Mother’s Day came and went this year. Each time the holiday passes, my wisdom expands to see the day in more enriched and atypical ways. To be a mother is not the same as mothering. The capacity to mother is loaded and enmeshed with historical complexities baked in generational trauma, community connection, modalities of love and more.
The day is worth celebrating, reflecting, and holding space for all the ways to be and feel. I celebrate my mother, my grandmother, my late grandmother, and the maternal ancestors past and present. The love and wisdom passed down are as complex as they are priceless.
I celebrate the capacity to choose mothering intentionally with my son. The capacity to care for plants and watch them grow. The capacity to love other’s children as if they were my own. The capacity to love my friends tenderly and give them the space and reminders to be. I accept the capacity to allow mothering to not end with just my mother. Nurturing myself and tending to the fuller pieces of me has been a marvelous work of art and wonder.
Mothering has no gender, it can be in you if you carry the capacity to nurture, cultivate, and restore. My version of mothering sees that many of us are raising something, somebody, or something. Many and most I’d argue have the divine capacity to be nurturing. The work focused on leaving life better than you found it remains in your power.
