This Sunday, American’s celebrate Mother’s Day. It’s a bittersweet celebration this year as the contemplate whether or not parenthood is a sacred choice or a law-bound mandate. Namrata Poddar contemplates motherhood in her poetic dictionary below.

New Motherhood, a Dictionary
By Namrata Poddar

Motherhood: Goddess squad gracing the walls of Hindu temples, wifehood and motherhood balanced perfectly in those slender waists and big breasts, ever ready to nurse.

Motherhood of the Goddess Consort, a male fantasy like their Virgin Mother.

Motherhood: a border, a wall sundering your life into prebaby and post-baby days. Wait till he grows up, they say. It comes back—the physical mobility, the energy, the yoga, the reading, brunches with girlfriends, happy hour with colleagues, the love-making too.

Motherhood: your new role—now  that you’ve given them a legacy with a baby boy—as an addendum in their parties, neither the text you’ve aspired to be nor the footnote you used to be.

Motherhood: its own game of power in heterodomesticity, one you keep fighting for dignity, one you keep losing for sanity.

Motherhood: shield for your baby boy from the silence and self-hatred of those mother figures, wired to perpetuate toxic masculinity.

Motherhood: quarantine before quarantine becomes a global thing, worthy of empathy.

Motherhood: a feminine logic of love. How it strips romantic love of its luster, that transactional love between adults driven by a capitalist logic of profit.

Motherhood: an unending play of paradox, a dance in chiaroscuro.

Motherhood: Adi Shakti, primordial Goddess Mother, Creatrix to all that was, is, will be. How she empties you of the masculine drive to possess meaning. How she anchors you into the fleeting, into what is yet to be born. Your alignment with eternal becoming.

This piece was originally published by Raising Mothers.