Mother of sighs, mother of darkness, mother of tears, mother of cats and plants, and legislation to quell your pain or break your sanity….
If you’ve bequeathed twenty-three pairs of chromosomes to a living creature, if you’ve inherited a friend or relative’s descendents, or if you’ve taken in the orphaned of any species, I hope your Sunday was to your liking. I started reading Sue Black‘s book All That Remains a week ago and came across a passage that was quite fitting for Mother’s Day, so I mentioned it on my bookface.
The part of you which came directly from your biological mother that isn’t simply half of your DNA and that will likely always be a part of you is inside your ear.
As the author explains, “While it is a fallacy that a pregnant woman eats for two, she does need to ensure that her diet is sufficient to meet not only her own needs but also those of her very demanding passenger.
“The nutrient building blocks required to construct our otic capsule were supplied by Mum from what she was eating around sixteen weeks into her pregnancy. So within our head, in that minute piece of bone just big enough to hold four raindrops, we will perhaps carry for the rest of our lives the elemental signature of what our mother had for lunch when she was four months pregnant. Proof, if any were needed, that our mums never leave us, and a whole new perspective on the mystery of how they manage to get inside our heads” (38, 39).
Find out exactly where the otic capsulse is located at Britannica.com.