The Mother Body — Matrix

I once heard it said that somewhere in our subconscious, we can still recall the time we spent in the womb. I keep wondering — what did that warm, moist womb actually look like? And would we want to go back?

Scientific research shows (forgive my tone here…) that being born is the greatest ordeal of a person’s life. We leave behind the environment we were innately given — the womb — and must adapt to the outside world. Could we think, back then? I’m sure we must have been able to, in some fashion, or we wouldn’t have come crying into the world at all. Life itself, from the very start, is an ordeal.

Many people like to use the color blue as a metaphor for mother, because the earth is blue, and the earth carries humanity the way a mother carries her child in pregnancy. But if you trace the origin of the word for “mother” (妈妈) in Chinese, it turns out to be, under patriarchy, an insult and a contempt directed at women. The right half of the character 妈 — 马 (“horse”) — anciently referred to a chamber pot (a kind of male urinal), and woman was thereby equated with an object and instrument for discharging desire… and that is the original meaning behind the word “mother.” (Li Ao)

Thinking about my mother’s belly stirs up an extremely complicated awareness in me, one I find hard to even picture. Is it longing? Is it avoidance, or merely a kind of wishful fantasy? I really don’t know. But I think that for everyone, the womb we once existed within, inside the maternal body, is a universe in another sense entirely — one filled, at different times, with joy, with warmth, with love.