my voice cracking only slightly. “I’m getting to know you,” he says, very matter-of-factly. He tips my face up with the gentlest of touches. “I want to know you,” he says directly. “Everything.” I shake my head. “You wouldn’t like what you find out.” He would hate me. Family is everything to him and I gave mine away. “Try me,” he says. I hold on to his waist—he still has his arm around me—as the subway comes to a stop. He looks down at me for a second too long, long enough for me to see his brow furrow and the little vee form between his eyebrows. “What are you hiding?” he asks. “Everything,” I whisper. But I say it more to remind myself than to tell him anything he doesn’t know. I’m hiding everything. I pull him out the door and into the station, and we race to the top of the steps. “Friday,” he calls when I’m a few steps in front of him. “You have to at least give me a chance.” I pretend like his voice gets caught on the wind, but it doesn’t. It sinks deep inside my heart, and hope blooms. Hope blooms in a place where no light has lived in a really long time. I thought it was difficult being on the subway and having Paul ask me so many questions, but that was nothing compared to the memories that swamp me when we walk into the maternity ward.

He set his wine goblet on the table, knelt by Bridget’s feet, and took her hands in his, pressing a kiss upon each small, soft palm before looking at her. “What ye saw happen to those thieves and what ye saw tonight is a part of me. I cannae deny it. I cannae deny that there have been MacNachtons who have behaved verra much like the creatures of some nightmare. There is a feral part of me, of us. It comes out in the hunt, in battle, in anger. It has been a verra long time, however, since MacNachtons were a threat to innocent Outsiders, although I fear Scymynd would like to be so again. They used to call us the Nightriders because we raced out of these hills at night and death always followed, though nay in the ways and numbers the tales would have ye believe. I think Scymynd wants those days to return.” “What of the sun, Cathal? Can that kill ye?” “Aye, eventually. Tis as if the sun feeds upon us, steals the life right out of us. It burns us up. A Pureblood can die rather quickly if caught out in the sun. I can endure it for a while, but it does leave me feeling weak and ill.” “And what of whatever children we may be blessed with?” “I cannae say. There isnae any way to ken what traits will weaken, which will linger, and which will disappear. My cousin Connall is of the same paternal and maternal bloodline as I am, but is different. James is born of a halfblood and an Outsider. He can endure quite a lot of daylight, but he still suffers a wee bit.” Bridget slipped her hands free of his grasp and took his face in her hands. “It matters not. I chose ye. I have said vows afore God. Tis good to ken that I deal with people, nay demons, but it still doesnae matter. Ye are my husband.” There

What’s up?’ he asked. ‘Would you mind if I went on maternity leave a bit earlier than I was going to?’ ‘When were you thinking?’ ‘Another few weeks?’ I asked tentatively. Nick sat back in his chair and looked at me. ‘I thought you were planning to stop on the side of the road somewhere between calvings to produce this child, and then tie it on your back and keep going,’ he said. ‘There’s been a slight change of plan. I’m going to go and live with Mark instead.’ ‘Are you now? Well, that would have to be a step in the right direction.’ ‘Mm,’ I said, feeling my cheeks get hot. It would have been nice to think I’d succeeded in hiding the shambles of my love life from my colleagues behind a facade of dignified calm, but evidently I hadn’t. ‘So presumably you won’t be coming back to work,’ he said. I shook my head. ‘I’m so sorry to be leaving you in the lurch.’ ‘That’s alright,’ said Nick. ‘We’ll manage. Although I must say it would have been a lot more considerate of you to get yourself knocked up by someone local.’ ‘Then you’d never have got rid of me,’ I pointed out. ‘Well, there is that,’ he said, returning to his paperwork.

Gloria told Maria the whole story of her adoption by the time she was seven years old. She had adopted Maria after breaking up with a man---a fellow graduate student she would only ever refer to as H---who had wanted her to stand behind him at protests, and type up his dissertation, and serve him dinner and wash the dishes and bear him some children and write her own dissertation in between folding laundry. He'd seemed attracted to her in direct proportion to how well she disappeared into their backdrop. Gloria was in her midthirties then and just beginning her graduate program. She knew there were many black babies languishing in the system, unwanted. She put in a request for a healthy black infant girl. It was only a few months before she got a call from the agency saying they had one available. The baby was only a few weeks old and her name was Maria. She came from the Cane River in Louisiana. They didn't have much more information than that except that she was in the care of a Catholic orphanage now----the Saint Ann's Infant and Maternity Home in Maryland. Gloria dropped everything and drove eight hours to collect her child.

Harvard University biologist David Haig has spent the last few years systematically debunking the notion that the relationship between a mother and her unborn child is anything like the rose-tinted idyll that one usually finds on the glossy covers of maternity magazines. In fact, it is anything but. Pre-eclampsia, a condition of dangerously high blood pressure in pregnant women, is brutally kick-started by nothing short of a foetal coup d’état. It begins with the placenta invading the maternal bloodstream and initiating what, in anyone’s book, is a ruthless biological heist – an in utero sting operation to draw out vital nutrients. And I’m not just talking about baby Gordon Gekkos here – I’m talking about all of us. The curtain-raiser is well known to obstetricians. The foetus begins by injecting a crucial protein into the mother’s circulation which forces her to drive more blood, and therefore more nourishment, into the relatively low-pressure placenta. It’s a scam, pure and simple, which poses a significant and immediate risk to the mother’s life. ‘The bastard!’ says Andy. ‘Shall we get some olives?’ ‘And it’s by no means the only one,’ I continue. In another embryonic Ponzi scheme, foetal release of placental lactogen counteracts the effect of maternal insulin thereby increasing the mother’s blood sugar level and providing an excess for the foetus’s own benefit. ‘A bowl of the citrus and chilli and a bowl of the sweet pepper and basil,’ Andy says to the waiter. Then he peers at me over the menu. ‘So basically what you’re saying then is this: forget the Gaddafis and the Husseins. When it comes to chemical warfare it’s the unborn child that’s top dog!’ ‘Well they definitely nick stuff that isn’t theirs,’ I say. ‘And they don’t give a damn about the consequences.’ Andy smiles. ‘So in other words they’re psychopaths!’ he says. BABY

Jenny, what can I do to help?” Westhaven’s expression was merely genial, but in his words, Jenny heard determination and that most dratted of holiday gifts, sibling concern. “Help?” “You’re quiet as a dormouse. Maggie says you’re chewing your nails. Louisa reports that you’re taking odd notions, and Sophie won’t say anything, but she’s clearly worried. Her Grace muttered something about regretting all the time she’s permitted you to spend among the paint fumes.” “What would Her Grace know of paint fumes?” What would the duchess know of anything relating to painting? “She’s our mother. Where knowledge fails, maternal instinct serves. Is Bernward troubling you?” Westhaven was an excellent dancer, and if Jenny did not finish the dance with him, Her Grace would casually suggest that tomorrow be a day to rest from the activity in the studio. The idea made Jenny desperate. “Westhaven, you must not involve yourself in anything to do with Elijah.” “Elijah.” Westhaven’s gaze shifted to a spot over Jenny’s shoulder. “And does he call you Jenny?” He calls me Genevieve, and sometimes he even calls me “woman.” “He calls me talented and brilliant but uneducated and unorthodox too. I’ve enjoyed working with him these past weeks more than anything—” “Excuse me.” Elijah had tapped Westhaven on the shoulder. “May I cut in?” Westhaven’s smile was diabolical. “Of course. Jenny would never decline an opportunity to dance with a family friend.” Family friend? Her blighted, interfering, perishing brother was laying it on quite thick. Elijah bowed. “Lady Genevieve, may I have what remains of this dance?” Two days remained. Two days and three nights. Jenny curtsied and assumed waltz position. As Elijah’s hand settled on her back, his scent wafted to her, enveloping her in his presence. “You’re avoiding me,” he said. “You needn’t. I’ll be leaving soon, and I hope we can at least part friends.” With her siblings, she could dissemble and maintain appearances, but with Elijah… “I am honored you think me a friend, Elijah.” And he danced wonderfully, with the same sense of assurance and mastery that he undertook painting… and lovemaking. “I am your friend too, Genevieve.

Folks talk a lot about the maternal feeling in women, but they say nothing about man's need to protect and care for someone; yet the one feeling is as basic as the other.

Athena in her armour can be understood as a sign that women can and must be protected. The Goddess herself needs protection, if she is to survive the perils of a patriarchal era. Athena’s skills of strategic protection and clever defense are vital to women who—like Athena herself—are prisoners of patriarchy. She is the Goddess of protected spaces: the walled city, the castle, the acropolis, and the women’s wisdom and culture contained therein. As guardian and protectress, Athena in antiquity was ‘envisaged as a caring and feminine, not to say maternal, figure.

Another ambiguity in debates over work and welfare concerns time. Any duty to work must include a time dimension. Advocates of the new work regime often seem to assume that “workers” should always be working—occupying a full-time job (forty or more hours a week), forty-eight to fifty weeks a year (excluding leaves for illness, injury, or maternity), every year of their adult lives (excluding periods of full-time education), until retirement age. But why are these the only kind of “workers” who have fulfilled their moral or civic duties with respect to work? Arguably, we should consider someone a worker in good moral or civic standing even if he or she takes periods off from work—say, to do care work (if this is not considered “work”), to augment or develop new skills, to participate in activities that, though not considered “work,” promote social welfare, or to just take a break to do something more personally satisfying. Setting aside the details, the point is that even in a society that regards work as a duty, there can be a variety of work regimes and we should consider whether a less onerous regime, with more opportunity for leisure, would be both desirable and feasible.

Part 1 A Woman is a Fate? Or a Bless? When a baby is girl is born, to some is a blessing. She will grow as wonderful woman, beautiful, with nice features and showers love as a daughter, a sister, as a wife, as a friend and as a mother. It is also luck, or a Mahalakshmi to the house. Some centuries back, and to some people when she is born, she is a fate. An ill fated to some in orthodox families and believe that she brings bad luck. So, there is this ritual in some places or villages where, when a new born baby girl will be poisoned to death upon her arrival on earth. It is brutal and devastating. Yes it is still happening till today. Where did this ritual came from? Who started it? Where was it written that the baby must be killed if it is a girl. And WHY? Has anyone thought, that it was a woman who carried her for 9 months, loved her from the day she is created in her womb, and the moment when she is born, the tear of a joy and her happiness the moment she sees her little tiny human girl arrived, and her dreams as mother and to love her all her life… will be no longer alive in the next few minutes? I have always respected woman, for uncountable reasons. As much as I am happy to see them successful, but it also worries me most of the time. 99.9% of it I am worried for them! The one who gave birth to us, is a woman. We also worship to a female God and beg her to show mercy on us. It is also a woman, who becomes a wife and satisfies a husband’s needs. But still, there are no respect shown to them despite knowing these basics. In some houses while her parents off to work, or being abandoned, or lets just say the parents passed. It is her responsibility to take care the rest of her family as the family head. When it comes to education, she is not safe to study among the boys, neither in higher education. Same goes to a woman at work. As she will have those wild eyes on her, she has to take care of her virginity, her womb, and her dignity. Beyond these, there are also some beasts, who is talented in sweet talking and flirtatious towards her. When she is too naïve and fall for the trap, it happens to be a one night stand. Once a woman marriage is fixed, she gets married and goes off to her in laws. Her life changes in the moment the knots tied by the man. In todays millennia, womens are still carrying the burden of the responsibility of her maternal side, together with her new in-laws. Every morning she wakes up, she serves the husband, deal the day with by preparing him for his day, every day. As well taking care of her new in-laws all of her life. Then, comes the pregnancy moment, again, she carries her child her womb, making sure he is safe in there, and taking care of her world on the outside. She loses all her beauty, her happiness, her wishes, her ambitions, and it is all sacrificed for the sake of her marriage. And then the cycle never stops. She raises her children, become beautiful, and then one day they too get married. But as mother, she never stopped caring and provide them all the love, the needs, etc. It never stops. There are some man and in laws who support their daughter in law and I have a big salute to them. They are an example for today’s woman millennia, don’t stop her for what she is capable of, and don’t clip her wings..

Fans who had only just seen the team win the 2015 World Cup probably weren’t aware of what the players had been through in the past—boycotting games to earn comparable pay to the men, threatening to retire in the face of a lawsuit, asking the U.S. Olympic Committee to intervene, and so on. These sorts of battles were built into the DNA of the team. Their drive to win and their drive to stand up for themselves seemed to go hand in hand. For Lloyd, the appearance on the Today show and the public decision to file the EEOC claim gave the players a chance to help people understand that this sort of substandard treatment was the reality of the women’s national team. She laments that some people mistook the players’ stance as fighting against the men’s team itself, but she says it shined a light on the issues confronting the women’s team. “A lot of people didn’t realize the history of this team and what we’ve had to fight for,” Lloyd says. “When I first joined the team in 2005, they were fighting for salaries, healthcare, pregnancy leave—basic stuff.” Like many American women, the players had their own struggles with equal pay, fair treatment, maternity leave, and other issues that are as endemic in the United States as they are disheartening. As it turned out, even World Cup champions faced the same challenges as other women.

IN 1957 JOHN WEST left Marcle School and went to work on the farm with Fred and their father. Life as an unskilled labourer was poorly paid, but the West boys could expect nothing better. Their father had been a farm worker all his life, as had their maternal grandfather, William Hill, and his father before him; there was no reason to hope or think that John and Fred would ever do anything else. An acquaintance of Fred’s at the time, Patrick Meredith, says that he fully expected Fred to be ‘walking behind a cow with a stick for the rest of his life’.

While across patriarchies a common response is to view women as dangerous antagonists to be subdued, [Sudhir] Kakar says the 'defensive mode' of Indian male fantasy takes a specific form - that of 'desexualization, either of the self or of the woman', the former through celibacy and ascetic longings, and the latter through transforming the woman into either a maternal automation or an 'androgynous virgin

The feminine mystique says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity. It says that the great mistake of Western culture, through most of its history, has been the undervaluation of this femininity. It says this femininity is so mysterious and intuitive and close to the creation and origin of life that man-made science may never be able to understand it. But however special and different, it is in no way inferior to the nature of man; it may even in certain respects be superior. The mistake, says the mystique, the root of women’s troubles in the past is that women envied men, women tried to be like men, instead of accepting their own nature, which can find fulfillment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love.

I feel this intense pressure to step in and be this amazing “bonus mom.” Everyone expects me to just naturally be maternal and love my step-kids and take care of everything for them. I feel like I do all the hard work of parenting, but I don’t get any of the benefits that bio-parents get. I don’t get love, loyalty, or affection from the kids, no matter how kind I am to them. They never hug me or say thank you. I certainly don’t get acknowledged on Mother’s Day. I really try to be a good stepmom, but I feel like all my efforts are looked at with suspicion or resentment from my step-kids, because they think I’m “trying too hard.” It also feels like my husband wants it both ways. He expects me to love his kids “just like they’re my own,” and he expects me to take care of them and be involved and support them and help raise them. But then he gets defensive and territorial, and he resists my input if I try to be involved in any actual parenting, because they’re “his” kids, not mine. And his ex-wife gets threatened, and she basically tells me to “butt out and stay in my place.” So, my husband and his ex both expect me to help them do the hard work of parenting and provide childcare for them, but only on their terms. Apparently, I don’t get a place at the decision-making table. I feel like an unpaid babysitter, not a partner. And it seems like the harder I work and the nicer I am, the less anyone appreciates me. I can’t win.

Mothers not only pass the harms of endocrine-disrupting chemicals on to their fetuses but on to even more distant generations. When a mother is exposed to EDCs, so too are her fetus's germ cells, which develop into eggs or sperm. "It's thought that during that exposure, the chemical can target those germ cells and do what we call reprogramming, or making epigenetic changes," says Flaws. "That can be a permanent change that gets carried through generations, because those germ cells will eventually be used to make the next generation, and those fetuses will have abnormal germ cells that would then go on to make the next generation." In the mid-20th century, scientists documented this in women who took a synthetic form of estrogen, called diethylstilbestrol or DES, to prevent miscarriages.? The drug worked as intended, and the women gave birth to healthy babies. But once some of those children hit puberty, the girls developed vaginal and breast cancer. The boys developed testicular cancer, and some suffered abnormal development of the penis. Scientists called them DES daughters and sons. "When those DES daughters and sons had children, we now have DES granddaughters and grandsons, and a lot of them have increased risk of those same cancers and reproductive problems," says Flaws. "Even though it was their great-grandmother that took DES and they don't have any DES in their system-their germ cells have been reprogramming, and they're passing down some of these disease traits." And now toxicologists are gathering evidence that mothers are passing microplastics and nanoplastics complete with EDCs and other toxic substances- to their fetuses. In 2021, scientists announced that they'd found microplastics in human placentas for the first time, both on the fetal side and maternal side.Later that year, another team of researchers found the same, and they also tested meconium-a newborn's first feces and discovered microplastic there too. Children are consuming microplastics, then, before they're even born.

And if it be asked why the priest says Mass in Latin, an unknown tongue, instead of in the vernacular, we reply: The Holy Mass is not a sermon, it is not intended for the instruction of the people; it is the offering for them of the sacrifice of the New Testament. There are good reasons why this should be done in a language which never can change. Some languages are called dead, others living; the former are no longer in common use and are consequently unchanged; the latter are the modes of speech of the various peoples and are subject to constant variation. If the Mass were said in one of the living languages, there would be great risk that, as the meaning of words changed, the original significance of the formulas would change also, and against this danger the Church must guard. As the integral part of religion cannot be altered, so the language of religion must ever remain the same. The unity of doctrine in the Catholic Church throughout the world is beautifully illustrated by the identity of the languages she employs. In whatever part of the globe the Catholic finds himself, there the great mystery of the faith he professes is celebrated in the same manner, in the same language. And lest the ordinary Christian should reman in ignorance of the meaning of the Latin prayers of the Mass, holy Church in her maternal care for her children, provides that in the prayer-books (i.e. the hand-held missals used by the laity to follow the Mass) they should be translated into the vulgar tongue of each country.

I’d say I’ve got no maternal instinct, but I’m not sure I buy that. What is maternal instinct except a way to shame women and condition them to believe they are the ones responsible for the baby’s well-being? Where is paternal instinct? Maybe if paternal instinct existed, I would be more interested in having a baby.

Apparently Daisy gets what Sunny is trying to say. She defends Alex’s nonexistent virtue. “Don’t you say things like that about your brother!” Either she’s truly in complete denial or she’s too blinded by her maternal love to see the truth. Alex may not be a player, but he can be a dirty, dirty boy.

To recap, here’s what we all can do to stop the mass shooting epidemic: As Individuals: Trauma: Build relationships and mentor young people Crisis: Develop strong skills in crisis intervention and suicide prevention Social proof: Monitor our own media consumption Opportunity: Safe storage of firearms; if you see or hear something, say something. As Institutions: Trauma: Create warm environments; trauma-informed practices; universal trauma screening Crisis: Build care teams and referral processes; train staff Social proof: Teach media literacy; limit active shooter drills for children Opportunity: Situational crime prevention; anonymous reporting systems As a Society: Trauma: Teach social emotional learning in schools. Build a strong social safety net with adequate jobs, childcare, maternity leave, health insurance, and access to higher education Crisis: Reduce stigma and increase knowledge of mental health; open access to high quality mental health treatment; fund counselors in schools Social proof: No Notoriety protocol; hold media and social media companies accountable for their content Opportunity: Universal background checks, red flag laws, permit-to-purchase, magazine limits, wait periods, assault rifle ban

Child most dear to me, place your hand upon your heart and tell me your secrets.  How many times have you been unhappy, anguished, embittered, because you have done your own will?  Know that you cast out the Divine Will, and fell into a maze of evils. The Divine Will wants to make you pure and holy, happy and attractive, with an enchanting beauty; but you by doing your own will, have waged war and cast the Divine Will in sorrow from its beloved abode, which is your soul.  Listen child of my heart: it is painful for your Mother because l do not see in you, the Sun of the Divine Will, but rather the dense darkness of the night of your human will. But rise up and take heart!  lf you promise to place your will in my hands, I your heavenly Mother will take you in my arms, I will put you on my lap and re-order in you the life of the Divine Will.  And you, after so many of my tears, will form my smile, my joy, and the smile and rejoicing of the Holy Trinity as well. The Soul Heavenly Mother if you love me so much, I beg you: do not let me descend from your maternal knees.  And if you see that l am about to do my will, be watchful over my poor soul, enclose me in your heart so that the power of your burning love, may reduce my will to ashes.  In this way l will change your tears into smiles of pleasure. Instruction Today to honor me, you will come to me three times, give your will to me and say: my Mother, I want this will of mine to be yours, so that you may exchange it for the Divine Will. The Soul Sovereign Queen, cast down my will by your command - so that the seed of the Divine Will may spring up within me.

In last month’s photo, a front tooth dangled over her bottom lip and Iris laughed out loud, wanting to reach into the picture and yank the loose tooth from her daughter’s mouth. She wondered about the conversations she missed with the child—the fights they must have had over Melody’s need to keep that tooth a day, a week, a month, longer. Why hadn’t Aubrey snuck into her room in the middle of the night and yanked it the way her own father had done—Iris waking in the morning with that new space in her mouth and a crisp dollar bill beneath her pillow. But now the tooth was gone. Had Melody gotten a dollar for it too? Iris studied the space—the pink half circle of gum beside a tiny front tooth that hung at a slight angle as though it too was loose now. Iris shivered. Ran her tongue along her own straight teeth. She had missed the child’s birthday but had called, only to have Melody say, It’s my birthday and it’s party day. Bye! Daddy got me a bicycle. Bye again. And when she reminded the child that the bicycle was from both of them, Melody said, But Daddy put it together. And Daddy’s gonna teach me to ride. Always the phone calls were Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, and TV shows she’d watched. When she tried to ask Melody what she was reading, the child laughed. Everything, she said. I read everything. Now, staring at the picture of her daughter, she remembered again how her own mother had said more than once that there was nothing at all maternal about Iris and wondered if the maternal gene kicked in later. Iris wondered if it would happen in her twenties or thirties. And if it did, would she want more children?

My maternal grandmother,” says Sibelius, “would not have approved by any means had I chosen such a risky and disreputable career as that of a musician. It is true she appreciated my artistic gifts and thoroughly approved of my efforts at composing, but the mere thought of music as an occupation seemed an abomination to her. She was old-fashioned, and had spent her life in the country and in the provincial town and looked upon a musician as on the same level as a wandering organ-grinder, or not far removed from it.

I’m going to have to talk to HR sooner rather than later about arranging for my maternity leave anyway. And people are going to find out in time. I unlock my phone and open Instagram. I have an oddly high number of followers thanks to an article Forbes did on me right after I sold the app to Apple. I’m not that interesting of a person, but I do find the best funny memes to share. I upload my favorite picture of Archer and me from this weekend, heart fluttering when I look at it. We’re standing by the pink balloons, and looking lovingly into each other’s eyes. My hair is tucked awkwardly behind my ear, but we both look so happy. So inlove. Archer’s hand is on my stomach, and his smile is genuine. Man, I miss him. Tomorrow is too far away. Long distance sucks. “We cannot wait for spring. Hashtag thirteen weeks. Hashtag baby girl,” I say out loud as Itype. “Don’t forget hashtag blessed.” “And grateful. Please. I might be basic, but I know enough not to flaunt it around on social media,” I laugh and post the photo. But I really do feel those things.

When reared with especially nurturing mothers, such animals show no signs of the usual behavioural disorder. Instead, they showed signs of precocious behavioural development and rose to the top of the hierarchy as adults. Females adopted the maternal style typical of their especially nurturing mothers.