Umbilical Noose: Maternal Hauntings and the Womb as a Portal on Mosher Mag

You didn’t ask to be born, right?

And yet here you are, flinching at the sound of her voice.

Still dreaming of drowning in warm red water. Still mistaking obligation for love.

You think the womb is soft, sacred, warm?

It is not.

The womb is teeth. It is a tunnel that ends where identity begins. It is a graveyard of forgotten twins and phantom limbs.

It is the first haunting, a velvet sarcophagus wrapped in love and screams. And no one talks about it, not the way they should. Not the way we will.

Let’s start with the lie: “Birth is beautiful.”

No. Birth is violence. Birth is eviction. You don’t come from a kiss, you come clawing your way out of blood and mucus and pain, screaming like something exorcised.

And your mother?

She is the first god. The first cage. The first sin.

The umbilical cord is sold to us as lifeline.

Connection. Nourishment. A symbol of unity.

But look again.

It’s a noose. A leash. A living tether to a body that isn’t yours, pumping in hormones and trauma and generations of inherited ache.

Every birth is a death. Not metaphorically. Literally.

A death of potential. Of privacy. Of peace. Of the “before.”

The womb was your original coffin. Plush-lined, yes, but still a trap. 

You were a parasite with a face. Fed by someone who had no say in your desires. You moved when she was still. You kicked when she cried.

And when the time came, you clawed your way out like something feral. Screaming. Covered in someone else's blood.

The lights. The tearing. The slicing of the cord, the only thing keeping you connected to the only god you’ve ever known.

From the moment you’re born, the first thing they do is separate you from her. Snip. Clamp. Cry.

You don’t remember it, but your body does.

Your nervous system has never stopped trying to crawl back.

The umbilical cord is not a lifeline. It’s a data cable, and she uploaded her unfinished business straight into your spine.

You were born with secondhand trauma in your lungs. You cried with her voice. You shivered under the weight of her secrets.

You weren’t just sipping vitamins and iron, you were absorbing everything.

Her fear. Her resentment. Her shame. Her broken dreams.

You can leave the house. You can change your name. You can go no-contact.

But you can’t crawl out of your origin story.

The maternal haunting isn’t her face at the window or her voice in your voicemail. It’s deeper. It’s cellular.

She’s in your blood pressure. She’s in the way you cry. She’s in the dreams you keep having where you’re small again, helpless again, wet and ashamed and watched.

Because here’s the truth: The mother doesn’t end at birth. She lingers.

In the mirror when your mouth twists like hers. In the way you scream at your own kid and hear her voice behind your teeth. In the sickness you carry, labeled “genetic” but what it really means is 'she handed you her curse.'

The maternal haunting is the inheritance of emotion unprocessed.

You are her grief in drag. Her body, repeating. Her ghost, walking.

You were told the womb is where life begins.

But what if it's where it slips through?

Forget science for a minute.

Forget the ultrasound, the diagrams, the placenta talk.

Let’s talk myth.

Let’s talk about why witches buried umbilical cords under thresholds.

Why folklore warns of changelings and miscarried twins.

Why dream journals are full of wet, red rooms and whispers in the dark.

The womb is not a cradle. It’s a gate. And gates don’t just open one way.

Cultures across time have whispered this in symbols and secrets.

The haunted uterus of possession narratives.

The birth-blood pact of demon mothers.

The C-section scar that won’t heal and whispers when you sleep.

Stillbirth. Postpartum psychosis. Dream-babies who grow teeth. These aren’t anomalies. They’re evidence.

Evidence that the womb is not just biological. It’s metaphysical. It’s a rift.

Where souls come and go. Where the veil gets thin. Where something else peers back and wonders if it can fit inside your lineage.

Grief. Spirits. Ancestral echoes. Lost sisters. Dead gods. Hungry shadows that smell like milk and rust.

Some people get possessed. Others get pregnant.

Same difference.

There’s always something else in the room.

Not just the foetus.

Something watching. Something waiting.

A presence just behind the breath. A cold hand on the inside of the ribs.

Ever wonder why so many cultures feared pregnant women?

Why temples barred them? Why ancient societies locked them away?

Because they weren’t seen as holy. They were seen as dangerous.

Let’s get personal.

Do you ever feel like you were never supposed to be here?

That your mother flinched when she looked at you, like she recognised something in you she never meant to pass on?

That’s because she did.

You don’t have to be a monster to resent your child.

And you don’t have to be evil to curse your offspring with your pain.

Sometimes a mother’s love is a knife in a velvet box.

Sometimes the womb is a panic room. And you were the intruder.

She might have smiled. She might have cradled you.

But part of her hated you.

You were proof she couldn’t leave. Proof she was never free. Proof her life was no longer hers.

And you? You felt it. Even in the dark.

You absorbed it through the cord. Drank it like poison in warm milk.

So when you feel guilty for existing, it’s because your body remembers what her mouth never said.

She made you from blood and fear and sex and hope and all the things she never said out loud.

And when she pushed you out, she didn’t just give you life.

She gave you her unfinished story. Her shadow. Her rot.

You aren’t her child.

You’re her echo. Her do-over. Her accident with teeth.

You think you’ve left her?

She’s still inside you.

Some of us were born unwanted. Others were born needed too much.

But some of us? We were never born right.

We came into this world sideways. Missing pieces. Carrying too many voices. Half-formed. Over-formed. Wrong.

We had to cut ourselves loose.

From mothers who cried when they looked at us. From legacies of broken wombs. From the lie that the past doesn’t bleed into the now.

There’s no tidy ending here. No “honour your mother” platitude.

This isn’t a call to forgiveness.

To the ones whose mothers haunted them with silence.

To the wombs that opened to monsters.

To the children who feel a little too full of someone else’s grief:

You are not unholy. You are not cursed. But you are haunted.

The umbilical noose isn’t forever.

But first, you have to stop calling it “love.”

For the freaks, by the freaks.

Thanks for reading. Stay strange.

✦ moshermag.com