What the Qur'an says about the women who carried us
The Qur'an holds mothers in high regard, and it does so by telling their stories rather than by praising motherhood in the abstract. Gratitude to God arrives in the same breath as gratitude to the woman who carried him through weakness upon weakness. The debt is named in the body: the carrying, the two years of nursing, the strength that was spent.
The longest portrait belongs to the mother of Musa. She is told to nurse her son and then to put him in the river, and the reassurance attached to that command, "Do not fear and do not grieve", is fastened to an instruction that would frighten any parent alive. She does it. Then the Qur'an says something it did not have to say: "The heart of Musa's mother became empty." She almost gave him away, and would have, "had we not steadied her heart". The wobble is recorded as carefully as the obedience.
What she is promised is his return, and she gets it, "that her eyes might find comfort and she would not grieve". The relief is measured on a small and physical scale: a child put back into her arms.
Two more mothers stand near each other in one family. The wife of Imran promises the child in her womb to God's service, then delivers a daughter and reports it as though something has gone wrong: "My Lord, I have given birth to a girl". The vow is accepted, and the girl becomes Maryam. A generation later Maryam is in labor under a palm tree, alone, wishing "If only I had died before this and been forgotten". That sentence was kept. Nothing in the account edits it down.
Where the Qur'an corrects a custom of its time, it does so by settling who a mother actually is: "Their mothers are only those who gave birth to them." A man could once cast off a wife by declaring her his mother's back, and the verse refuses the fiction. Motherhood is a fact about a body and a history, and no phrase can assign or withdraw it.
If you came here holding your own mother in mind, alive or gone, the pages on parents and grief sit closer to that. This one stays with the mothers the Qur'an names by name, and with the plain fact underneath it: everyone reading was brought out of a womb knowing nothing, then given hearing and sight.