Many of us were mothered in ways we cannot yet even perceive; we only know that our mothers were in some incalculable way on our side. But if a mother had deserted us, by dying, or putting us up for adoption, or because life had driven her into alcohol or drugs, chronic depression or madness, if she had been forced to leave us with indifferent, uncaring strangers in order to earn our food money, because institutional motherhood makes no provision for the wage-earning mother; if she had tried to be a ‘good mother’ according to the demands of the institution and had thereby turned into an anxious, worrying, puritanical keeper of our virginity; or if she had simply left us because she needed to live without a child—whatever our rational forgiveness, whatever the individual mother’s love and strength, the child in us, the small female who grew up in a male-controlled world, still feels, at moments,
—Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1976), 184. (via wassupgrandpa)
