Today is Mother’s Day here in the UK. I’d like to celebrate all the many ways that we can and do mother one another – and all the ways that we can each mother ourselves, particularly through our creative practice.
I know that Mother’s Day falls on a different day in many other parts of the world and I know that Mother’s Day is complicated for so many people. Thank you for bearing with me as I try to unravel something I’m feeling today by writing about it.
(I’m also asking, why the singular possessive apostrophe in Mother’s Day? Why not celebrate Mothers’ Day? Why not all forms of mothers and mothering everywhere?)
I'm thinking about the other in the word mother and particularly about Pragya Agarwal’s brilliant book (M)otherhood: On the choices of being a woman in which she talks about the many shapes and bodies that motherhood takes, and deconstructs the shame and stigma that society continues to exert around whether women can, or choose to, give birth.
I am also thinking about mothering outside of any notions of gender or human form. The OED lists many different meanings for the noun mother, including:
‘a quality, condition, event, etc., that gives rise to or is the source of something. Also: a place regarded as engendering or nourishing something.’
It cites mother as ‘the source of a material substance or object,’ such as the mother used to make my favourite sourdough bread or apple cider vinegar.
Mother infuses our everyday language, describing acts and ideas that are a part of our embeddedness in a wider more-than- human world. The process of life-giving and nurturing is something that we do alongside our more-than-human family – the creatures and plants and earth and oceans.
When I think about the ways that I’m still learning to mother, I think about all the human and more-than-human beings who have mothered me in my life so far, teaching me, guiding me, showing me the way, including my own Mum who was the first person to read aloud to me, to encourage me to try the sounds of words on my own tongue, to think of books as companions on life’s great journey, to scribble my thoughts down in notebooks.
I feel very lucky that this opened the way to the page as a kind of mother to me, to pen and paper as patient healer and steadfast secret-keeper.
I’m still learning to mother myself onto the page, with kindness and self-compassion. It’s difficult and messy and joyful and sometimes terrifying.
Writing Experiments: Using writing to mother ourselves and one another
1. Think of your notebook as your private space. Find places where you can be alone with it – just you and your favourite pens and paper. Arrange pillows and blankets. Bring cups of tea. Curl up. Cocoon yourself. Keep yourself warm. Everything you write in this space is for you and the page only.
2. What words will you use to write to yourself with deep kindness and acceptance? What words will you use to honour who you are?
3. If your notebook is a mirror in which you see yourself reflected in your full beauty, without judgment, how will you describe what you see in words? What does it look like and feel like to be your full self?
4. What do you most need your notebook to be for you, right now? What qualities do you need it to embody? How do you need it to hold you or read you?
5. What qualities of mothering would you like to borrow from the world around you – from all the human and more than human beings – to mother yourself? This mothering could be fierce as well as tender, quiet as well as loud. Try some different shapes on for size. Find out how they feel.
6. Write a letter to a being in your life —human or more than human – who has mothered you in some way. Tell them how precious their engendering and nourishing is to you and in what ways.
Wishing you mothering of all kinds, today and every day.
