Motherhood Quote by Margaret Atwood

Atwood takes the nagging, domestic prophecy of “wait till you’re older” and turns it into something colder: a theory of causality where the universe behaves like a mother with receipts. The line is funny in that dry, Atwoodian way - “their mothers” arriving like an overdue bill collector - but the humor is a lure. It gets you to lower your defenses before the punch lands: the consequences aren’t moral, they’re structural.

The phrasing “finally caught up” suggests adulthood as pursuit, not progress. You can run for years on borrowed confidence, believing you’ve outgrown supervision, only to discover the supervision has merely changed form. Mothers stand in for systems that remember: the body, the state, history, patriarchy, climate, capitalism - forces that don’t need your awareness to enforce their terms. That’s why the most chilling clause is “things you didn’t even know you’d done.” Atwood is interested in complicity that happens through ignorance, convenience, or cultural default. You don’t have to commit a dramatic sin; you can just participate normally and still be implicated.

The intent isn’t to scold so much as to diagnose how accountability actually arrives: sideways, delayed, and often misattributed. It’s a critique of the fantasy that innocence equals noninvolvement, and of the comforting idea that consequences are always proportional and legible. In Atwood’s world, the real punishment is epistemic: you don’t even get the dignity of understanding the charge until after the sentence has started.