Mother Country chronicles the story of a driven young Palestinian woman seeking to understand her relationship with her mother. She is married at a young age, 19, leaving home to live with her new husband, where she is lonely and spends most of her time with her mother-in-law, doing the same chores she did at home with her own mother. She has a first child, a daughter, and enrolls in local university. She is extremely busy juggling school and motherhood, but her deep sense of malaise and a fear of ending up like her mother — in a loveless marriage full of loneliness and fear — she forces herself to stay busy.

A second child, a boy this time, and she continues her advancement, getting a masters degree and eventually starting to teach at the local community college. Her relatives are all disapproving, as none of the other women stray out of their domestic roles. But despite having achieved everything she wanted, the woman still feels like something is wrong and struggles with her mental health. She decides to get a divorce, something akin to "setting her life on fire" in the community she is in. Her mother seems to understand at first, but neither her husband nor her father do, caring more about their reputations in the community, and her mother eventually sides with them as well. Then her mother dies, and all the woman can do is to try and reconcile all her thoughts and feelings and seek a new life.