" when a woman herself becomes pregnant, it is as if she links directly back into an intact matrilineal network where all the mothers, all the wombs, all the foetuses and infants are connected. This does something peculiar to maternal temporality: it has the ability to stretch time out in linear directions to the distant past and future, and equally to concertina in upon itself to a point that is always in the present. Folding out, folding in, the past and the future, hinged together like delicate butterfly wings. In the way that matryoshka dolls can be opened out and displayed in a long line from smallest to biggest, or packed one inside the other, becoming one body, one space, one time. "

― Pippa Grace , Mother in the Mother: Looking back, looking forward – women’s reflections on maternal lineage