I know someone who refers to these sorts of musings as “25 cent theories” – because that’s all they’re worth, of course.

As for genetic memory? I don’t know; but it feels pretty natural.

I don’t know of any mainstream researcher that would claim that you have a genetic memory relating to maternal behaviors. What I’d expect (though I am not an expert) would be something along the lines of: through your inheritance, you have a constitution that both provides both the hormones necessary to be differentially influenced by the presence of a child and cognitive mechanisms that allow you, as a woman on average, to be better suited for raising a child. You don’t have a memory of any behaviors that are required to raise a child; those likely come from gender-specific learning/conditioning that you experienced. But you’d have cognitive mechanisms like a greater ability to notice small changes in behavior, a mother’s intuition if you will, that help you respond more positively to your child’s needs.

Standard evopsyc disclaimers:
-the differences (like the majority of cognitive sex differences) are likely to be small, but nonetheless, they are worthy of study. For example, if you have a 3 point difference on a scale like IQ (M=100, SD=15), then you will have a 61/39 difference between groups if you select for abilities over 2SD.

-any individual can fall on any end of the scale, though the small differences will mean that the likelihood of each sex falling at a certain point will be different.