Motherly Love

5 minute read

It’s Mother’s Day here today. In many bedrooms, mums are being brought cute homemade cards and dodgy breakfasts carried on trays made with heartfelt love and care. Whether prompted and assisted by teachers or co-parents, older siblings or grandparents or just from the kids themselves - that perfectly imperfect display is gorgeous for many of us. And it’s hard for many of us - often complicated and frequently difficult. And to others, it’s simply not a thing. A Hallmark day, they say. Made to make money others say.

Bullshit I say. To me, any day that sparks thought and love beyond the regular is a good thing. But each, as always, to their own.

So, today on Mother’s Day, where it’s just Another Day, this is just a note to say hello.

Just a note to say I see you.

Just a note to say that whether or not you are a mother of humans, that mother energy is within you. The mother energy is in all of us. We - all of us - are nurturers. We nurture our families, whatever shape they are - with siblings, cousins, aunts or uncles, or without, with parents still, or without. With or without teenagers, toddlers, tinies or adults. We may or may not be raising humans, but we are raising ourselves, our friends, our pets, our workplaces and our communities. And that is powerful.

The mother energy is in us all.

Personally, I am raising two young girls. My eldest turns 13 tomorrow, the younger is 10. I have been the only parent on site for most of their lives. Our story is not unusual, there are a lot of funny-shaped families such as our newly formed blended one. Ours is busy, chaotic, intense, hard and fun. And it is beautiful. I feel lucky.

Is it how I thought my life would turn out? No, it isn’t. Like lots of us, I accepted the conditioning of generations prior, the pre-planned vision of a marriage, a house and then kids.

That’s now a blurry visual for me. Entirely irrelevant. Utterly redundant.

10 years ago I became a solo mum with a two-year-old, an eight week old, bills to pay and no job. All that conditioning of how life ‘should be’ goes out the window and you just get on with how life actually is. You just get on with mothering as hard as you can, as best you can, and putting one foot in from of the other - paying rent because you can’t save for a mortgage, navigating real life as best you can.

As best you can.

In that time, and the years long after, I was mothered right back by my friends, my new colleagues, my family, and some kind strangers who may never know the impact they had on my life.

Here is the thing - mothering is in us all. We do it when we help people. We mother when we see a need and answer it - whatever that may be. We mother when we give our company and compassion. We mother in the big and small things - mainly in the small.

We mother when we send a text to someone who is going through something shit, just to say we see them. We mother when we drop a tin of gin and bunch of tulips on a pal’s doorstep whose kid fell and has been in A&E all day - just to acknowledge a crap day wasn’t lived unnoticed.

Mothering is ‘I see you’.

It doesn’t change the direction of someone’s experience. That’s not the goal of mothering. Good mothering fosters independence and autonomy - it is a force of bearing witness, of holding, of walking alongside, offering guidance, sitting in silence, maybe holding hands.

My friends are mothers to me.

They are different to my own mother, whom I am lucky still to have. My relationship with her is about other things - it’s about me in midlife, as a mother myself, navigating space with her in her older life, whilst still being mindful of me as my younger self. And her in hers. Two adult women living out their own life paths. It’s layered. It’s sometimes complicated. It’s two mothers together, who each made decisions generations apart but finding harmony. It’s the collision and combination of life’s paths. Like braided hair - intertwined, bonded, borne from one root, yet separate.

It is, I imagine, how it is for many of us at this age.

My friend-mothers are about the day-to-day. They are about the text check-ins, sending funny memes from The Midult or videos from Mama Still Got It and Celeste Barber. They are about laughing a lot, crying quite a lot and sometimes complaining. They are about honesty and give the airspace for us to be ourselves.

Mothering shows up in lots we do as midlifers. It is present in our work environments - I think they call it ‘soft skills’- which always makes me laugh - there’s nothing bloody soft about it! It’s hard-won life experience, all bundled together in a practical attitude towards collaboration and creativity. It is heart-led leadership. It may be called kinder, but there is nothing weak about it. Mothering is strong. It’s hardy. It is resilient, resourceful and robust. It sees between the lines, beyond the surface and around corners. As women we are intuitive - we sense what’s really going on and we know what is needed to help, heal or seal a deal. And we do this all around us, almost every single day.

I believe that it is in midlife when we truly learn to mother ourselves.

This time of life is when we tune back into who we are as individuals and feel our way to fulfil our needs. Our personal mother stories can be hard, they can involve much suffering, loss, shattered dreams and hardship, either as we were mothered or as we tried to become mothers or if we are not mothers by choice or circumstance. It’s all complicated and personal and private. But when we tune back in with empathy - when we feel it out - we return to the mother energy in us all and we can begin to re-nurture ourselves. We may or may not mother others, but we can mother our own damn selves. And that kind of motherly love is transformative.

That may look different to lots of us. For me, it’s via meditation, going to therapy, learning to set a boundary - (and sticking to upholding a boundary!) - and learning how not to people-please. My young life was based on people-pleasing, I don’t think I knew who I was until I was 40. That saddens and gladdens me equally. I’ve lived a lot of my life feeling I had to be appealing in various ways to others. Eh, hello bullshit! But it’s only since 40, that I learnt that in any real way. It gladdens me that I will live the rest of my life with this knowledge. It’s a new sort of self-belief. Brought to me by mothering myself.

So, here’s the thing…

If you are learning more about yourself - you are mothering yourself.

If you are, at last (or always) standing up for yourself - you are mothering yourself.

If you are making changes to your lifestyle, your relationships, your stress levels, your workload so that you can live lighter and brighter - you are mothering yourself.

If you are prioritising things that are important to you - doesn’t matter what they are, they only need to be important to you - you are mothering yourself.

If you are prioritising peace, health, self-acceptance and embracing calm - you are mothering yourself.

If you are learning to love yourself by speaking up for what you need and believe in - you are mothering yourself.

If you make a huge change, that feels terrifying but so necessary because belief in a better way pervades your dreams - you are mothering yourself.

If you choose to stand by yourself and others who need your voice - you are mothering both yourself and them.

If you trust yourself - you are mothering yourself - and if you use that hard-won self-belief to help others in a way that is healthy and guide our young people to their own paths of positive autonomy, you are then, by that act of authentic grace, mothering everybody.

Motherly Love

5 minute read

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