It doesn’t mean that I’m okay with being a terrible mother. Or that we never regret the sacrifices we make to get what we want, or what we think we need.

And I realized that their concept of teamwork in parenting was that my mum was left for weeks at a time to raise us as if she were a single mother while she boasted that her husband was working in ‘the Far East’.

I’m mentioning this celebration of mothers in the context of work that sustains and maintains—but I don’t think that one needs to be a mother to experience a maternal impulse.