The Push: Mother. Daughter. Angel. Monster?

“It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother’s heartbeat. Actually, the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother’s blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear.”

This quote is from American drummer and mythologist Layne Redmond’s 1997 book When the Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Women. Redmond takes the point farther, saying that these vibrations reach a human being when they’re still an egg in their mother’s ovary—and even when the mother herself is a four-month-old fetus. This concept holds special relevance to The Push in that the author’s chief concern is how trauma passes down through generations, particularly between women. Although Redmond finds beauty in the eternal, inherited rhythms of the human body, the author uses this concept as a jumping-off point to discuss how the seeds of psychological and physical abuse are formed and sown before Blythe or Violet are even conceived.

“Motherhood is no different. We all expect to have, and to marry, and to be, good mothers.” 

Across virtually every culture, geographic location, and even species is a common belief that mothers should take care of their children. A mother’s abandoning a child is considered the ultimate perversion of the natural order. However, this is precisely what Etta does to Cecilia, and what Cecilia does to Blythe. Nevertheless, to conclude that this makes Etta and Cecilia “bad people” is reductive and unfair, particularly given the circumstances surrounding each woman’s pregnancy.