On Becoming Mother

Thoughts on Gestation, Lineage, and the Maternal Subject

There’s something I’ve been trying to articulate for nearly four years, and I still struggle to find the right words. When I became pregnant, the truth of not being in control revealed itself with startling clarity. My mind and my body felt like distant continents. My body was astonishing. It knew how to grow a person, as naturally as my lungs draw breath and my heart carries on beating without instruction. My womb simply began, quietly and without fanfare, to build the most extraordinary thing I will ever know.

What felt momentous to me was, I learned, ancient and ordinary. Every strange symptom, every bewildering sensation, was part of a tapestry countless women had worn before me. A first for me, yet hardly unique. The thought that every single person who has ever lived began the same way was almost impossible to comprehend. And in that realisation, something settled. I understood that I was participating in something so much larger than myself. I could almost feel the hands of all the women who came before me resting gently on my shoulders. A lineage. A long thread pulled taut across centuries, now placed in my palms.

I was six months pregnant when my grandmother died. At her funeral, I thought about how a part of my daughter began with her. The biology of it felt like myth: the eggs of a female foetus forming in her mother’s womb, which means my mother once carried the egg that would one day become my child, while she herself was inside my grandmother. Three generations nested like Matryoshkas. My grandmother held my mother, and within my mother were the beginnings of my daughter, waiting. I felt it physically, like a pulse.

And then I thought of my husband’s side, of the ancestral line that was not mine, now entwined with mine and growing inside me. Two histories meeting at a crossroads in my body, forming a new branch. I know, rationally, this is what happens with every new generation, but standing at that intersection felt seismic.

I thought of stardust. Of how our atoms were forged in the hearts of stars that lived and died long before Earth ever spun itself into being. Carbon, oxygen, iron: remnants of celestial fires, now arranged into organs and skin and the fragile miracle of a heartbeat flickering inside me. To be human is to be made of galaxies.

I was both the hinge and the hinge’s shadow: the centre point of a new life beginning, and also just another link in an infinite chain of causes stretching back to the beginning of time. Every choice, every breath, every person, all rippling toward this moment. My daughter and I, exactly as we are meant to be.

We are the sum of everyone who came before us. We are trees and oceans, echoes of stars. Not my decision, but determined from the beginning of the universe by every atom expanding as it has, to become this child’s mother. My fiercest joy. My great, astonishing privilege.

Perhaps the most astounding moment arrived when she was placed on my chest for the first time. This curious creature I had spent months imagining, this stranger I had been so eager to meet, felt instantly familiar. It was less revelation than recognition. Not surprise, but certainty. Of course it’s you. As if, somehow, I had known her all my life, waiting in the quiet spaces of me for her arrival.