Mother Tongue #9 2025

Mother Tongue is a biannual print magazine that interrogates (and celebrates) modern motherhood through inclusive stories about art, sex, pop culture, politics, food and a few things in between. 
It’s not about kids or how to parent them: it’s about the nuanced lives we are living—as mothers, and much more. 

Issue 9 is full of women sharing, with great conviction, how they see the world (and themselves in it): filmmaker Mary Bronstein makes a horror show of the maternal experience; writer Alexa Wilding asserts her existence amidst illness in the best way she knows how, and our cover star, Erykah Badu is, in her own words “pregnant with possibility.” Caro Claire Burke confronts millennial “cringe” and wonders why we’re so afraid of it; artist Carmen Winant takes us on an all-American road trip (with her mom), and we publish a short fiction piece for the first time, a ghost story, no less, by the young writer Yukti Narang. There’s also talk of earlobes, an account of fertilization as you never knew it, poetry by Kate Baer and Hala Alyan, an ode to frivolity, and a reexamination of Linda and Paul McCartney’s supposedly perfect love story—yet another reminder that things are not always as they appear.