Personal note from the author

Why a book about MUM?

Rebecca: Charlotte and I have previously made two books together and in the process we experienced each other as mothers; a text message from a daughter, who was upset; a son who needed to be picked up earlier than planned etc. and in this way, we gradually started a conversation about what it means to be a mum.

Charlotte: Since I was a little girl, I have known that I wanted to be a mum one day. I thought it was the most natural thing in the world to create a family. But when it turned out to be really difficult for my husband and I to have children, the wish to become a mum started to take up a lot of space in my life. For a period it was all I thought about.

The road to motherhood has been long and winding. Finally, we were approved for adoption. The wait was unbearable. There are no words to describe the moment when we finally received the first information, the first pictures of our daughter and the day when I first held her in my arms at the orphanage.

I have the loveliest daughter, Maria, who is 11 years-old and born in Ethiopia. As the mum of Maria, I have thought a lot about the mother/child relation. Maria has experienced several losses and enormous neglect at a very early age. She has experienced that the world can be unsafe and unpredictable. She has learnt that you have a “mum” for a while and then she is exchanged for another. And the trust and connection between her and I as her mother had to built up from scratch with unconditional, continuous love, safety and care.

How did the book come about?

Charlotte: The idea for the book came one day when Rebecca and I were talking about our children. I told her about an experience I had had at Maria’s school. One of her classmates said to me that I had not given birth to Maria, because we didn’t look alike. I answered that Maria had not grown in my belly, but that she had grown in my heart.

When Rebecca heard the story, the word “Child of the Heart” appeared. We could both feel that there was material for a picture book here.

The small human being and the heart is a repeated theme – what thoughts have you had about this? And about the connection between text and artwork throughout?

Rebecca: Between each text and drawing, there is a kind of gap which leaves space for your own story and interpretation. It is deliberate that we do not see mum as a person, but all the time as a heart in different shapes. For us, mum is a heart, mum is love, not necessarily in an uncomplicated way, but the heart of the mother transgresses gender, colour, time and place – it is the truest symbol for mum that we felt we could find.

And the little human being is our representation for every single child, also the child that we carry inside ourselves as adults. The heart is much bigger than the child, the heart is a power that can carry us, and it is a burden that can crush us – both parts are true. Both appeared to us to be powerful entitities: the small, almost naked, child and the enormous heart which can transform itself indifinitely.

MUM – a roar, a song, a sigh forms part of a wave of motherhood literature. How do you feel about that?

Rebecca: When I was three weeks old, my mum didn’t have anymore milk for me and she has been so upset about it since. I wish that someone had told her that you are just as much a mum when you don’t breastfeed, as when you do. I have been thankful for all the conversations that are sparked by motherhood literature. The literature that also tells the story about how demanding it can be. In all thinkable and unthinkable ways.

That said, parts of that wave have also made me quiet. I have felt caught in a story that isn’t mine: a story about how awful it is to be pregnant, how boring it is to be at home with your baby, that you wished you’d never had children, that you feel like leaving your child or throw it out of the window – and I’m aware that these are the extremes, that these statements come from a necessary counterweight to the overpowering, romantic tale of motherhood.

I become so insecure when I say these things, I am afraid of being unsolidaric. I feel like apologising

But I try to listen to a voice inside myself that says "stop". What kind of a voice is that? I think it is a voice which has had to apologise throughout my adult life.

Apologise for being a mother. Apologise for the fact that it means an awful lot to me. Apologise for excusing myself from work events because I prefer to go home to my children. Apologise to my new husvand that my children come first. Apologise at work because I have to leave to pick up my children – and WANTING to pick-up. I designed my working life, so that I did not have to feel bad about leaving early.

I loved being pregnant – I read about women who feel invaded by the child in the womb, personally I experienced a joy for my body that I have not experienced elsewhere those three times that I carried a child in me and felt it grow. And a joy to subsequently birth it, breastfeed it, adjust my rhythm and my perception of the world to it – or at least together with it.

Being a mother demands the ultimate of me, and at the same time it is effortless – constantly this double sensation. The mother is latently within me, and the mother is someone I create myself, I am a mother, but I am also something else, and that something is also a part of the mother I am.

Mum is a role, mum is a function, mum is a choice, mum is another name that overwrites my own and both erases and exposes it. I am all my strengths and all my weaknesses. But with the heart at the forefront, everything will be alright – that’s what I always end up concluding.

How do you hope that your book will be read?

Charlotte: I hope the book will start some thoughts and emotions in the reader. That it will be a book that you feel like pulling out from the shelf to read and look at again and again. It is a heartfelt book and I hope it will be welcomed with open hearts.

Rebecca: I hope the book will work as small nudges, a provocative push, a loving mirror. That it will inspire thoughts in those who read it, about what it means for them to be a mum and to have a mum. And that it will be accepted in the way it was created; with love. Charlotte and I both feel the doublesidedness all the time, the different truths - equal in weight and relevance - about what it means to be a mum.