Parenting & Family Quote by Tracey Emin

There is a brutal kind of intimacy in Emin putting her mother’s veto on the record: not a tidy origin story, but a live wire of judgment that still crackles “even now.” The line works because it refuses closure. Emin isn’t recounting youthful rebellion from a safe distance; she’s admitting that maternal authority can remain psychologically current long after you’re technically free. That little tag is the twist of the knife: time hasn’t softened the verdict, and success hasn’t redeemed her in the one arena that’s supposed to be unconditional.

The intent is less confession than provocation. Emin knows the cultural script that treats motherhood as a moral completion, especially for women approaching later adulthood. By presenting her mother’s fear as practical rather than puritanical - “destroying my life” - she sidesteps sentimental talk about “maternal instinct” and goes straight to the economics of selfhood: children as an existential cost, art as the fragile asset. It’s an argument that lands harder coming from an artist whose work has repeatedly made her own body, trauma, and desire the medium. If your practice depends on radical self-exposure, parenthood isn’t just a lifestyle change; it’s a re-routing of attention, time, and identity.

Subtext: the mother may be protecting her, but also policing her. Emin leaves that ambiguity intact, letting care and control occupy the same sentence. The cultural context is contemporary Britain’s lingering suspicion of the “difficult” woman - the one who won’t be domesticated - reframed here as a family diagnosis. It’s not society shaming her directly; it’s society speaking through Mum.