Almost twenty years ago, when considering pregnancy a subversive state bearing “generative lessons unknown to men and angels,” I made the following remark: “Serious involvement in child bearing and rearing involves an . . . unrelenting tug of attachment, what Kristeva calls a pain that ‘comes from the inside’ and ‘never remains apart. . . . You may close your eyes, . . . teach courses, run errands, . . . think about objects, subjects.’ But a mother is marked by a tenacious link to another that . . . never quite goes away .” (Miller-McLemore, Also a Mother, 143. See also Julia Kristeva, "Stabat Mater," in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, Columbia University Press, 1986: 166)