This thread is so interesting to read ....
My feeling is that it touches on the whole psychodrama of the maternal. Most of us arrive at this thread having enunciated ourselves through the heroic story of self-hood: We look back on our lives, and tell it like a Hollywood film, with a s/hero: ourselves. Our story, of the evolution of ourselves, takes place against a background, a gerund, of facts and material, whose significance is only donated according to its impact on that heroic story (of how we became ourselves) -- did it hinder us? did it enable us?; otherwise it is just "dead" matter.
For that "matter" to become autonomous is just too much for the story. The story would become un-tellable, preposterous, incomprehensible.
The most important matter in that story is, of course, the mother -- who birthed us, and who still in Western societies, takes on most of the role of parental, nurturing care. It is, I would say, still of paramount importance that she be, psychologically, inert, a gerund, a background. Her autonomy, her assertion of self-hood, as self, threatens to make the story go pear-shaped.
Hence the real psychic pain people can experience in the disruption of that narrative.
Of course, as mothers, we know the "secret" - that gerund requires a bloody load of work. Self-effacing work, necessarily. I think sometimes women can get quite upset at the prospect of autonomy in "other mothers" because they feel it will implicitly diminish and devalue the importance and significance of that work.
Cards on table - I think it is no longer feasible to expect women to do that work of the self-effacing gerund. If only because it is quite clear that the workerist discourses of late capitalism no longer permit it. It is therefore necessary that we start, now, the work of re-negotiating that story of self-hood to incorporate the (occasional) instances of the autonomy of the background - of mothers, in particular.
Also, just think, women have a history of having suffered under the weight of being the gerund. Women raising children knew that the male child would go on to the story of being Odysseus, the girl child to being Penelope. So they tended to donate quite different experiences of the gerund to those children. And I think we can say they had a different relationship with power.
We have to create ways of being both Penelope and Odysseus: for ourselves, and for our children.
Imo.