Our bodies are the document of our circumstances, but of all the tales that the body tells, motherhood is at once the most central and the most conspicuously absent. Whether or not you yourself have given birth to a child, your very existence reveals that you were given birth to. What it can't tell us is who it was that fed you, who held you, who wore away their own bodies working elsewhere to provide for you. (It also can't tell us how you felt about your needs, or how you felt about having them met.) Not all maternal stories begin in the womb: 'mother' is not a category limited only to those who have given birth to a child, and even for those who have, the attention afforded to this particular organ is hysterically overdetermined. It seems to me that it is my mother's knees that are the true record of mine and my brother's existence: yes, we began our lives in her uterus, but nine months pales in comparison to the long years her care for us was performed through those complicated joints.

— Mother State by Helen Charman (Page i)