 Historically, the relation between mother and child was either excluded altogether from philosophical discourse or taken as mere preparation for a full expression of ethical selfhood. Prevalent Western views commonly invoke a tale of early dependency on the family followed by the eventual achievement of autonomy through narratives of separation and acquiring virtues of self-determination. In contrast, feminists in the care ethics and eros traditions revalue the mother-child relationship as a way of figuring the interdependency of the self. The infant’s development of creative communicative skills through affect attunement and face-to-face play explains the lifelong intensity of social bonds (Willett 1995, 2001, and 2014; Welsh 2013). Alternative traditions of maturation may feature instead a multiplicity of social roles, practices, and connections. Hilde Lindemann argues that caregiving exhibits key features of what she calls the practice of personhood of knowing when and how to hold and let go of parts of others identities (Lindemann 2014). Patricia Hill Collins offers glimpses of an erotic ethics of interconnectivity in her characterization of the fluidity of “othermothers” for black American communities (Collins 1990). Collins cites Audre Lorde’s distinct rendering of the term “eros” as not primarily sexual or narrowly maternal, but rather as an energetic drive that oppressive systems attempt to appropriate, but which may be regenerated through creative social practices. Cynthia Willett, expanding upon critical traditions of eros, argues that the laughing mother provides a subversive complement to the long-suffering, self-sacrificing maternal ideal (Willett and Willett 2019), while Mary Rawlinson advocates the generativity of mothers as an alternative to the proprietary notion of the modern self (Rawlinson 2016). Because all people are cared for by an adult or adults, and every individual is shaped by this emotionally charged interaction, the self is essentially formed in and through its relations with its caregivers (Chodorow 1981). For Chodorow, the rigidly differentiated, compulsively rational, and stubbornly independent self is a masculine defensive formation—a warped form of the relational self—that develops as a result of fathers’ negligible involvement in childcare.