This discussion of Miri Rozmarin's “Maternal Silence” (this issue) situates Rozmarin's article within a wider literature on motherhood and writing before moving on to argue that although a powerful account of maternal ethics, Rozmarin's call for a certain stepping aside from maternal narrative has particular resonance with discourses of maternal masochism. I argue that the child's “open future” cannot be protected by maternal silence as, following Jean Laplanche (2007), both maternal and social “noise” precipitate the possibility of a future that is never fully open. I close by linking maternal narrative with maternal temporality and suggest that this may entail an acceptance of what refuses development, what resists time.