“It’s All About Me Because My Children Are the People I Care About”: Valuing Domestic Shrine Traditions as Maternal Labor and Rethinking Maternal Sacrifice

This chapter examines Bengali American mothers’ domestic shrine traditions as a maternal labor through which mothers not only care for their children but also care for their own wellbeing and fortify themselves for the daily and extraordinary challenges of motherhood. Because domestic shrine traditions have historically been viewed as a means for women to fulfill their socio-religious duty to ensure the wellbeing of their families, some scholars have characterized these traditions as essentially self-sacrificial. This chapter complicates this characterization. I draw from the scholarship of maternal subjectivity, principally Mara Benjamin’s The Obligated Self (2018), and examine the selfhood of the mothers I worked with as inter-dependent and, therefore, affected by the wellbeing of their children. To illustrate this claim I share the stories of three Bengali American mothers I worked with whose children faced life-threatening or life-altering health crises. I show how each mother valued worship at their home shrines as a source of comforting assurance that deities would care for their children, and as a self-fortifying reminder of their own capability as mothers.