لَمْيَاء سُلطَان’s Reviews > Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life > Status Update

Clearly, there are coasts to your self image if you reveal yourself to be desirous in a maternal way. Desiring sex, of course, confirms once standing as an independent woman; by desiring a child, or worse, a husband, reveals one to be pathetically contingent.

The pressure to deny maternal desire is obvious in the caricatured image of the woman who lets it affect her thinking or actions.

For all of us, irritation, boredom, frustration, and ineffectiveness are inevitable passing states in a day of mothering. But how we interpret these states is not simply personal; it is influenced by the social values and life choices of our peer group and a larger social surround.

Like any creative practice rooted in human necessity, at its best, caring for a child involves physical engagement aligned with intentions toward a valued purpose.

at times, emphasis on women’s maternal role has overshadowed attention to their other needs and desires; but other times, the verse has been true.

Today call mom we might consider whether women’s power is inhibited by impediments to their motherhood.

Like the artist or the poet, a mother can feel she is not truly living her life or being herself if she feels deprived of the time and emotional space to relate to her child.
She can still nurture and support her children, still feed them and put a roof over their heads, but her sense of creative contribution can be diminished.

Ironically, those who most vociferously defend women's reproductive rights with regard to contraception and abortion are often least forceful in defending women's reproductive rights as pregnant workers or new mothers.

Further, the conflict continues to be routinely, reflexively discussed, as if the only issue we’re how to find a way for women to do list caring for children.

In an important sense, or a difficulty in speaking about the subjectivity of mothers beings with this imagery of engulfment and merger, and its acceptance as a concrete reality rather than as a fundamentally psychological experience.