Mother of two children

Abstract

The paper considers the place of the impersonal in the making of intimacies (in this case, the “mother-child dyad”), through examining examples of how temporality, grammar, measurement and knowledge are imbricated and naturalised in the events and processes of life-giving. Experimental in genre, the paper is expressive rather than rationalist, shifting between the personal voice and a more distanced analytic to unsettle taken-for-granted modes of scholarship and undo rigid distinctions between subjective and objective knowledge. Describing the interfaces and interleaving of embodied, intuitive and biomedical knowledge, I suggest that different modalities of knowledge, experience, intensity and duration weave together in the production of life, producing contradictions, contractions and expansions of the social world. Throughout, slightly tongue in cheek, I use the framing of “my culture” (a common South Africanism seldom used by English-speaking whites, who assume “culture” is elsewhere) to invite critical assessment and to reflect on the ways that individuals are uniquely positioned through socio-cultural practice. The refrain “I am the mother of two children” offers a heuristic through which to examine dyadic relations.

Keywords:

• birth
• intuition
• knowledge
• life
• mother-child dyad