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Articles

What Simone de Beauvoir Got – And Didn’t Get – About Motherhood

Nura Hossainzadeh argues that motherhood is both physical and transcendent.

It is often said that becoming a parent is a profound transition. This transition feels different to everyone, since it occurs within the particular context of each person’s life. For me, it felt like a jolt from the abstract to the concrete; from the philosophical to the everyday; from the freedom to speculate, to the need to make decisions. When I had my first child, I was teaching political theory at Princeton, and when I had my second, I was teaching in a ‘great books’ program at Stanford. So I moved abruptly from spending my days thinking about the big ideas – justice, freedom, Islamic theories of government, love in Christian mystic writings, love in medieval Italian poetry – to dwelling in the more physical dimensions of life: changing diapers at what often felt like 1,000 times a day; experiencing the inevitable lack of sleep that comes with having a newborn; and asking my body to nourish this growing lifeform with breastmilk.

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