Motherhood is so beautiful, women are told, even before they have become women. Motherhood is what we are meant for. Motherhood is part and parcel of our womanhood. Motherhood will, sooner or later, define us.
What they do not tell us is that for so many of us, motherhood is trauma. It is the loss of ourselves as we are subsumed by the creature growing within us. It is the loss of control over our own bodies, the loss of sleep during pregnant days and colicky nights, the loss of our intimate selves in exchange for cracked nipples and wombs that never stop aching. It is the loss of safety in being able to confide to our loved ones, who stare at us in horror at our ugly confessions.
We are the walking wounded, the mothers with bleeding hearts and emptied wombs, the mothers whose minds are on the verge of breaking. We are the women whose souls are frozen in fear - for we are told that we are weak, impatient, failures as believing women.
Only Allah knows our agony, when everyone else refuses to see or hear our pain.
{And We have enjoined on humankind [goodness] to their parents. Their mothers bore them in weakness and hardship upon weakness and hardship, and their weaning takes two years. Give thanks to Me and to your parents, unto Me is the final destination.} (Qur'an 31:14)
{And We have enjoined upon humankind, to their parents, good treatment. Their mothers carried them with hardship and gave birth to them with hardship…} (Qur'an 46:15)
When the Qur'an speaks of motherhood, it is not with words of false sweetness, nor promises of unbridled joy. Instead, Allah speaks to us with the rawness of our own experiences: wahnun 3ala wahn; hamalat'hu karhan wa wadha3at'hu karhan… weakness and pain upon weakness and pain. The word "karhan" shares the same root as the word "karaaha" - something that is hated. The pain that a mother experiences is unimaginable, a pain that anyone would hate to experience - and yet, it is what women endure, over and over again.
The greatest of all women, Maryam bint Imraan ('alayhassalaam), cried out during labour, "Would that I had died before this, and had been forgotten and out of sight!" (Qur'an 19:23)
The burden placed on Muslim women to experience motherhood - to perform motherhood - as the completion of her feminine identity and epitome of self-worth, as the measure of her womanhood and of her spirituality, is a burden that we do not find in the Qur'an and Sunnah.
How then do we have the audacity to place this burden on women?
Read more: https://muslimmatters.org/2020/06/20/fractured-wombs/
What they do not tell us is that for so many of us, motherhood is trauma. It is the loss of ourselves as we are subsumed by the creature growing within us. It is the loss of control over our own bodies, the loss of sleep during pregnant days and colicky nights, the loss of our intimate selves in exchange for cracked nipples and wombs that never stop aching. It is the loss of safety in being able to confide to our loved ones, who stare at us in horror at our ugly confessions.
We are the walking wounded, the mothers with bleeding hearts and emptied wombs, the mothers whose minds are on the verge of breaking. We are the women whose souls are frozen in fear - for we are told that we are weak, impatient, failures as believing women.
Only Allah knows our agony, when everyone else refuses to see or hear our pain.
{And We have enjoined on humankind [goodness] to their parents. Their mothers bore them in weakness and hardship upon weakness and hardship, and their weaning takes two years. Give thanks to Me and to your parents, unto Me is the final destination.} (Qur'an 31:14)
{And We have enjoined upon humankind, to their parents, good treatment. Their mothers carried them with hardship and gave birth to them with hardship…} (Qur'an 46:15)
When the Qur'an speaks of motherhood, it is not with words of false sweetness, nor promises of unbridled joy. Instead, Allah speaks to us with the rawness of our own experiences: wahnun 3ala wahn; hamalat'hu karhan wa wadha3at'hu karhan… weakness and pain upon weakness and pain. The word "karhan" shares the same root as the word "karaaha" - something that is hated. The pain that a mother experiences is unimaginable, a pain that anyone would hate to experience - and yet, it is what women endure, over and over again.
The greatest of all women, Maryam bint Imraan ('alayhassalaam), cried out during labour, "Would that I had died before this, and had been forgotten and out of sight!" (Qur'an 19:23)
The burden placed on Muslim women to experience motherhood - to perform motherhood - as the completion of her feminine identity and epitome of self-worth, as the measure of her womanhood and of her spirituality, is a burden that we do not find in the Qur'an and Sunnah.
How then do we have the audacity to place this burden on women?
Read more: https://muslimmatters.org/2020/06/20/fractured-wombs/
No comments:
Post a Comment