Chapter 8: The Nested Nature of M/Othering: Complicating Curriculum Conversations

A few weeks after my daughter was born I had a family friend come to visit. She asked me, “So … has becoming a mother changed your life?” For a moment I looked at her through eyes weary from having a colicky baby. In that moment I had a surreal daydream where I took off my shirt, pointed to my linea negra, the black line from pregnancy that runs from my ribcage to just above my pubic bone and said, “This is my linea negra. As a woman of color it shows a part of me that some White women will never experience. Like my ethnicity, it’s the first thing I bet people would see if they were to look at my stomach now. Like my ethnicity, at first I was slightly embarrassed by it, by being different, but now I take pride in that difference.” Then I would point to the stretch marks at my side and say, “These are my stretch marks. They will, for the rest of my life, serve as a visual reminder of what my body went through for this pregnancy. A reminder of one of the first sacrifices a mother makes for her child. All of these things are suddenly all at once together within and on me. That’s how motherhood has changed my life.”