It is time to recognise the diversity of paths that lead to motherhood, including those that fail, those that take years, and those that lead nowhere. When you think of Mother’s Day, which is widely celebrated across the world in the month of May, and in France on the last Sunday of May each year, you might think: Nice lunch, kids’ crafts and lots of hugs.
Yes, it is a moment of joy for many. But for millions of women, this spring Sunday is also a day of silent pain: women whose pregnancies ended in miscarriage, whose fertility treatment came to nothing, who gave up after years of exhausting hope, or who simply never had the child they longed for. These women are rarely at the centre of the celebrations. And yet their experiences reveal something important about how societies continue to think about fertility, womanhood and time.
