The Disappearing

My father is leaving.

Not all at once, which would at least be a thing you could stand at the edge of and mourn cleanly. He is leaving the way the tide leaves, so gradually that you keep thinking it has stopped, and then you look up and another long stretch of him is simply gone. It was a stroke first, that took the first piece of him. Then the dementia came in behind it, and has been quietly carrying off the rest ever since. The names. The threads of a sentence. Most of his speech, lately. He still knows me. That much has stayed, and I am grateful for it past saying. But he has gone quiet now, and lives somewhere deep inside himself, behind eyes that still, thank God, warm when they land on me.

Dementia is a strange grief, my loves, and I did not understand it until I was inside it. You lose the person while they are still sitting in front of you. There is a name the researchers give it, the mourning of the living. They call it ambiguous loss. The grief with no funeral and no clean end, because the person is both gone and not gone, every single day.

And underneath it, where I expected only sorrow, I have found something else. A release. And lately, more and more, something even quieter and more surprising. Something close to peace.

The Dinner

Let me tell you about the last time I sat with him.

I flew back, over the ocean, last year, and we all went out to dinner together, our small family gathered round him. We sat and ate and he could barely find the words any more, and mostly just looked out at us. I felt how far back into himself he had gone. There was a version of me, not so long ago, who would have sat at that table with her heart breaking.

But at some point I reached over and took his hand. And I told him I loved him. I told him there was nothing but love here. Nothing he had to do, or say, or be. That we were all right, he and I. That it was all all right. And it was. It was so simple it astonished me. A hand, and a few plain words, and somehow the whole thing was complete.

And something dissolved in me that night that I had been carrying for the better part of thirty years.

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What I Was Waiting For

Because here is what I had been carrying.

For most of my life there was a small and almost desperate hope beneath everything I built. That one day my father would truly see me. Not the version of me that was useful, or impressive, or easy to be proud of from a distance. Me. The actual one. I wrote about the wider version of this, in a piece I called Fatherless. About a whole culture of us raised by fathers who were present and absent in the same breath, there at the table and gone somewhere behind the eyes. My father was one of those. A good man in many of the ways that get counted, and behind the eyes, in the place I most wanted to reach, somewhere I was never quite let in. I knocked at that door for the better part of fifty years.

And there was one particular shape the longing took, one I have not said out loud to many people. He never came to see me. I built a whole life out here in America, thirty years of it, a life I was proud of, and he never once got on the plane. He never made it here. And for years, God help me, I let that mean the only thing a waiting child knows how to make it mean. That I was not worth the journey. That if he had truly loved me, he would have come.

I know better now. The truth, the one I can finally hold without it cutting me, is that my father loved me. He loved me the whole time, in the way that he was able. It simply was not the way I needed. Those are two different facts, and they are both true, and learning to hold them in the same hand has been most of the work of my middle life. He gave what he had. It was not what I was asking for. And he loved me. All of it, at once, true.

The day I was waiting for, when he would turn and see me whole and say the words, is not coming now. The stroke and the dementia have seen to that. That ship has sailed. And at that dinner, with his hand in mine, I understood that I had stopped needing it to come. The waiting had ended without my noticing, somewhere along the way, the way you finally set down a bag so heavy you had forgotten you were holding it.

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The Gift

And in its place, the oddest gift of this whole long leaving.

The stroke took something. The dementia is taking the rest. But between them, they have taken the armour too. Whatever it was that kept my father contained and defended and just out of reach all those years, the emotional distance of a certain kind of man of his time, it has fallen away. He cries easily now. It frustrates him, I can see that it does, this new nearness of his own tears. But for me, I will be honest, it is a blessed relief. The feeling was always in there. I am simply, finally, allowed to see it.

Because that is the gift, the strange and holy joke of it. He may not be able to see me any more, not in the deep way I spent a lifetime waiting for. But I can finally see him. The seeing I was always longing to receive, I get to give instead. I get to look at my father, softened and open and at last unguarded, and see him clearly, and love exactly what I see. It is the wrong way round from how I always pictured it. It turns out to be more than enough.

Across the Ocean

Most of the time, of course, I cannot be there. The ocean sits between us, and I reach him the way the distance allows. On the calls. And in a quieter, deeper way I want to tell you about plainly, because it has become the truest thread between us.

Some of what holds me steady is plain science. Researchers at the University of Iowa found that people with Alzheimer’s go on feeling an emotion long after they have forgotten what caused it. The memory of a visit fades within the hour. The warmth it leaves behind stays. The emotional life, the lead researcher said, is alive and well. And doctors are beginning, at last, to study terminal lucidity, the way some people with advanced dementia surface near the very end, whole and clear for a moment. They cannot fully explain it. But it tells me what I have always known in my body. He is in there. The whole of him. The disease is a curtain. Not an erasure.

And the rest, I know the way I know my own name. We can reach one another without words. I believe it with my whole being, and more than believe it, I have lived it. The Telepathy Tapes devoted an episode to exactly this, to dementia, one called Alzheimer’s and Telepathy. In it, a man named Dan Goerke describes how his wife, Denise, lost her speech to early-onset Alzheimer’s, and how, as her words fell away, something else opened wide between them. He began to sense her. Wordlessly. Her thoughts and her feelings arriving whole, in her own unmistakable voice, from somewhere beneath the disease. And he was not the only one. Family after family told the same astonishing story. A connection that outlived the loss of language, and slipped below words into something older and truer.

I had been doing this with my own father long before I had a name for it. Reaching for him in the silence, and feeling him reach back. So from here, an ocean away, I still myself and I go to him, soul to soul, in the place beneath the wreckage of his memory, and I find him there. Every single time. The body forgets. The names go. The speech goes. The soul does not. The soul can be spoken to, and it answers. The part of him I am reaching for is precisely the part that nothing, not the stroke, not the dementia, not the whole grey Atlantic between us, will ever take.

The Letter Was Always to Me

Somewhere in all of this, with his hand in mine at that table and then carrying him home in my heart across the water, I finally learned the thing my own work has spent thirty years trying to teach me, the thing I held out for everyone but myself. The seeing I waited a lifetime for was never going to come from him. It was not his to give, not in the measure I needed. The one who had to turn at last and see me, and say the words, and mean them, was me.

So I say them now. To the girl who knocked at that door for fifty years, who became so capable and so bright in the hope that it might buy what love is meant to give for free. I see you. I see how hard you worked to be worth the journey. And it was never, not once, your fault that he could not make it. You can come home now. I have got you, and you do not have to earn a single thing.

That is the love letter. It was addressed to him for half a century. It turns out it was always meant for me.

What He Gave Me

And here is what I am left with, now that the longing has gone quiet. Not the long list of what he could not give. The list of what he did.

Because my father gave me a great deal, and these days, more and more, that is the man I think of. The wonderfully eccentric one. The one with the quirky, surprising laugh. The grafter, industrious to his bones, deeply and quietly capable, who could turn his hand to almost anything and usually did. The practical man who grew his own food and baked his own bread. The one who made his own wine, and went ballroom dancing of all the glorious things, and lost himself happily for years in vintage motorbikes and camper vans, in the particular obsessions that made him so completely and unmistakably himself.

That is who I think of now. Not the closed door. The whole, odd, capable, dancing, bread-making, wine-making man who stood behind it. I think of him and I find, to my own quiet surprise, that I simply enjoy him. That I am grateful. For his quirks and his graft and his strange and lovely passions and the life he built with his own two hands.

In this moment, sitting here with all of it, there is nothing left to be upset about. There is only a daughter, grateful for her father. That is where the long road has finally brought me, and I did not expect it, and it is the most peaceful place I have stood in a very long time.

The Fathers We Are Calling Forward

And yet, releasing my father into all this gratitude has not left me only with him. It has left me with a fierce new clarity about what we are missing in the world, and must call back.

Because the wound my father carried was never only his. He was handed it. A boy of his time, taught that feeling was weakness and tenderness was unmanly, that a father provides and protects and presides but does not, heaven forbid, weep at the table or say the words I love you, I see you, I am proud of you, out loud where they could be heard. He spent a whole life behind glass because someone had told him, long ago, that a man belongs there. It took a stroke and the unmaking of his mind to finally let him out from behind it. That is not a personal failing. It is a tragedy with a thousand years standing behind it.

So on this Father’s Day, my loves, I want to do more than grieve, and more than be grateful. I want to call something forward.

I want to honour the good men. The ones already doing it. The fathers choosing, often with no model of their own to work from, to stay present behind their own eyes. To see their daughters, and to say so, in words. To weep at the table. To bless their children out loud instead of leaving them a lifetime of guessing. To stand in a masculine that protects without imprisoning, that is strong enough to be tender, that uses its power to witness rather than to withhold. This is the noble masculine. It is not soft and it is not weak, and the world is quietly starving for it.

To those men, doing the unglamorous, history-altering work of being a father who can actually be reached: thank you. Every daughter you truly see is a fifty-year wait that some grown woman will now never have to endure. Every son you let watch you cry is a boy who will not have to wait for his mind to fail before he is allowed to feel. Keep going. We see you, even on the days the culture does not.

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Father’s Day

So. Dad.

I am not waiting any more. Not because I gave up on you. Because I found the seeing in the one place it could ever have come from, and because, over a quiet dinner with your hand in mine, I stopped needing you to be anything other than exactly who you are. Which is my father. Eccentric, gentle, disappearing, and mine.

I cannot always be in the room. It is a deep pain in my life that an ocean sits between us as you go. But I have found there is a place I can reach you that no water touches and no disease can close, and I go there as often as I can, and I sit with your soul, and I am, in the only way left to me, the warm thing in your room.

And I say it now, out loud and in the silence both, the thing I came all this way to learn how to say. Thank you. For all of it. For everything you did give me, which turns out to have been so much more than I could see while I was still busy counting what you did not.

I see you, Dad. I am proud of you. I love you. There is nothing but love here.

And to every good man being called, this Father’s Day, to stand up and be reachable: so do we. So does the whole aching world. We are waiting for you at a door that, this time, is going to open.

In love and devotion,

Elayne Kalila

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The Text Over Tea

I was making my morning tea when the text came in.

It was from one of my dearest friends, and it said: look what is happening now. This is how Emperor Trump is celebrating his eightieth birthday. And underneath it, the photographs.

WTAF.

That was the whole of my response, for a good minute, standing in my kitchen with the kettle still going. I am a mystery school teacher with three decades of training in holding the wide and patient view, and what rose up in me, fully formed, was four letters, and not one of them holy.

Because there it was, in the pictures. A steel cage, an actual eight-sided fighting cage, put up on the South Lawn of the White House, under a black canopy that someone had decided to name The Claw. Men inside it, beating each other bloody, for the eightieth birthday of a president who sat at the front in a box beside the man who owns the spectacle and the man who owns the platform it streamed on. The fighters had walked out through the doors of the Oval Office. One of them appeared to skim a copy of the Declaration of Independence on his way to the fight. Jets crossed the sky. The closed captioning, and I truly wish I were inventing this, was sponsored by a cryptocurrency with the president’s own name on it.

My friend called him Emperor Trump as a joke. Standing there with my tea going cold, I did not think it was a joke.

Because if you have been waiting for a sign, a real one, that we are in the last days of this particular civilisation, I think we can stop waiting. This is what it looks like. We have all read about this part in the history books, and somehow assumed we would be spared having to watch it live, on a Sunday, over breakfast.

So I did the only things there were to do. I stood with the old cold drop in my body. I said a quiet prayer to all of my well ancestors that what I was looking at was the fever of a dying thing, the malaise before the end, and not the rude good health of something that means to stay. And then I asked the question that actually matters, the one underneath the WTAF.

What do we do with this?

We Have Seen This Film

We have seen this exact film before. We have just forgotten we were in it.

When Rome could no longer feed its people, it learned to entertain them instead. The phrase the poet used was panem et circenses. Bread and circuses. Give the crowd enough grain to keep it standing and enough blood to keep it cheering, and it will not ask the harder questions about who has taken everything else. The Colosseum was not built at the height of the Republic. It was built as the thing underneath was rotting. The gladiators, the emperor in his box, the roar of the stands, the coin with his face stamped on it. That was not a civilisation at its strongest. That was a civilisation learning to perform strength because the real thing was draining out of it.

So when I watch men brawl on the lawn of the most powerful house in the world, for the birthday of one man, with his face on the money and his name on the captions, I am not watching something new. I am watching something very, very old. The empire has reached the part of the story where it stops governing and starts staging.

The poll, for what it is worth, told the same tale. Most Americans, asked, did not think this belonged on the White House lawn. Even most of his own side did not. This was not a hungry people demanding its games. This was an emperor throwing himself a party and calling it the nation’s.

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What the Spectacle Is For

A spectacle this size is never only a spectacle. It does a job.

Its job is to fill the frame. To be so loud, so bright, so impossible to look away from, that the eye never drifts to the edges, to the quieter footage of what is actually happening to the country while the jets are roaring. The prices people cannot meet. The corruption running in plain sight. The slow, methodical taking apart of the things that were supposed to protect ordinary lives. A cage match on the lawn is a very effective way of making sure you are looking at the cage, and not at the hand deftly going through your pockets.

And there was one line, from the government’s own lawyers, that told the whole truth without meaning to. When people went to court to stop the fights, the Justice Department wrote that the objectors could always just avert their gazes for the weekend.

Avert your gaze. Look away. That is the instruction the dying empire gives, every single time. It is the one instruction we must refuse.

The Hungry Men

Now. I want to be careful, my loves, because the easy thing here is to sneer at the men in that crowd, and I will not do it.

The men cheering at the edge of that cage are not my enemy. They are hungry. And not only for the brawl.

I have written before about the boys we are losing, the young men handed a culture that offers them no rite of passage, no elders, no initiation, no honourable way to become men, and then sells them a counterfeit.

The cage is the cathedral of that counterfeit.

It speaks to something real and ancient in the male soul, the longing for the test, for courage, for the heroic, for a threshold you cross and come out changed. That longing is holy. Men have always needed it. Every culture that loved its men built them a true version of it.

Ours did not. Ours tore down the temple and put up an Octagon. It took the deep hunger for meaning and sold it back as blood and branding and a flag draped over a shoulder for the cameras. The men are not contemptible for being moved by it. They are being fed junk because the kitchen that once made the real food has been boarded up. The hunger is true. The thing being served to it is not.

A Civilisation That Forgot How to Feed Its Soul

This is the part I keep coming back to, the part underneath all of it.

A civilisation reaches for blood-spectacle when it has forgotten how to feed the soul.

And ours forgot a long time ago. This is the world I have been calling motherless across all of these essays, the one severed from the Great Mother, from the sacred, from the feminine face of God, from any sense that life itself is holy and worth tending rather than conquering. A culture cut off from that does not know how to nourish its people, so it learns to distract them. It cannot offer meaning, so it offers spectacle. It cannot give bread, so it gives circuses.

I will say, because I always do, that this is one way of reading it and not the only one. But it is the truest reading I have. What is staging itself on that lawn, the dominance, the conquest, the worship of the strongman, the cage as the highest sacrament a society can offer its young men, is the late, decadent face of an order that was always going to end here. An order built on power over rather than care for. It has run out of everything except the show.

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What Is Actually Dying

So yes. I think we are watching the dying of a civilisation.

I want to be honest about that, because I think a lot of us feel it in the body and have been told we are catastrophising.

We are not catastrophising. Something is ending. You can feel it, the way you can feel weather coming.

But here is the thing I need you to hold, because it is the whole of why I am not in despair.

The end of an empire is not the end of the world.

Those are not the same, and the empire would very much like you to believe they are, because if its death feels like the death of everything, you will fight to keep it alive. You will cling to the very thing that is crushing you, out of terror of what is on the other side.

An empire is not the world. It is one arrangement of the world. A brutal, exhausted, four-thousand-year-old arrangement that is finally, visibly running out of road. And in the oldest story I carry, the one of Inanna going down through the seven gates into the underworld, the death is never the end of the tale. The death is the middle of it. She has to be stripped of everything and hung on the hook and undone completely before she can rise, remade, as Queen of both worlds. Things have to be allowed to die so that something truer can be born from the compost of them.

That is where I think we are. Not at the end. In the underworld. In the long dark middle, watching the old king stage his last and loudest games while the ground shifts under all of it.

Do Not Avert Your Gaze

So here is what I would ask of you.

• Do not avert your gaze. They told you to, in writing, and that alone should tell you it is the one thing worth refusing.

• Watch it. Witness it clearly, name it honestly, and do not let anyone convince you that the spectacle is the same thing as strength, or that the noise is the same thing as a future.

• And then turn, with whatever you have, toward the other work. The unglamorous, deeply unspectacular work of building the thing that comes after. The tending. The feeding. The remembering of how to care for one another and for the living world. Everything the empire forgot. Everything the Mother never did.

Empires fall, my loves. They always have. They are falling now, on a lawn, under a canopy called The Claw, with the cameras rolling and the captions sponsored.

Let it fall. And then let us go and build the thing that actually feeds people.

In love and devotion,

Elayne Kalila

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Two Languages, One Conversation

Venus crossed into Leo today, and stays until the 9th of July. Twenty-six days.

Let me say something about how I hold this before we go in. I do not think a planet reaches down and rearranges your life. I hold astrology the way I have come to hold most things, as one map among many, useful precisely to the degree that it names something already true. The old sky-watchers were not fools. They watched, for thousands of years, and noticed that certain seasons of the sky rhymed with certain seasons of the human heart, and they gave those rhymes names. Venus in Leo is one of those names. I am not asking you to believe in it. I am asking you to notice what it points at.

Because what it points at, this year, lines up almost uncomfortably with the thing I have been writing about for months. Menopause. The way our bodies somewhere in this passage, stop helping us lie. The confronting, intimate honesty of it.

This transit and that passage are, to my eye, the same conversation held in two languages. One written in the sky. One written in your body. And both of them are saying the same deeply important and inconvenient thing.

The wild knowing is coming back to you.

The Radiance They Sell You

First, though, I have to clear something off the table, because the word at the centre of all this has been thoroughly ruined.

Radiance.

You have been sold a version of it. We all have.

It arrives in soft lighting and good skin and a serene, lit-from-within glow you can apparently buy in serum form if you act now. It is the radiance of the woman who has her life beautifully arranged, who is pleasing to look at, who takes up exactly the right amount of space and not an inch more. It is sunny. It is agreeable. It photographs well.

And it is phony.

Not because there is anything wrong with good skin or soft lighting. But because that radiance is still sourced from outside. It still depends on being seen approvingly, on being pleasing, on the verdict of the room.

It is radiance as performance, the kind you have to earn and maintain and never once let slip. It is the glow of a woman who is still, underneath it all, asking permission to exist.

There is an entire industry that prefers her that way.

A woman who has been taught to distrust her own body is, after all, a woman who will spend a great deal of money trying to fix herself. The glow comes in a bottle. The serenity comes in a subscription. The permission is always available for purchase, and it always, conveniently, runs out.

That is not the Leo Goddess. That is her, defanged and declawed, sold back to you at a markup.

I keep returning to a line I wrote not long ago, about a different counterfeit. A goddess with all her other faces amputated is not the divine feminine. She is a woman who has been made safe to keep. The radiance they sell you is exactly that. One face, the pretty one, held up as the only one you are permitted. The warrior quietly removed. The dark mother. The wild one. The one with teeth.

What the Leo Goddess Actually Is

Here is the real one.

• She sources her love from within. That sounds like a wellness slogan until you sit with what it actually means, which is that she has stopped running her worth through the approval of other people.

• She is not lit because she is being looked at. She is lit, and being looked at is incidental.

• She creates because creation is her nature, not because anyone asked for the output.

• She stands in her own light and, rather inconveniently for the people who preferred her dim, lights up everyone near her.

• She receives as easily as she gives, which, if you were raised female, you will recognise as one of the hardest disciplines there is.

• She plays. She delights. She treats joy as a sacred practice rather than a reward for finishing the washing.

And she has all her faces.

This is the part the soft-lit version leaves out.

• The real radiant feminine is not only sunny.

• The lioness is gorgeous, and the lioness has teeth. There is a fierce, in-your-face, holy heat in her, the same heat that lives in Kali and the Black Madonna and the Magdalene.

• The visceral no to what is false.

• The refusal to keep absorbing what is wrong.

• A woman permitted only the sweet, nourishing, palatable face of the feminine has been handed half of herself and told it is the whole.

• The other half, the one with the boundary and the rage and the bottomless dignity, is the half that was taken.

The Radiant Queen is not the woman who has finally become pleasant enough. She is the woman who has finally become whole.

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How the Knowing Got Trained Out of You

None of which is new. That is the thing I most want you to hear.

The Radiant Queen is not a self-improvement project. She is not something you acquire by July with enough journalling. She is what you were before you were trained out of it.

And you were trained out of it on a schedule. Most of us were.

It happened, roughly, around the age the blood first came. There is a girl, somewhere around twelve or thirteen, who knew things in her body without being taught them.

• Who said no and meant it.

• Who took up the whole room and did not apologise for the room.

• Who had not yet learned that her wanting was dangerous, or her body a problem, or her loudness a liability.

And then the instructions arrived.

• Be quieter.

• Want less.

• Don’t trust that feeling, trust the room.

• Smile when you do not feel like smiling.

• Say the social yes over the internal no, again and again, until the saying becomes automatic and you forget there was ever a no underneath it at all.

We learned to override our sacred bodies. The deep animal instinctual knowing that lives within us, traded in for being agreeable and perceptive and exquisitely attuned to everyone else’s comfort. We got extraordinarily good at it. It is, in its way, a towering achievement. And it cost us the signal almost entirely.

That girl did not die. She went underground. She has been waiting, this whole time, at the far end of the bleeding years, for the blood to come back round and let her out.

Why They Call It Decline

At peri/menopause our menstrual blood is leaving. And the most deeply confronting and amazing thing happens, which nobody quite warns you about, because the people doing the warning have an interest in you not knowing.

The override stops working.

Here is the part no one sat us down and explained. For most of our lives we have been, in the most literal chemical sense, maintained in a state of tolerance. Oestrogen does a great deal more for the female nervous system than anyone told us. It buffers the stress response. It softens the spikes. It quietly smooths the neurotransmitters that let us absorb things and carry on, things that might otherwise register, quite correctly, as intolerable. It is, among its many jobs, a chemical instrument of social harmony.

And then perimenopause begins, and that buffering starts to withdraw.

• The cushioning that let us tolerate what we should perhaps never have been asked to tolerate simply thins out.

• The things that used to slide no longer slide.

• The conversation that would once have washed over you now lands and stays.

• The room that is wrong now feels wrong, and you cannot un-feel it.

• The tolerance you had built, for the half-life, the half-marriage, the work that uses you, the friendships that only take, runs out.

• The instinct comes back online, rude and precise, and refuses to be talked out of what it knows.

And we are told this is decline.

I want you to look very hard at that word, because it is doing an enormous amount of work. We are told the thinning hair and the sleeplessness and the heat and the sudden intolerance add up to a woman diminishing. Becoming less. A problem to be managed discreetly while she carries on and does not make a fuss.

But consider what is actually leaving.

• What is leaving is her availability.

• Her agreeableness.

• Her willingness to abandon herself to keep everyone else comfortable.

• A woman returned to her own instinct is, frankly, ungovernable.

• She cannot be talked into the thing that is bad for her.

• She quietly withdraws her compliance from arrangements that were running on it the whole time.

And a great deal depends on women’s compliance. Rather more than anyone says out loud.

So I have come to think that decline is not a description at all. It is a verdict, passed on a woman at the precise moment she stops being useful in the old way. The culture cannot quite call it what it is, because what it is, is a woman coming back into her own authority. So it calls it a malfunction instead, and offers to medicate the symptoms, the chief symptom being that she has stopped lying.

That is not decline, love. That is the knowing coming back. And the rage that arrives with it is not a chemical accident. It is the instinct’s holy no, thirty years overdue.

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They Have Always Called It Something

And they have always called it something.

This is the oldest move there is. When a woman stops being available, the culture does not say, how interesting, she has come back to herself. It reaches for a word that means broken. We have a long and inventive history of these words. They called it hysteria, from the Greek for womb, on the theory that the trouble with a woman was, essentially, that she had one. They built asylums to hold the women who would not settle. They burned a great many at the stake, and a striking number of them were older, past childbearing, unmarried, ungovernable, no longer producing anything the village could use. Women, in other words, who had stopped lying.

It is the same instinct each time, dressed for the century. The diagnosis. The prescription. The discreet management. The quiet cultural insistence that a woman’s worth falls in exact proportion to her fertility, and that whatever rises in her afterwards is a symptom to be corrected rather than a power to be reckoned with.

They tried all of it. And here we are anyway.

There are something like forty-three million women in this passage in this country alone. Forty-three million nervous systems recalibrating at once. Forty-three million women who held everything together for decades, discovering that the body is now, firmly and without negotiation, declining to continue the performance. That is not a malfunction. That is a whole generation coming off the buffer at the same time and feeling, all at once, what was always there.

Can you feel us.

Menopause Gives It Back

I should say, because it would be dishonest not to, that none of this is tidy while you are inside it. I am not making a banner out of suffering, my loves. For many of us this passage is brutal in plain, physical, unromantic ways, and no amount of mythology takes the edge off a body that will not sleep. If you are in the worst of it, I am not asking you to find it beautiful. I am asking you to consider that it might also be intelligent.

Because underneath the symptoms there is a shape, and the old cultures knew it even when they knew nothing of hormones. They told it as descent.

Inanna takes off her crown at the first gate, her jewels at the next, her robes at the next, and walks down through seven gates into the underworld, and at the bottom she is stripped of everything, even her life, before she can be returned. The story is not a warning. It is a map. It says the way through is down, and the way down takes everything you arrived in, and you do not get to keep your costume.

Menopause has its own seven gateways. You go down through them whether you booked the trip or not. There is the Reckoning, where you first see clearly what you have been living around. The Release, where you begin to set it down. The Unknown, that map-less middle where you are no longer who you were and not yet who you are becoming. And then the long climb back up, through Self-Devotion, Body Love, Self-Expression, and at last Embodied Wisdom, where you arrive carrying everything you learned in the dark.

And what gets taken, gate by gate, is precisely the costume. The roles. The performed agreeableness. The self that was built to be kept. Which feels, from the inside, exactly like losing yourself. It is the opposite. It is losing everything that was never you.

If you want to know which gate you are standing at right now, I have made something for exactly that. A short quiz that reads your place on the map. You can find your gateway here, and I will come back to it before the end, because it opens a particular door.

And here is the bookend, the thing I find almost unbearably tidy. The girl was sent underground at the first blood. The woman is brought back up at the last. The first blood mystery put the knowing away. The final blood mystery hands it back. Menopause is not the end of the wild girl. It is the gate she has been waiting at the whole time.

What to Do With Twenty-Six Days

So. What do you do with twenty-six days of a sky pointing at all of this?

You practise. Gently, and on purpose.

• Take the throne, which is not a metaphor about grandeur. It is your own body, your own voice, your own life, sat fully in rather than apologised for.

• Receive. Unapologetically. The compliment, the help, the abundance, the adoration.

• Become fluent in the lost art of receiving, which for most of us is harder and braver than any amount of giving, because giving keeps us safely in charge, and receiving asks us to be soft enough to let something land.

• Be seen. Turn up the full voltage of who you actually are. Your visibility is not vanity. It is, quite simply, how your gifts reach anyone at all, and they cannot do that from behind your hand.

• And when the instinct speaks, the small clean no, the quiet this is wrong, do not override it out of habit. Just once, this fortnight, trust the feeling before the room.

That is the whole practice. It is smaller than it sounds and harder than it looks.

This Is What I Am Now

I’ll say the next thing plainly, since it is rather the point of this letter.

This is what I am now.

I went down. I have written about my own descent elsewhere and won’t make you sit through it again, (thank goddess!) except to tell you it took everything I arrived in, and there were stretches where I could not have said whether I was being destroyed or remade. As it turns out, those are the same process. I learned the difference between collapse and surrender the hard way. Collapse goes nowhere. Surrender goes somewhere. One is the floor giving way beneath you. The other is the open hand. I surrendered, in the end, because there was nothing left to do. And then, slowly, I received.

And I came back up as her. Not on a good day. As a settled fact. The fully expressed woman, sovereign over her own life, with all her faces intact, no longer available for dimming. The Radiant Queen, if you like, though I would still not put it on a mug.

This is, as it were, my coming-out party. And I would very much like your company.

Primal Knowing

On the 8th of July, one of Venus’s last full days in Leo, I am opening Primal Knowing, the first free, live gathering of Wild Knowing.

It is for you, if you are anywhere in the peri/menopause passage. And it is, at heart, about exactly the thing this whole letter has been circling. Getting you back into contact with your instinctual knowing. The wild, primal, body-rooted intelligence you were domesticated out of, and that this passage is working so hard to return to you.

• We will not be managing symptoms.

• We will be reading the map. Where you are in the descent. Which gate you are standing at. What is being stripped, and what is being handed back.

• We will do it together, beloveds, in a room full of women who do not need a single word of it explained, where you will not have to translate yourself, or soften yourself, or perform being fine.

And there is a doorway in, which doubles as a doorway home.

Take the Seven Gateways quiz. It takes only a few minutes, and it will show you which of the seven gateways you are standing at right now, so you walk into the room already knowing your own location on the map. And here is the part I am rather pleased about. When you take the quiz, you are automatically enrolled in Primal Knowing on the 8th of July. One thing, two doors. You find your gate, and your seat is saved. Plain and simple.

Find your gateway and claim your seat: https://discover.priestesspresence.com/7-gateways-quiz/

That is the whole of it. Find your gateway. Take your place. Come and meet the knowing in a room built to receive it. It is free. It is live. And it falls inside the most radiant window of the whole year for precisely this kind of remembering.

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The Wild Knowing Is Coming Back

So, for the twenty-six days, and honestly for the rest of it.

• Stop overriding your intelligent sacred body.

• Trust the feeling before the room.

• Take up the space you were told to give back.

• Receive the good thing without deflecting it.

• Be seen on purpose.

• Let the fierce face live alongside the tender one.

• And when the old voice insists that all of this is far too much, have a long look at who taught you to say that, and whose comfort it was protecting, because it was not yours, love, and it was certainly not the Queen’s.

You are allowed to take up space.

You are the Radiant Queen of your own life.

The wild knowing is coming back. It was always going to. Come and meet it. I’ll be right here, with the fire lit.

in love and devotion

Elayne Kalila

Venus is in Leo from June 13 through July 9, 2026. Take the Seven Gateways quiz to find where you stand and to claim your free seat at Primal Knowing, the opening gathering of Wild Knowing, live on July 8th: https://discover.priestesspresence.com/7-gateways-quiz/

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What the Heck Is a Tradwife?

I asked it out loud a few weeks ago, sitting with some of my sisters, the way you do when a phrase has been drifting past you for months and you finally admit you have never stopped to look at it. One of us had seen the videos. One of us had a niece who wanted to be one. Not one of us could have given you a clean definition if you had paid us for it. So we did what women around a table have always done. We went down the rabbit hole together.

And what we found at the bottom was stranger, and a good deal darker, than any of us had expected.

It begins, the way these things do now, with the videos.

A woman in a long linen dress is making butter from scratch. The light is doing that thing where everything looks like an old Dutch painting, all gold and holy. There are children, several of them, clean and golden, arranged around a farmhouse kitchen the size of my first flat. She is churning something. She is always churning something. Her voice, when it arrives, is very low and very slow, as though speaking at a normal pace would be a kind of violence.

And I can feel exactly what it is pulling on. It is not pulling on stupidity. It is pulling on the dream. Put it all down, the video murmurs. More than the work, more than the voice, more than being whatever it is I am, the boss-babe with the Substack and the opinions and the forty-seven browser tabs. Come home. Let someone else carry it now. Wouldn’t that be a relief.

And the honest answer, on a tired day, is yes. God, yes. Which is exactly why it irks me. Not because it is absurd. Because something in me leans toward it before the rest of me has caught up.

So I kept pulling the thread after the others had gone home, into where it comes from and who is making it and what it is for. And underneath the butter and the linen, it is not soft at all. It is one of the more sinister things I have looked at in a long while.

What a Tradwife Is

Tradwife. Short for traditional wife. The word is barely a decade old, and it already has tens of millions of followers gathered under it.

A tradwife is a woman who has publicly returned to what she calls traditional womanhood, and built a following on the broadcast of it. Her husband earns. She keeps the home. She raises the children, often a great many of them, and she frames the whole arrangement as the natural, God-given order of things. The look is specific. Sometimes it is the 1950s, the set hair and the shirtwaist dress and the lipstick on before breakfast. More often now it is the homestead. The farm, the linen, the sourdough starter, the raw milk, the baby on the hip and the garden out the back.

The aesthetic shifts. The doctrine underneath holds steady. A woman’s highest purpose is to be a wife and a mother, and her husband is her head.

And I want to be careful here, because it matters. I love to cook and to bake. I love to garden, to make things with my hands, to keep my home and tend my animals. I love all of it. So hear me clearly.

Not every woman who bakes her own bread is a tradwife.

Loving the hearth is not an ideology, and I will have a great deal to say in a moment about why the hearth is sacred.

A tradwife is something narrower, and far more deliberate. She is selling a teaching. The teaching is submission. And the submission is dressed, every single time, as something that we should desire.

What She Is Selling

The tradwife is selling a fantasy of the romantic feminine. A woman who does not want her own voice. Who does not want her own power. The dream is that she can lay all of it down, the voice, the power, the whole exhausting weight of being a person responsible for her own life, hand it across to a man, and call the handing-over her femininity.

And it does not always call itself the tradwife. That is the cleverness of it. It comes rebranded in softer, holier clothes. The divine feminine. Feminine energy. The soft life.

The high-value woman who has learned, at last, to receive. Ballerina Farm is the cathedral of it, but it is everywhere now, scaled down and sold to women who do not own a single cow.

And the word it has chosen for the handing-over is surrender. Surrender your ambition. Surrender your edges. Surrender the exhausting project of having opinions of your own, and let a good man lead. Soften. Receive. Come home to your true nature, which is, apparently, agreeable and quiet and faintly damp from the kitchen.

It is dressed as liberation. It arrives wearing the exact clothes of the thing I believe in, the rest, the body, the refusal of the grind, and walks straight past me into the homes of frightened, depleted women and offers them a deal.

Make yourself smaller, hand the hard work of your own life to a man, and we will call it peace.

It is the diminished maiden. With better lighting. A grown woman invited back into girlhood and told the regression is her homecoming.

The Longing Is Real

I want to be careful, because the easy version of this essay is contempt, and contempt is lazy and is not what I am aiming for here. I feel a deeper call to understand what makes us tick, so this is why I am writing this peice.

I do not think these women are stupid, and I do not think the longing is fake.

The longing is the truest thing in the picture. A woman who has spent twenty years proving she is competent inside a system built to extract her, who is tired in a way sleep does not fix, who has been told the answer to her exhaustion is to optimise harder, is going to look at that golden kitchen and feel something crack open. Of course she is. She has been starving for rest, for a body allowed to slow down, without a name for the hunger.

The longing is holy. What is being sold to soothe it is a cage with a nice view.

And here is the part nobody in the comments wants to sit with. A cage, to a woman who has been running on a treadmill for two decades, can feel like relief. The structure holds you. The decisions get made elsewhere. The unbearable openness of a life you have to author yourself gets quietly closed, and something in the nervous system goes, at last, oh, thank God.

I understand it completely. I have thirty years of training in seeing exactly this mechanism, and I have still felt the pull of it on the bad days. So let us not pretend it is only the gullible who are reached. It is reaching all of us.

The Hearth Is Holy

And there is one more thing I have to speak with care, because it matters more than all the rest.

I am not against the hearth.

In the lineage I have stood in for two decades, the hearth is holy. Hestia is a goddess, the keeper of the flame at the centre of the home, one of the oldest and most honoured faces of the feminine we have, the one the ancients greeted first and blessed last. The woman who tends the fire, feeds people, and holds the warm centre of a family is doing sacred work. There is nothing small about her. I have knelt at that hearth myself, and I will again.

So this is not a quarrel with the hearth. It is a quarrel with being handed one face of the goddess, a defanged copy of even that one, and being told it is the only face I am permitted.

Because she has so many. The feminine face of God was never a single expression. For two decades my work has been one thing under all of its names. Sitting with women while they remember they are larger than the single face they were handed, and find their way back to the feminine face of God in all of her.

The tradwife gospel takes that whole living pantheon and hands you back one figurine. Hestia with her fire turned down low and her sisters quietly killed off. A hearth-keeper with no warrior to defend the hearth, no queen to rule it, no wild one allowed to leave it, no dark mother permitted to end it. Just the apron. Just the smile. Just the staying.

A goddess with all her other faces amputated is not the divine feminine. She is a woman who has been made safe to keep.

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Collapse, Submission, Surrender

The word is surrender. And I am not handing it over.

In my mystery school work, the first teaching of the Great Mother is four words. I surrender, I receive. And the order is not decoration. You cannot receive from the divine until you have surrendered to it. The open hand comes before anything can be placed in it. Which means surrender, the real thing, is not weakness. It is the most active spiritual act there is, the deliberate opening of a centre you actually possess.

And this is where the whole culture trips, because we have confused surrender with two things it is not.

We think surrender means collapse. The white flag. Going down and staying down, the going limp, the quiet folding inward of a woman who has decided it is not worth it anymore.

And we think surrender means submission. Handing your will to another person, lowering your eyes, calling the obedience peace.

Neither of those is surrender.

• Collapse is what happens when you have no centre left.

• Submission is what happens when you give your centre away.

• Surrender is what happens when you have a centre, fully, and choose to open it to something larger than yourself.

• Collapse goes nowhere. Submission goes to a man. Surrender goes to the divine.

And the linen-dress gospel is selling women collapse and submission with the word surrender printed on the label. It is the white flag, marketed as the open hand. It stops at the bottom and calls the bottom home.

The Oldest Story

In the oldest story I keep returning to, Inanna surrenders too. Queen of Heaven, she receives a call she cannot refuse, down into the underworld. At each of the seven gateways she is asked to surrender something. Her crown. Her jewels. Her robes. Every marker of who she has been is stripped from her, one threshold at a time, until she arrives at the bottom naked and undone and is hung on a hook to die.

That is surrender. There is no linen and certainly no butter.

And then. Three days later. She receives. Resurrection. She climbs back up through the seven gateways and takes up everything she laid down, transformed, and comes back not as Queen of Heaven but as Queen of both the heavens and the underworld.

The surrender was the descent. The receiving was the resurrection. I surrender, I receive. The oldest version of the teaching we have, and not a soft one.

Hold the two women side by side. One goes down into the dark, surrenders everything she was performing, and receives an authority she did not have before, unfoolable, dangerous to anyone who would manage her. The other stays in the bright kitchen, collapses her voice and submits her will, and receives a man’s approval and a smaller life.

Both are called surrender. They are travelling in opposite directions.

She does not come back smaller. She comes back Queen of two worlds.

One Map Among Many

I will say the next part openly, because I promised a reader some months ago to keep saying it.

The cosmology underneath some of this, the language of polarity, of masculine and feminine energies, is one cosmology. One map among many. It is ancient and it has given some people something true, and it is not the truth about all bodies, all loves, all lives. The moment anyone tells you this is the nature of woman rather than a story about woman, you are no longer being offered a cosmology. You are being offered a leash with good branding.

And real receptivity, in the lineages that hold it well, is a ferocious thing. The strength to stay open inside the fire. It was never a synonym for going quiet so that he can talk.

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The Soft Front of a Hard Project

The tradwife is not a lifestyle. It is the soft front of a hard project, and you do not have to take it from me, a woman with a Substack and a great many opinions about goddesses. The people who study this for a living have been saying it for years.

• Media Matters ran the experiment. They built a clean TikTok account, interacted only with tradwife videos, and coded the 327 videos the algorithm served up next. Nearly a third had tipped into conspiracy theory and apocalyptic fear. Prepper warnings about a coming civil war. Anti-vaccine content. The government lies, the doctors lie, the schools lie. You start with sourdough, and within a few swipes you are being handed a worldview. The pretty content is the doorway. Something colder is waiting in the hall.

• Julia Ebner, who studies extremism at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and went undercover in these movements for her book Going Dark, found that what radicalises most tradwives is not hatred. It is the search for love. Sian Norris, the investigative journalist whose Bodies Under Siege maps the global far-right war on women’s bodies, names the destination without flinching. Tradwife culture, she writes, is not frilly dresses and tired women romanticising motherhood. It is a subculture with its roots in the far right, built on natalism and white-baby anxiety and the normalisation of male supremacy. The rollback of women’s rights is not a side effect of it. It is the point.

I am not getting carried away. The trad in tradwife was never only about aprons. It has surged, not by accident, in the same few years the right to choose was struck down and the plans for what comes after were written out in the open.

Most of the women in the videos have no idea they are standing in the mouth of that. Even the researchers sounding the alarm are careful to say not every tradwife is a fascist, and a woman has every right to choose her life. Ebner’s finding is the one that stays with me. It is the search for love that radicalises them. The fault was never in the longing. It is in who lies in wait to catch it.

And the answer they catch, once they are inside, is the one you felt land wrong before you could name it. A woman does not need her own voice. Her husband will speak. Her church will speak. The movement will speak for her. She can lay hers down.

Look at the most famous of them. When a reporter finally sat down in the kitchen of the one the papers had crowned the queen of the tradwives, she could not, the way the profile told it, get a single answer out without the husband correcting her, interrupting her, or answering in her place. The queen of the whole dream. And she could not finish her own sentence. There it is, in one image. The voice, spoken over, at the very hearth she was supposed to rule.

And here is what I need you to hold, my loves, because it is the whole of it.

• A woman with no voice is a woman with no vote.

• A woman with no vote is a woman with no defence.

• The surrender being sold in that kitchen is, downstream, every right we have ever won. Not as a metaphor. Actually.

• The same softness that gives him the last word in the marriage gives him the last word over her body, her money, her children, her name.

We did not claw our way into our own voice, over a century of women who did not live to use theirs, only to be talked back out of it. Beautifully. Gently. With excellent lighting.

The women in the videos are not the enemy. They are the recruits.

The project is counting on their exhaustion, and exhaustion is not a character flaw. It is the entirely predictable result of asking a woman to carry everything and smile while she does it. The fury belongs further up. With the people who built the trap, lit it so warmly, and called it home.

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A Motherless World

This is what I was circling when I wrote Motherless. The world has been severed from the Great Mother for ten thousand years. And when you lose the Mother, you lose her teaching. Lose her, and the word goes feral. Surrender stops meaning the open hand and starts meaning the white flag. It gets handed to whoever has a use for it, printed on a cage and sold back to her daughters in soft focus. A motherless world cannot tell the open hand from the surrendered will, because it has forgotten the One who taught the difference.

So of course this is the moment the counterfeit sells. We are starving for the Mother, and someone has arrived offering a costume of her.

They Stole the Words

And they have done it, this is the part that lights my own sacred rage, in my own language.

Divine feminine. Feminine energy. Surrender. Receive. These are the words I have used for twenty-five years to call women home to their power. And they have been lifted, clean, and pressed into the sale of women’s captivity. The exact vocabulary of liberation, turned to move the cage off the shelf.

So I am taking the words back. The way we took back hysterical. They do not get to keep them.

What the Divine Feminine Is

The divine feminine, the real one, the one I have sat with women inside for over two decades, is not small.

• She is not quiet.

• She is not dependent, and she is not waiting to be told what she is for.

• She is the whole face of God the world cut away when it cut away the Mother. And she was never one thing.

• She is the hearth-keeper who holds the centre.

• She is the warrior who guards it with a blade. She is the queen who rules the house rather than serving in it.

• She is the wild one who walks out into the dark when she has to. She is the lover who belongs to no one.

• She is the dark mother who ends what has to end. She is the one who goes down into the underworld, and the one who climbs back up knowing everything there is to know.

• And her first teaching is not submission. It is the four words I gave you earlier. I surrender, I receive. She opens her own hands, on her own terms, to something far larger than a husband. That is the surrender they can never sell you, because it does not make a woman manageable. It makes her vast.

• To reclaim her is to reclaim all of her. Not to keep the one face a frightened culture finds least threatening, and call that devotion.

Surrender, and Receive

So what do we do with this. I do not want to leave you with a diagnosis and a sneer. I have been teaching myself to walk past the autopsy and out the other side.

• We do not refuse the rest. The rest is real. Take the rest.

• We do not refuse the hearth, or the body, or the slowness, or the longing for a life with its hands in something other than a phone. All of it is yours and always was, and you needed no homestead and no husband and no course to be allowed it.

• What we refuse is the counterfeit. The collapse dressed as devotion. The submission dressed as peace. The one amputated face held up as the whole of the goddess.

Because there is a real surrender, the one Inanna makes and the Great Mother teaches.

• You surrender to your own descent.

• To the truth your body has been telling you for years while you smiled and kept a peace that was never yours to keep.

• To the grief, the anger, the long low no that has been rising in you.

That surrender does not make you more agreeable. It makes you impossible to manage.

And on the far side of it, at last, you receive. Not a man’s approval, or a smaller life. You receive yourself, handed back whole and transformed. Your voice, your vote, your no.

The hearth-keeper and the warrior and the queen and the wild one and the dark mother, every face you were told to put down. The feminine face of God, returned to you complete. I surrender, I receive. That is the teaching. That has always been the teaching.

So surrender, my loves. Of course. Always. But down into your own life. Not out of it.

And then, with your hands finally open, receive what the Mother has been holding for you the whole time. All of her. All of you.

In love and devotion,

Elayne Kalila

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I want to tell you something the medical world has been documenting for nearly twenty years and somehow has not gotten around to mentioning to us.

Menstrual blood contains pluripotent stem cells. I love the word pluripotent. It feels like a word describing a magical ability to be overflowing with potency.

What is real is that the blood we have been bleeding every month for thirty or forty years contains pluripotent stem cells. Regenerative cellular gold. The same kind of biological wisdom medicine has spent billions of dollars trying to find in other places, sitting inside our bodies the whole time. Released, every month, for decades. And never named for the women whose bodies were creating them.

Take a breath with me. That is the kind of fact that requires a moment.

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The Biology Underneath

Let me give you the data up front, because we deserve that.

In 2007, researchers identified what they called Menstrual Blood-Derived Stem Cells. Also called Endometrial Regenerative Cells, which I will admit is not a name that exactly sings (someone else really needs to be in charge of naming these things), but the substance underneath the dry, bureaucratic naming is genuinely extraordinary, and quite frankly magical.

These cells are multipotent. The research shows they can differentiate into at least nine different tissue lineages. Cardiac muscle. Lung tissue. Neurons. Skeletal muscle. Blood vessel cells. Pancreatic cells. Liver cells. Fat tissue. Bone.

They are, in fact, ingenious.

They proliferate faster than umbilical cord stem cells. They are easier to collect than bone marrow stem cells. They carry no ethical concerns. They are currently being used in clinical regenerative medicine research for cardiac disease, neurological conditions, endometrial reconstruction, and more.

Across our reproductive life, we menstruate approximately four hundred times. Four hundred. Every cycle, the endometrium regenerates, sheds, and is rebuilt. Every cycle, you have been releasing pluripotent regenerative cells. Every month, for decades, your body has been making biological gold.

We have been told we are inconveniently bleeding. We have been told we are shedding waste. We have been told our menstrual blood is contaminated. Unclean. To be hidden away. Tucked discreetly into the bin. Apologised for if we ever stained a sheet, or our pants, or in any way showed that we were bleeding.

What is real is that we have been making medicine.

For decades.

And we have been told to call it waste.

What This Actually Means

Sit with what I have just said for a moment. The implications are not small.

For your entire menstruating life, your body has been producing regenerative cellular gold and releasing her every month. Not as waste. As medicine. The blood you have been washing out of your knickers for decades has been one of the most biologically valuable substances in your body.

And nobody mentioned this. Not once. Not in a single sex education class, not in a single doctor’s appointment, not on a single tampon box.

Which is wild to me.

This is not an oversight. This is a cultural inversion of one of the most fundamental truths about a woman’s body. We have spent centuries being told we are unclean, that our menstrual cycle was something to be dismissed, and was a nuisance. And yet other cultures that knew better called this blood time sacred. They knew, even without the laboratory data we now have, that what was leaving her body every month was the same substance her body used to build life. They honoured the blood time of a woman’s life because they understood the immense power of this capacity to create life.

Now we have the science to prove what they always knew.

We have been making medicine. For decades. And we have been told to call her waste.

Before She Was Waste, She Was Sacrament

Here is something else that almost nobody is mentioning, because it teeters on the taboo.

For most of human history, in most of the cultures that came before our own, menstrual blood was not seen as waste. It was a sacrament.

In the languages of the ancient world, the words for menstruation and the words for sacred were often the same word. The Polynesian word tapua, which gives us our modern word taboo, meant both sacred and menstruation. They were not separate ideas. They were inseparable. Something set apart. Something powerful. Something not to be approached casually because she carried the force of life itself.

Barbara Walker, in her landmark 1983 reference The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, documents this pattern across dozens of cultures. Early alchemical texts called the menstrual blood of the Great Mother the original raw material from which the world was made. Pre-Christian European traditions honoured it. The Hindu Tantric tradition, more documented than most, considered our blood so sacred that it was a central element of certain Tantric rites. Encyclopedia Britannica, not exactly a fringe source, names this plainly. Menstrual blood, strictly taboo in conventional Hinduism, was also used in Tantric rites.

The Kamakhya temple in the Indian state of Assam still observes, every year, the Ambubachi Mela. Three days during which the goddess herself is understood to be menstruating. The temple closes. The land is held to be in a sacred state of cosmic menstruation. When the doors reopen, water that has been reddened during the festival is collected by the priests and distributed to pilgrims as a sacred substance, said to carry generative power. This is not ancient history. This is happening every year. Pilgrims travel from across India to receive this sacrament.

And feminist scholars have proposed, with varying degrees of acceptance in the wider academic world, that even the Holy Grail of the Western mythological tradition is, at her root, a memory of this older teaching. Sang Real. The royal or true blood. The chalice that holds the blood that gives life. The cup that, before she was the cup of Christ, was the womb of the Mother.

Whether you find the Grail connection persuasive or not, the wider pattern is unambiguous. The blood that our culture has spent centuries calling unclean was, in the cultures that came before our own, treated with the reverence due a sacrament.

We have not always pretended we did not know what this was.

Only recently. Only in the last few thousand years.

Which is, in the long human story, almost no time at all.

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And Then Menopause Arrives

Here is where the teaching opens.

When menopause arrives, something changes. The body does not stop holding the regenerative capacity. The endometrium can still be activated, rebuilt, regenerated. The cellular intelligence is still there, held within. The research is clear on this. What menopause does is stop the monthly release. The blood that has been leaving your body every month for decades is no longer leaving.

Your body is now holding the blood within.

And not only the blood. The body is holding many things at once. The iron rises in your bloodstream as you stop bleeding. Your brain restructures into what the neuroscientist Lisa Mosconi calls, in her own words, a leaner, meaner architecture. Fewer neurons. Better connected. More resilient. The amygdala becomes quieter. The reactivity that drove decades of her life settles. The hormonal rollercoaster that orchestrated reproduction for forty years stabilises into a different, steadier register.

You become, biologically, a different kind of vessel.

What the documented research is just beginning to map is what indigenous knowledge has held for centuries. The endometrial stem cells, the cellular gold, do not disappear at menopause. Recent research has confirmed they remain present in the postmenopausal endometrium, and that they are no longer hormone-dependent. The regenerative capacity that was being released every month is now held within. The energy that orchestrated reproduction for forty years redistributes through the body in ways the science is only beginning to chart. What women’s bodies have always known, the laboratories are now catching up to.

Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, observed this without the laboratory data we now have. She wrote that there is no greater power in the world than the zest of a post-menopausal woman.

She was not being romantic. She was being anthropological.

She had seen what our culture has worked very hard to make us forget.

Her Blood Is Gold

So here is the teaching, my loves, in the plainest words I can give it to you.

Our blood is gold. Until menopause, it has been giving her away. Now we hold it within us.

The womb that held the possibility of children now holds the woman herself. The blood that was offered for the possibility of others is now offered for the possibility of our own becoming. The energy that went outward for forty years is being called back inward, finally. Possibly for the first time in our adult lives.

This is the alchemical shift at the centre of menopause. And it is possibly one of the most wild, magical, and profound shifts that we will ever go through. When we enter this journey of peri-menopause and menopause, we are quite literally in a metamorphosis.

I know that sounds slightly grand written down like that. I can hear it myself. But I mean it in the most ordinary and embodied sense.

Alchemy is the transformation of raw material into gold. The medieval alchemists searched their whole lives for the Philosopher’s Stone, the substance that would transmute lead into gold. They never found it in the chemical sense, partly because they were not actually looking for chemistry. They were looking for the inner gold of awakened consciousness.

The menopausal woman has been doing alchemy for decades.

She has been turning every experience, every loss, every love, every threshold, every heartbreak, every birth and miscarriage and choice and devotion into the gold of who she is becoming. By the time she arrives at menopause, the gold is already in her. The alchemy is already complete. The Philosopher’s Stone is her own life.

Which, when you think about it, is rather a lot to have been carrying around without anyone telling you.

What menopause does is stop the monthly release of the blood that was the raw material of her reproductive years. Now the gold she has been making, the wisdom, the embodied knowing, the lived transmission, the medicine, is held within her.

She is the alchemical vessel.

She is the gold.

The Women Who Saw This Before Me

I want to name that this teaching is not mine. She has a lineage, and I am part of it, and the women who came before me did the work that made it possible for me to write what I am writing today.

Lara Owen published a book in 1993 called Her Blood Is Gold: Awakening to the Wisdom of Menstruation. She was one of the first to name menstrual blood as the alchemical wisdom of a woman’s body. Her title is the title I am giving to this article. With reverence. With acknowledgement. With the recognition that I stand on her shoulders, and on the shoulders of every woman who has been quietly holding this work alive in the decades since her book was first published.

Judy Grahn published Blood, Bread, and Roses in 1993, introducing what she calls Metaformic Theory. She argued, with the precision of a scholar, that menstruation was not peripheral to human civilization. Menstruation was the origin of her. The earliest mathematics, the earliest astronomy, the earliest marriage rites, all of them traced back to ancient menstrual rituals.

Tamara Slayton founded the Menstrual Health Foundation and trained generations of women in the cycle as a sacred navigational system.

I was lucky enough to study with many of these women. And there were countless others, in small dim rooms, in circles, in conferences, in books almost nobody read at the time, holding this work for decades while the wider culture was not ready to enter the dialogue.

What they gave us, all of them, was a map.

This article is one small piece of the larger reclamation they began. And I am beyond grateful for each of them. And I believe that we might just be ready to have this conversation on a wider, broader level now.

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And This Is Where I Have to Stop

Here is what I will not do in this article.

I will not teach you how to actually hold the gold.

Because that part, the part where this teaching comes off the page and lands in your body, in your daily life, in your specific choices about how to live as a woman who is no longer giving her blood away every month, that part cannot be received from an article.

This has to be received in real time. In circle. With other women who are crossing the same threshold. With breath, with body, with the slow attentive work of letting a teaching actually become embodied rather than just understood.

Some teachings can travel through the written word. The biology can. The reframe can. The naming can.

But the transmission and the practice, the way of being, the architecture of a daily life organised around the held gold rather than the released gold, that one is too important to entrust to text.

So I have written you what an article can carry.

The rest is something I am preparing to bring to you live.

Some teachings cannot be received from the page. They have to be received in circle, in real time, in the body, with other women who are crossing the same threshold.

What She Asks of You

For now, my loves, I want you to sit with this teaching.

Not in a hurry. Not trying to make sense of it. Not asking yet how to apply it. Just letting the truth of what your body has been doing for decades, and what is now ready to do differently, land inside you.

Notice what comes up. Notice what changes when you let yourself believe that your blood was always gold. That every cycle you ever had was a release of regenerative wisdom into the world. That every month you bled and apologised for staining a sheet, you were releasing medicine.

Notice what changes when you let yourself believe that the gold you have been giving away every month is now beginning to be held inside you.

For your own becoming. For your own legacy. For the woman you are quietly being made into, inside this great threshold.

That is where I am going to leave the teaching, for now.

The fuller version of Her Blood Is Gold, including how a woman actually lives this in her daily life, what she asks of you, what becomes possible inside her, and how she threads through the seven gateways of the menopausal passage, will be opened in The Untamed Chrysalis. The third and deepest evening of The Wild Knowing series, on the 30th of July. And then again, in much greater depth, inside Metamorphosis, the nine-month initiation that begins on the 15th of August.

I will share the registration links the moment they go live.

For now, the simplest thing you can do is take the free quiz I opened earlier this month. She will help you find your gateway in the seven-gateway map of this passage, and quietly hold a place for you in The Wild Knowing series as she opens.

→ Take the free quiz: Where Are You In Your Menopausal Journey?

And if any of this has landed in your body the way I hope she has, share her with the women in your life who have been giving their gold away for decades without ever being told what they were holding.

They deserve to know.

All of us do.

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A QUICK NOTE FOR THE WOMEN READING THIS FIRST

My loves, this article is written directly to the men in our lives. The partners, the brothers, the grown sons, the fathers, the closest friends. I want you to read it first, because you will know whether it lands. And then, if it does, please send it to the men who love you. You do not need to explain or soften it. A simple message will do. Something like, I want you to read this. It will help you understand what I have been walking through. Please take the time. They have been waiting for this map too. And so have we.

Also if you have not yet taken the new quiz “Where Are You In Your Menopause Journey” here is the link!

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So. You are here.

Which probably means one of two things. Either someone you love has sent you this article and asked you, in a tone that did not quite invite negotiation, to read it. Or you stumbled in by accident and have not yet realised that almost nothing else on the internet about menopause is written for you.

Either way. Welcome.

I am writing this for the men who love a woman walking through the menopausal passage. The husband. The partner. The brother. The grown son. The father. The closest friend. Whoever you are to her, and however that connection is shaped, if she is in this passage and you are trying, with whatever you have, to walk beside her, this article is for you.

And let me say one thing right at the start, because nobody else has said it to you and somebody needs to.

Nobody gave you a map either.

You are travelling with a partner mid-metamorphosis with no instruction manual, no language, no training, and a culture that has worked very hard to make sure nobody around you knows what is happening to her either. Your doctor was given roughly one hour of training in this menopausal passage during medical school. Your own father, if he is still alive, almost certainly was not given language for it either. Your friends are mostly not talking about it. And the woman you love may not be able to fully explain it herself, because she is inside the storm trying to describe the weather.

So if you have been feeling baffled, helpless, hurt, defensive, or quietly terrified, I get it!

You are moving through something genuinely huge with no preparation.

Let me try to give you some.

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What Is Actually Happening to Her

Let me be direct about this.

She, whoever the She is in your life, is in a hormonal initiation that is comparable in magnitude only to puberty. The last time her body went through anything this big was when she was twelve. Her estrogen is in a long, unpredictable freefall. Her progesterone has been quietly declining for years. Her brain is actively rewiring. Her nervous system is recalibrating in ways that have real neurological consequences, including disrupted sleep, cognitive fog, emotional intensity, and physical sensations she did not have access to last year and may not have access to next year either.

This is not vague. This is a powerful biological, emotional, psychological, and spiritual rite of passage. Dr Lisa Mosconi, a neuroscientist at Weill Cornell Medical College, has spent years scanning the perimenopausal brain. Her research, published in her 2024 book The Menopause Brain, shows that this passage is one of only two structural neurological transitions a woman’s brain goes through in her entire life. The other one was puberty.

And the medical world, frankly, has been catastrophic at explaining this phase of a woman’s life. Only thirty-one percent of US obstetrics and gynaecology residency programmes include any standardised menopause training. Twenty percent of OB/GYN residents finish their entire residency having received zero lectures on menopause. The clinical professor at Yale Medical School has stated publicly that she gets one hour to teach menopause to medical students during their entire OB/GYN rotation.

One hour. For an initiation roughly two million American women cross every single year.

Which means your partner is walking through one of the largest biological transitions of her adult life, often without language, often without medical support, often without anyone around her having a clue what is going on.

If she has not been able to explain it to you, it is not because she does not want to. It is because she does not yet have the words.

What This Really Is

Now I want to take you a layer deeper, because the biological piece is only half of what is happening to her.

Menopause is a powerful rite of passage. A rite of passage is a structural transition between one life and another, marked by an internal threshold and accompanied by the death of who the person was before. Every traditional culture across history has had one for women at this age. Ours does not. Which is part of why she is having such a hard time, and part of why you are baffled.

She is not adjusting. She is not coping. She is not, with any luck and a few supplements, going to return to the woman she was at forty.

She is becoming someone she has not been before.

And here is the part that almost nobody is saying to either of you. In order for that becoming to happen, she has to withdraw her energy from the places she used to put it. The relationships she used to maintain on autopilot. The yes she used to say before checking with herself. The labour she used to absorb without anyone noticing she was absorbing it. The roles she has been performing, often beautifully, for decades.

She is calling that energy back, possibly for the first time in her adult life.

This is what looks, from the outside, like her becoming distant. Or selfish. Or hard to reach. Or no longer the person you fell in love with.

She is not becoming distant. She is becoming present to herself. And that is something most women only do once in their lives. This is when.

She is withdrawing her energy from what she used to do in order to bring that energy into herself. Possibly for the first time.

Which brings me to her symptoms.

The hot flashes. The insomnia. The rage that arrives without warning. The exhaustion that no rest seems to reach. The grief that comes up in the kitchen on a Tuesday for no reason she can name.

Yes, they need to be tended. Yes, she may need medical support. Yes, you can help her find the right doctor and the right framework for her body. All of that is real.

But the symptoms are also messages. They are her body and her psyche telling her, often loudly, what she has been carrying that is no longer hers to carry. What she has been swallowing that needs to be spoken. What she has been postponing that needs to be lived.

Her body is not malfunctioning. Her body is speaking.

If she can listen to what her symptoms are saying, the symptoms move differently through her. Not always faster. Not always easier. But with the meaning intact, instead of being treated as noise to be silenced.

And here is the part of this teaching I most want you to hear.

Her transformation may initiate yours.

If you are the kind of man who can stay close enough to her to actually witness what is happening, something starts to move in you too. Not because you are trying to. Because her becoming, when it is genuinely met by someone close to her, has a way of asking the man beside her, quietly, what he is also being called to become.

You may find yourself reckoning with what you have built. The patterns you have inherited from your father. The work you have not yet done. The questions you have been postponing about who you actually want to be in the second half of your life.

This is not coincidence. It is the deepest possible kind of intimacy. Two people in metamorphosis at the same time, inside the same relationship, both being remade.

Most cultures had a name for this. We have lost the name. But the thing itself is still happening, in living rooms and bedrooms and kitchens all over the world, between women in this passage and the men who are paying close enough attention to be moved by her.

You can be that man. Whether you are now or not. You can become him.

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Eleven Years In, From Both of Us

Let me tell you something about my own partnership.

I met my partner thirteen years ago. He has walked alongside me for eleven of those years through this passage. We are still in it. Still in the middle of the great metamorphosis. And we both know now what neither of us knew at the start.

In the early years, neither of us understood what was happening. My PMS (pre-menstrual syndrome) got significantly more extreme. I would become someone slightly different in the days before my bleed. So different, in fact, that I gave her a name.

Helga.

Helga was the more bombastic version of me who arrived without warning, ideally with a list of grievances, and was happy to litigate them at considerable length. She was not subtle. She was not negotiable. And she was, in those early years, putting some real pressure on our intimate life.

My partner, to his credit, became extraordinary at reading Helga’s arrival. He could often feel the shift in my energy before I could. He knew when my period was coming three days before I did. Which, when you think about it, is a kind of magic. He had become more sensitive to the rhythm of my cycle than I was.

And then my cycle began to break apart. Some months it was three weeks long. Some months it was one continuous bleed that did not seem to want to stop. Some months it skipped entirely. The compass that had been quietly orienting me for thirty years was no longer giving me a reading.

I felt cast out into the abyss. Frankly. There is no other word for it.

And as I came unmoored from my own internal rhythm, the tension in our connection became real. Not because either of us was doing anything wrong. Because we had no map. Neither of us knew what was happening, and neither of us had a framework that gave the passage a name.

It is hard to navigate this passage from the inside. I can only imagine how it must look and feel from where you are standing.

Then came the impact on our intimate life. The hot flashes. The night sweats. My body would flare up like a volcano any time he touched me. It wasn’t because I did not want him to touch me, I did. But my body literally could not regulate the heat his hand was transferring to me and it would trigger a hot flash almost immediately. Every loving touch became, biologically, kindling.

I want to share this with you, because the men I have spoken to about this almost never know it. When your partner pulls away from your touch in this passage, it is not because she has stopped loving you. It is because her body has temporarily lost the capacity to receive heat from another body without overheating. The reflex is biological. The love is intact.

Her withdrawal may also be because she is is experiencing other symptoms that make it hard for her to be intimate with you. As estrogen decreases, it often causes a thinning of the skin, in particular the skin of the vulva. Which can lead to increased sensitivity and in some cases vaginal atrophy, (don’t even get me started with the way that this was named) which makes having penetrative sex very painful.

So for me eventually, after years of resistance, I started to enter into the conversation about hormones.

On the Bone of Contention That Is HRT

I want to say something about hormone replacement therapy here, because she may be in the middle of this decision and the cultural noise around it is, frankly, two decades out of date.

In 2002, a major study called the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) was halted early because it appeared to show increased risks of breast cancer, heart disease, blood clots, and stroke in women taking the form of HRT that was standard at the time. A generation of women, and a generation of doctors, walked away from HRT in fear. My own decision to consider it took me years, partly because my mother had both breast cancer and cervical cancer, and I was tentative about anything hormonal as a result.

Here is what has changed.

In May 2024, the same researchers published twenty-year follow-up data in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) showing no increase in deaths from breast cancer or cardiovascular disease in the women who had been part of the original trial. Women under sixty who started HRT actually showed decreased all-cause mortality.

The form of HRT being prescribed today is largely different from what was being studied in 2002. Lower doses. Bioidentical micronised progesterone instead of the synthetic progestin used in the original trial. Transdermal delivery through patches, creams, and gels, which significantly reduces the risk of blood clots compared to oral pills. The 2024 guidelines from The Menopause Society (formerly the North American Menopause Society) have explicitly removed the old five-year duration limits and now state that arbitrary limits should not be placed on the duration of HRT use.

In November 2025, the United States Food and Drug Administration moved to remove the boxed warnings from HRT products that had been there since the 2002 panic, after a public expert panel reviewed the evidence.

None of this means HRT is right for every woman. The decision is hers, with her doctor, considering her own history and risks. What it does mean is that many women are still operating from fear-based information that is two decades out of date, and may not have been given the current research.

Why I am telling you this. Because if she is wrestling with this decision, she needs accurate information, not the cultural ghost of 2002. And you, as the person closest to her, can help her find the current research. You can come with her to the doctor’s appointment. You can hold the question with her. The choice is hers. The support can be yours.

For my own part, I came to HRT eventually, after careful consideration with my doctors. And I will only say this. Without an honest map alongside her, how is any man meant to understand how deeply this is affecting him too?

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Where to Start

If you want to get up to speed, here are the four sources I would put in your hands. Each one is current, evidence-based, and written by people with the credentials to be saying what they are saying.

• The New Menopause by Dr Mary Claire Haver (Rodale Books, 2024).

  Number one New York Times bestseller. Written by a board-certified OB/GYN and Certified Menopause Provider. Contains an entire chapter on the WHI study and why the 2002 reading has been reassessed. The single best place to start if she is wrestling with the HRT question.

• Estrogen Matters by Dr Avrum Bluming and Dr Carol Tavris (Revised and Updated Edition, 2024).

  Dr Bluming is an oncologist. Dr Tavris is a social psychologist. The book directly addresses the breast cancer question that has kept so many women, including women with family histories like mine, away from HRT for two decades. If her hesitation is specifically about cancer risk, this is the book.

• The Menopause Brain by Dr Lisa Mosconi (Avery, 2024).

  Dr Mosconi is a neuroscientist at Weill Cornell Medical College who has spent years scanning the perimenopausal brain. Her work explains the cognitive changes, the sleep disruption, the emotional intensity, and the brain rewiring that nobody has been telling either of you about. Read this and the brain fog stops being mysterious.

• The Menopause Society (menopause.org).

  The professional body that sets the clinical guidelines. Their position statements are publicly available. If her doctor is not a Certified Menopause Practitioner, the Society’s find-a-practitioner tool on their website will help you locate one who is. This matters. The right doctor or naturopath can change everything.

What You Are Going Through

Here is something I want to acknowledge directly, you are quite possibly also in your own midlife shift, if you are partnered with someone who is going through hers.

And if this is you, then your testosterone has actually been declining for years. Your body is changing in ways nobody briefed you on. Your sleep is probably different from what it was at thirty-five. Your relationship to your own ambition, your own mortality, your own sense of meaning, all of it is in flux. Some men in this phase find themselves in genuine andropause, with measurable hormonal shifts that affect mood, energy, libido, and cognitive clarity. Almost no doctor will say the word to you.

And underneath the hormonal piece, there is the deeper midlife reckoning. Who you are becoming. What you have built. What you have not yet built. What it means to age as a man in a culture that gave you almost no script for the older man as a figure of wisdom, depth, and luminous authority. You were told to stay productive. To not show vulnerability. To fix things. None of which serves you in this phase of your life.

You are walking your own initiation while she is walking hers.

Which means this passage is happening to both of you. Simultaneously. With no shared language, no shared map, and no cultural framework for two people in metamorphosis at the same time inside the same relationship.

If that sounds genuinely demanding, it is.

If it sounds beautiful, it is also that.

What She Actually Needs From You

In as practical a form as I can give you, after eleven years inside this passage, here is what I have come to understand about what your partner most needs.

1. Do not try to fix her.

This is the single most important thing in this entire article. She is not a problem. This is not a problem. This is a passage. You cannot fix her any more than you could fix puberty when she was twelve. What she needs is not a solution. She needs to be witnessed.

2. Do not say at least you do not have your period anymore.

Or any sentence that begins with at least. I cannot fully explain why this lands as badly as it does. Just trust me. Do not.

3. Believe her body.

If she says she cannot be touched, believe her. If she says she is exhausted, believe her. If she says her brain is not working, believe her. Her body is not malfunctioning. Her body is speaking. The hormonal and neurological shifts are real, and the messages underneath them are also real. She is not exaggerating. She is not over-reacting. She is, on top of an enormous biological transition, trying to function in a culture that does not honour her or help her create the space she deeply needs to make this passage.

4. Sit with her in the dark.

She does not need you to light the candle. She needs you to sit beside her while the candle is out. This is one of the most underrated forms of love available to a partner during this passage. Your presence, without trying to make the darkness brighter, is itself a profound gift.

5. Make her a cup of tea.

Or whatever the equivalent is in your life together. Small ordinary acts of care matter more in this passage than grand gestures. The tea brought without being asked for. The hot water bottle. The bath run for her. The phone call made on her behalf because she does not have the energy. The small things land deepest.

6. Let her withdraw.

She may pull energy back from places she has been putting her for decades. The dinner parties she used to host. The work she used to absorb. The friendships she used to maintain singlehandedly. The way she used to be available to everyone, at all hours, without question. This is not her abandoning the world. This is her bringing her energy back to herself, possibly for the first time in her adult life. If you can recognise the withdrawal for what it is, and not require her to keep performing the old life, you give her the most precious gift available in this passage. Space.

7. Do not take it personally when she changes.

She is becoming someone new. She is supposed to be. The woman she has been for thirty years is being remade. The values she has been carrying may shift. The yes that came automatically may stop coming. The patience she had for your particular small irritations may run thinner. None of this is about you. All of it is about her own becoming, finally, on her own terms.

8. Have your own life.

Your own friends. Your own work. Your own midlife shift to walk. She does not need to be your only world right now. In fact, the men who walk this passage best are often the men who are also walking their own. Get the male friendships. Get the therapy if it serves you. Sit with your own questions. Do your own becoming.

What Happens On the Other Side

Here is the part of this article that I particularly want you to read.

The men who walk their partners through this passage with real presence end up with a different kind of woman on the other side of her. A woman who is more deeply herself. Who has been through the underworld of her own becoming and come back carrying things she did not have access to before. Clarity. Sovereignty. A truer voice. A body that finally knows what she wants and is, perhaps for the first time, able to say.

And the relationship that survives this passage, when it is walked well, ends up deeper than anything you had before. The roles you both built your earlier life around get retired. What is left is honest. The intimacy that returns, when it does, is rooted in a different ground. Both of you have been through something. Both of you have been remade.

The woman you fell in love with is becoming someone she could not have been at the time you met her. If you can stay through this, you get to know her in a way no younger man ever did.

The men I see at the other end of this passage with their partners are deeply, quietly, properly loved. By women who have come into themselves. Which is a different experience than being loved by a woman who has not yet.

It is, frankly, the great gift of this rite of passage that is menopause.

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So This Is Menopause

For the last two years I have been performing in a stage show called So This Is Menopause. A series of monologues by women who have been walking through this passage, delivered live, with humour, with grief, with rage, with reverence.

And at every single performance, men come up to me afterwards. Often quietly. Sometimes with tears.

Thank you. I had no idea this is what she has been going through. Now everything makes sense. Every man needs to see this.

Which is part of why I am writing this article. Because most men do not live in a town where the show is playing. Most men will not, ever, sit in that theatre. But they need the information all the same.

And the women they love need them to have her.

One Last Thing

If this article was sent to you by someone you love, here is what I would suggest.

Do not write back a long reply trying to fix everything. Do not promise to be different.

Just breathe for a few moments and then read it again.

Find the part that lands hardest for you and sit with it for a moment.

Then go to your partner, your sister, your mother, whoever sent it, and say one true sentence. Something like, I read the article. I see you. I am here. Thank you for sending it to me.

Then make her a cup of tea.

It really is that simple. And that hard. And that good.

With deep respect for the work you are doing,

in love and devotion Elayne Kalila

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THE QUIZ IS LIVE

Where Are You In Your Menopausal Journey?

A free two-minute oracle to help you find which of the seven gateways of this passage you are walking through right now. Take it at the link below before you read on, if you are ready.

→ Take the quiz now

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I built you something, my loves.

And I want to tell you why, because the building of this has taken me longer than almost anything else I have made in this work, and there is a specific reason for that.

Across the seven articles I have written so far in this series, I have given you a great deal of language. The reframe of menopause as rite of passage. Who the Midlife Maven is and why I have chosen to name her as such. Peri/Menopause As Your Second Puberty. that we as women experience in our lives. The doctors who were never taught about Menopause.

And underneath all of it, the seven gateways of the menopausal passage. The map I have been carrying for years. The one I wrote about in the fourth article in this series, drawn from the myth of Inanna, from the accumulated wisdom of the sacred feminine lineages, and from eleven years of my own descent.

But here is the thing about a map, my loves. Knowing it exists is not the same as being able to read it.

And I think many of you have been sitting with this exact question.

You have been reading the articles. You have been feeling something land. You have been recognising yourself in pieces of the map without yet being able to say, with any precision, where you actually are inside her.

So I built you something that does.

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The Quiz Is Live

It is called Where Are You In Your Menopausal Journey?

It is free and takes about two minutes. And what it will give you, when you have walked through it, is something I have not yet been able to give you in any of the articles.

Your gateway.

The specific place in the seven-gateway map of this passage where you are walking right now. With a teaching on what that gateway is asking of you, what you are most likely facing, and some support as to how to navigate this pase of the journey, and what comes next.

→ Take the quiz

The Seven Gateways

For a taster here is a brief outline of each gateway. Each one names a different threshold of this passage, a different surrender, and a different power that arrives when you have walked through it rather than around it.

Seven thresholds. Seven surrenders. Seven powers.

Gateway One: The Reckoning

This is the moment that clarity arrives, inside of you. The dynamic you have been quietly working around for years. The role that no longer fits. The yes that has been costing you more than you admitted. Suddenly impossible to unsee.

Gateway Two: The Release

You can feel the ground is beginning to move under your feet. The structures you built your identity around starting, with or without your permission, to loosen. The grief of releasing the woman who held it all together so beautifully for so long.

Gateway Three: The Unknown

You are now in the dark night of the soul. Things start to dissolve. You are faced with looking and seeing what has been waiting in the basement of your life for decades. It can be the most demanding gateway of the passage, and the most transformative. You can no longer continue to do things the way that you used to, your body is too tired, you dont have the same capacity, and your old strategies are no longer working.

Gateway Four: Self-Devotion

This is the first gateway of the ascent. The compass that has spent your entire life pointing toward what others need, finally turning toward you. The question many of us have spent decades skillfully avoiding. What do I need? What do I really want?

Gateway Five: Body Love

Your body starts to return to you in a new way. Erotic aliveness coming back, not the way she was at twenty-five but as something slower, deeper, entirely your own. Pleasure returning as information rather than indulgence. Coming home to her.

Gateway Six: Self Expression

Your essence voice coming through. What wants to be created next. What wants to be spoken aloud. The life beginning to reorganise around what is actually true rather than what is expected of you.

Gateway Seven: Embodied Wisdom

You start to emerge. Wisdom as a lived way of being, present in the body and evident in your choices. The woman who has been to the underworld and come back, carrying something the world genuinely needs.

And here is the architecture, my loves, in the simplest possible form. Gateways One and Two are the descent. Gateway Three is the underworld itself. Gateways Four through Seven are the ascent. The map is not random. She is the ancient shape of every true initiation, drawn from the myth of Inanna, refined across thousands of years of women walking this exact passage.

Wherever You Are, You Are Exactly Where She Needs You to Be

Before you take the quiz, my loves, I want you to know that this passage is not linear. It is, like all things truly feminine, a spiral.

You can genuinely be inside more than one gateway at the same time. You may be walking the reckoning of Gateway One in your marriage, while your body is making the fierce renegotiation of Gateway Three. You may be in the deep disorientation of Gateway Three and feel the first tender shoots of Gateway Four breaking through at the same time.

You may cycle back through a gateway you thought you had already walked, at a deeper register, because you are finally ready to meet what you could not meet the first time.

This is simply the ancient shape of initiation.

There is no hierarchy. There is no correct pace. There is no version of this passage you are supposed to be better at.

There is only where you actually are. And the map is only useful from your actual location.

Take the Quiz

Two minutes, my loves. It will ask you a small number of honest questions. It will give you your gateway. And it will give you a short teaching on what that gateway is asking of you right now.

It is free.

→ Where Are You In Your Menopausal Journey? Take the quiz here.

And What Comes After

Once you know your gateway, my loves, you will be ready for what is coming.

In July, I am opening three sacred gatherings I have been deeply preparing for some time. I am calling them The Wild Knowing.

The first, Primal Awakening, on the 8th of July, is free and open to every woman in this passage. The Wild Dark on the 18th. The Untamed Chrysalis on the 30th. Each one walks deeper into the territory the quiz has just shown you.

And in August, I am opening Metamorphosis. A nine-month initiation into the Midlife Maven, walked through all seven gateways of menopause, in circle, with other women walking the same descent.

Both of those doors are coming. I will share the registration links the moment they goes live.

For today, my love, the door is the quiz. This is the simplest, fastest, most generous thing I can give you to help you find yourself on the map of this passage.

Grab a cuppa and listen for the answers to the deep oracle questions.

And if you are called share the quiz with any woman in your life who has been wondering where she is in this great rite.

She has been waiting for this map too.

→ Take the quiz now

Stay close, my loves.

The door is opening.

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Over the last few weeks, I have been getting one question more than any other from the women writing to me.

What do I do with the rage?

How do I transmute it? How do I use it without it spilling out into my relationships? How do I hold it without repressing it and having it damage me from the inside? How do I not turn into the woman I do not want to be, either the one who burns everything around her or the one who quietly disappears into illness and exhaustion?

These are powerful questions. They are the questions a woman asks when she has already done some of the work and knows there is more. They are the questions of women who have read Hysterical and The Boys We Are Losing, felt the rage rise, and arrived at the next layer.

Now what.

This piece is my attempt at an answer.

I want to name that the teaching that follows is not philosophy. I have spent three decades working with rage in my own body and in other women’s bodies. Through nervous system regulation. Through somatic psychotherapy. Through the mystery school work I have been holding for years, where we sit in circle and the women find their way into the power of their own rage and through to the other side of it. This is the work I have been doing in devotion for so long that it is now time to bring some of it into the open.

Let me begin where I should always begin, which is in my own body.

A moment of my own

A long time ago, a man I loved and was married to betrayed me. The details do not matter, and they are mine. What matters is what happened in my body.

The righteousness came first. Then, almost immediately, the rage widened — to him, to every man who had ever done this, to five thousand years of women being lied to. I could feel it pouring through. And underneath it, I felt my heart close. A small click. A door shutting.

What came next I am still reckoning with. The castrating queen who had lived in my body since girlhood came online without my permission and began, day after day, to murder the relationship from the other side. He had broken the trust. That was true. But it is also true that I made sure the relationship died. I did it with small precise cruelties I told myself were honesty. I was tortured by it. I wanted to forgive. I wanted to open. Some part of me could not. The rage had me. I did not have it.

I tell you this not because it is unusual. I tell you because it is ordinary. It is what happens in our intimate relationships, our public lives, our scrolling, our rage at the news cycle. The rage starts as a sacred signal and somewhere along the way becomes something else — something that runs us instead of moving through us.

The trap looks, from the inside, exactly like the cause we are fighting for.

This is what the women writing to me are sensing. They can feel the rage is real. They can feel it is sacred in some way. And they can also feel it pulling toward either spilling out onto the wrong people or folding inward and causing damage. They are trying to find the third path.

That is the path this piece is trying to name.

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A word before I begin

I am writing in the language of women and men because the cultural wound has been enacted along that binary, and because the lineages I work inside are polarity cosmologies. These are a few traditions among many. The teaching here is one way of describing reality. It is not the only way. Take what serves and leave what does not.

Sacred rage

Let me start with what rage is when it is doing its actual work.

Rage is intelligence. It is the body’s recognition that a line has been crossed. A line in your own life, or a line in the world, or both at once. Rage rises when something that should not be happening is happening. It is the nervous system’s most accurate signal that the situation in front of you is not okay.

Rage is also power. It is animating. It pulls energy up from the belly and into the chest, the throat, the limbs. It is what mothers feel when their child is threatened. It is what women feel when they finally stop accommodating. It is what whole movements feel when generations of swallowed no finally arrive in the throat as no more.

This rage is sacred. It is medicine. It is what wakes us up. It is what turns a slumbering culture into a moving one. Every meaningful change in human history has been propelled, at least in part, by women’s rage finally finding its target.

I will defend this rage with my life.

And.

Rage was not designed to be a permanent home.

Rage was designed to move through the body, propel an action, and then release. Like a wave. Like a contraction in labour. It rises, it crests, it does its work, it passes, and the body returns to baseline, available for the next signal.

This is what sacred rage looks like in the body. Hot. Clean. Located. It knows what it is about, who it is addressed to, what it is asking for. Time-limited. It rises, it acts, it releases. A woman in sacred rage is dangerous to the structures that should be afraid of her, and she is also available — to her body, to her loves, to her work, to her own life.

The rage has not eaten her. It has used her, briefly and precisely, and released her.

This is the rage your body is capable of. Some of you have it already. Some of you have had it and lost it. The capacity is in your body. It is not lost. It is waiting for the conditions that let it move.

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Where the rage actually goes

The rage is not the problem. The rage having nowhere to go is the problem.

Here is what the women writing to me are sensing, and what they are right to sense.

Rage that does not move does not disappear. It goes somewhere. It either spills outward in directions you would not choose, or it folds inward and goes underground and corrodes the host.

When rage spills outward in the wrong direction, it ends up on the people closest to us. The husband who is not the man we are actually angry at. The friend who said the wrong thing. The mother. The sister. The child. The colleague. The stranger in the comments section. We start finding evidence everywhere of the injury we are carrying, even in the people who love us. The rage that has no clean target spreads across every available surface, and the people we share our lives with become the surfaces.

When rage folds inward, it becomes something else. Insomnia. Cortisol that does not turn off. Autoimmune flares. Period dysregulation. Libido vanishing. Depression. The collapse of joy as a real biological capacity. The body that was built to move through rage in waves is being asked to live inside it as climate, and the body cannot do that for long without paying.

This is what the women writing to me are trying to interrupt. They can feel themselves doing one of these things, or both. They can feel their relationships straining. They can feel their bodies under siege. They can feel themselves trying to manage the rage by either stuffing it down or scrolling it out, and neither is working.

The reason neither is working is that the rage is not designed to be managed. It is designed to move.

When rage cannot move, it does not become peace. It becomes one of those two modes. And the cost is real.

I want to name this with care, because the women writing to me are not wrong to be enraged. They are living inside a culture that has dismantled almost every sacred space that used to exist for moving collective rage. There are no public rituals. There are no community circles at scale. There are not priestesses on every street corner. There is no language for what is happening in your body. There is no roadmap. Of course the rage has nowhere to go. The architecture for it to go somewhere has been taken away from us.

What I want to offer is the architecture, in small pieces, that you can build back yourself.

Both directions

This is the heart of the teaching, and it is what I have been working with for thirty years.

The medicine goes in both directions.

Rage that is being suppressed must be allowed to express.

Rage that is spilling sideways must be given a container, witnessed, and brought to ground. The same rage, in two different bodies, needs different work.

The woman who has been swallowing her rage for years needs to give herself permission to feel it, voice it, move it. She needs to learn that her rage is not dangerous and that she is not dangerous when she feels it. She needs the rage to come up out of the basement and into her body where it can do its work.

The woman whose rage is spilling sideways needs the opposite. She needs not less rage, but more accurate rage. It would be so powerful for her to learn to feel it before it leaks. She needs witness and a sacred container so the rage has somewhere to go that is not the husband, the child, the friend. She needs the rage to come down out of the throat and into the belly where it can be felt, named, moved.

Most of us are doing some combination of both, in different domains. The same woman who suppresses her rage at work spills it onto her family at home. The same woman who explodes at her husband swallows her grief alone in the bath. The body cycles between repression and spillage because it does not have a third option.

The third option is what the teaching is.

The rage needs to be felt fully. With witness. With a sacred container. With somewhere for the energy to go. And then it needs to be allowed to release. Not bypassed, or suppressed, or just let go in the spiritual sense that almost nobody can actually do on command. Released because it has actually moved.

That is what transmutation is. It is not the rage becoming something nicer, it is the rage doing its work, in full, and then resolving into the next available state in the body. Which is often grief, sometimes clarity or even a precise action, and sometimes, eventually, joy.

The body knows how to do this. It has been waiting to be allowed.

The witness

If there is one teaching from thirty years of this work I would offer above all others, it is this.

Being witnessed in your rage is the medicine.

Not being talked down, or managed, or fixed. Witnessed. Another woman, or a circle of women, present, available, holding the field, while what is moving in you actually moves.

Some of the most powerful work I have ever done with women is in circle, where a woman finds her way into the full power of her own rage, in her body, with sound, with movement, with witness. And then she discovers, almost always for the first time in her life, that the rage is not dangerous, that she is not dangerous, that the rage moves through her and out the other side and leaves her cleaner and more available than she has been in years.

This is what the body has been asking for. Not less rage. Witnessed rage. Rage that has somewhere to go because someone is willing to stay in the room while it moves.

The reason so many of us are cycling through rage that cannot be transmuted is not that we are too angry. It is that we have nowhere to be angry that does not cost us our marriages, our jobs, our friendships, or our self-image. We have no sacred circles. We have no priestesses. We have no rituals. We have no rooms where the rage is welcome.

So we either hold it in until it folds inward, or we let it leak in the wrong directions.

The sacred circle is the medicine. If you have one, deepen into it. If you do not have one, build one. Three women, a kitchen table, regularity. Start there. The capacity to witness each other’s rage is one of the oldest medicines on earth, and we have almost forgotten we are allowed to use it.

How to move the rage

The practices. Use the ones that fit. Do them.

• Shake. Animals shake after threat. They tremble until the stored activation discharges, and then they get up. Humans have forgotten how. Put on music and shake, knees, shoulders, hands, the whole body. Five to ten minutes. You will feel ridiculous. Your body will know exactly what to do.

• Voice. Rage held silently calcifies. Rage voiced moves. Find a place where no one can hear you, a parked car, a forest, a pillow over your mouth, and let the sound out. Not words. Sound. Roar, scream, growl, howl. The body needs to make the noise the rage has been holding. One note: if you are releasing rage to a tree or a forest, please ask permission of the tree first. You can also dig a hole in the earth and release rage into the earth, again with permission.

• Move your body. Walk fast. Run. Dance. Drum. Chop wood. Dig the garden. The rage is kinetic energy. It wants to go somewhere. If you do not give it a destination, it goes inward and corrodes the host, or it spills sideways onto the nearest body.

• Breathe out. The long exhale. Inhale four counts, exhale eight, sigh audibly at the end. Five minutes. The long exhale tells the nervous system the threat has passed. The body cannot stay in rage when the breath has lengthened.

• Be witnessed. Another woman, a circle, a therapist who knows somatic work. The rage moves when it is seen. The rage does not move when it is hidden.

• Bring it to the altar. Candle, stone, photograph, flower. Speak the rage into the space. Name what has been done. Name who has done it. Name what you want to release. Let the ritual container hold what your nervous system is too small to hold alone.

• Act, precisely. Aligned action is itself a somatic discharge. Phone call to the representative. Hard conversation at the dinner table. Vote. Donation. Boundary held. Decision made. Piece written. Email sent. The action does not have to be large. It has to be true. The rage is asking what are you going to do about this. When you answer with something specific, the rage releases.

This is what transmutation actually is. Rage that has found its target and is now doing the work.

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The wider context

A few things for the women asking these questions.

• You did not get here alone. The cultural infrastructure for moving collective rage does not exist in our world. No public rituals. No community circles at scale. No priestesses on every street corner. No roadmap. The fact that you are trying to figure out what to do with the rage, in your kitchen, by yourself, is itself a sign of how much the culture has dismantled. You are not failing. You are inside a system that took the containers away and now sells you outrage as the substitute.

• The algorithm wants you in the loop. Every refresh, every scroll, every click on the next outrage, is making someone money from your nervous system. The architecture of attention is designed to keep you cycling, because cycling is engagement and engagement is the product. Get off the feed when you can. The feed is not the work.

• Some of the rage is not yours. When personal injury fuses with collective injury, your rage at the man who betrayed you fusing with your rage at every man who has ever betrayed a woman, your body cannot tell the difference, and the rage stops being moveable. The lineage rage belongs at the altar, in the circle, in the political action. The personal rage belongs in the personal reckoning. Both are real. Neither benefits from being fused.

• You will fail at this. You will move the rage one day and spill it the next. You will start the practice and stop the practice. You will find yourself at 3am refreshing the feed and hating yourself for it. This is fine. This is the work. The capacity is itself a practice. You are meant to keep coming back.

What is available on the other side

You are not less angry. You are just less haunted. The rage rises when something needs it to rise, and it does its work, and it releases.

You are more focused. Your actions are more precise. You save your fire for what actually matters.

You are more available. To your body, your people, your work, your joy. You have not had to wall any of it off in order to manage the rage, because the rage is no longer something to be managed.

You are still standing in your no. You have not become soft in the way the culture means soft. You are still the woman the structures of harm are afraid of. You are just no longer their unintended ally, the woman so exhausted by holding the rage in failure-mode that you cannot build anything new.

You are building the new. That is what the moving of the rage frees you to do.

A close

I did not save the relationship I told you about at the start. The damage I did from inside the rage was too thorough. That is part of what I carry.

What I did save was myself. With the practices above. With sacred circles of women who let me rage and did not try to fix me. With altars I built in my own house. With actions I took, small and large, that gave the rage somewhere to go. With sleep and water and food and breath. With the willingness to admit that some of the rage was not actually about him, was older than him, was the inheritance I had been carrying since I was a small girl in a kitchen learning to keep myself safe with the only tools I had been given.

I am still doing this work. I will probably be doing it for the rest of my life. The rage rises. Sometimes I move it cleanly. Sometimes I do not. The practice is the practice.

What is different now is that I know what I am inside when I am inside it. I can usually feel the loop as it starts. I can usually find my way back to the practices.

This is what I want for you. Not less rage. Better relationship with rage. Rage as ally, not as jailer. Rage that moves through, does its work, and releases you back to your own life.

You have a life on the other side of this rage. You have work the world is waiting for. You have love to give that you cannot give while you are locked. You have a body that wants to be alive in you.

The rage was never meant to take any of this from you. The rage was meant to protect it.

Move the rage. Use the rage. Trust that what the rage was protecting is still there, on the other side of the moving, waiting for you to come back.

I will be there too.

in love and devotion, Elayne Kalila

If this piece moved something in you, share it with the women you love. Send it to your circle. Take it to your altar. The work is in the moving. Sacred Reckoning begins August 2026.

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THE HYSTERICAL RECKONING SERIES | ARTICLE SEVEN

FREE COMPANION TO THIS SERIES

7 Gateways of Menopausal Initiation

The Midlife Maven Map

A free guide to the seven gateways of the menopausal passage. The same map I have walked alongside countless women in. Download her below before you read on, and let her keep you company.

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I am a blood mysteries activist, my loves. I have been my whole life. Learning about the power of my menstrual cycle was one of the first ways that I began to din my way back to a sense o the sacred feminine, and to a lineage that is old as our blood, breth and bones.

I want to say that here, because I am about to make an argument that asks you to question something you have likely accepted as fact for decades.

I have spent nearly thirty years working with the deep wisdom held in women’s blood. The bleeding years. The conscious-menstruation years. The years with women in recovery from addiction and from violence, helping them understand that their cycle was a navigation system. And now the menopausal years, walking alongside thousands of women through this great second threshold.

The work has shown me, again and again, that the most ancient guidance system a woman has access to is the one our culture has worked the hardest to make her doubt.

So when I tell you that the definition of menopause we have been given is broken, this is not theory. This is what almost three decades in the rooms have shown me.

Menopause is not governed by a date she is a journey.

That is the thesis. Everything else unfolds from her.

If this is your first piece, welcome. This is the seventh article in The Hysterical Reckoning, a series about the menopausal passage and the woman we are becoming inside her. The previous pieces are sitting just below this one on this Substack. Read in any order. They will catch you up. This piece is the foundation underneath all of them.

The Definition We Have Been Given

Here is the medical definition of menopause.

It is the day twelve months have passed since a woman’s last period.

One day. Twelve months. A box ticked on a chart. A line drawn through her reproductive years.

That is what we have been given, my loves.

That is the framework, in every medical textbook, every magazine article, every well-meaning conversation about what stage you are in That single point in time, defined entirely by what has stopped happening in our ovaries.

This is, plain and simple, insufficient.

This tells us about our ovaries, and tells us nothing else about us.

This diagnosis does not name the years of crossing we walk to get to that day. It does not name the woman we become in the walking. It does not name the underworld, the descent, the return. It does not name the new ground we may not yet have reached. It does not name the arrival, when we finally cross the deeper threshold of returnong to ourselves.

This diagnosis was written, my loves, by a medical establishment that has historically pathologised women’s midlife as decline and disorder. It was written from outside our lived experience. And it was adopted into popular culture without question. And this narrow medical diganosis has been quietly accepted by women, who have had no alternative offered.

I have to tell you something, I myself accepted her for years. Decades, frankly. Even as a blood mysteries activist. Even as a woman who has spent her whole life working with the cyclical wisdom of the female body. The cultural force of the medical framework is that strong. I was inside the haze of it without quite knowing I was inside the haze.

And then, slowly, the haze began to lift. Which is why I am writing this to you now.

Because here is what we are not often told, and what changed everything for me when I finally understood it properly.

The Doctors Writing This Definition Were Never Taught Menopause

This is not a small fact, my loves. So let me say her plainly, with the data behind it.

Most obstetrics and gynaecology residency programmes in the United States do not have a dedicated menopause curriculum at all. A national survey published in 2023 found that only 31 percent of US OB/GYN residency programmes include any standardised menopause education. A 2019 survey found that 20 percent of OB/GYN residents received zero menopause lectures during their entire residency. Zero, my loves.

And the rest? An hour. Maybe two. A clinical professor at Yale Medical School has stated publicly that she gets one hour to teach menopause to medical students during their entire OB-GYN rotation. One hour. For the great third hormonal initiation that two million American women cross every year.

Most primary care physicians, who are the doctors the vast majority of women actually see, receive no formal menopause training at all. It is an elective. A footnote. A topic women are expected to educate their own doctors about, after a forty-five minute Google deep dive in the car park.

These are the people who wrote the definition we have all been carrying around as fact. These are the people we have been told know better than our own bodies.

A definition of our most powerful midlife rite of passage, written by people who were not even taught what it is.

Phew.

This is a definition we have been given. We have never been asked whether it serves us.

And the truth is - it doesn’t, never has, and never will.

The Two Words That Mean Everything and Nothing

And then there is the matter of how the language actually behaves, my loves. Because the clinical framework names the phases like this.

Perimenopause. The years of hormonal change before the final period. She can last anywhere from a few years to over a decade.

Menopause. Technically one single day. Twelve months after the final period.

Post-menopause. The rest of a woman’s life after that day.

Tidy, on paper.

Phew, right?

Except the words do not behave that way in real life. Women say I am in menopause when they are technically perimenopausal. They say I am past menopause when they have crossed the clinical line but are still in the deepest work of their lives. The word means everything and nothing. She fragments a unified passage into clinical phases that do not match lived experience.

Which leaves us, my loves, in a peculiar situation.

Some of us are given a name for what we are going through. Perimenopause. As though what we are living is preparatory. As though the reckoning is a warm-up for the real event.

Others of us are told the work is done. Post-menopause. As though we have arrived somewhere we have not actually arrived.

And the marker of completion has been placed, in this whole system, in the wrong place. In our ovaries. Instead of where she actually lives. In the soul’s arrival.

This leaves women confused about where they are in their own passage. And then, almost cruelly, the framework asks them to doubt their own knowing when the map does not fit.

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The Women Who Cannot Find Themselves on This Map

Let me show you what I mean, my loves. Because in my years in the rooms, I have met every single one of these women. Many of them, many times over.

The forty-six-year-old in the deepest descent of her life.

She is told she is perimenopausal. As though what she is living is preparatory. As though her reckoning is a warm-up for the real event. When in truth, my loves, she is in the deepest gate of the whole passage. She is in the underworld. She is being unmade. And the word she has been given does not honour the gravity of what is moving through her.

The fifty-five-year-old who has not yet found her ground.

She is told she is post-menopausal and the work is done. When in truth she is still walking. The bleeding has stopped. The arriving has not happened. She is told to be settled when she is not. And so she begins, quietly, to wonder what is wrong with her. Why she is still in the middle of something her chart says is over. Why the new shoreline has not appeared, when her doctor told her it should have by now.

The sixty-year-old who walked this passage years ago without a map.

She is told her menopause is over and she should be at peace. When in truth she is still gathering what was scattered in the descent. She is still naming what could not be named at the time. She is still in active completion of a rite that the clinical world declared done years before she actually finished her in herself.

Each of these women, my loves, is being asked to map herself onto a timeline that does not match her interior reality. And then she is being asked to doubt her own knowing when the map does not fit.

We have to give them a different map.

A New Definition

So here is the reframe I have been carrying for years, my loves. The one I want to offer you now, plainly, as the foundation of everything else I write.

Menopause is the rite of passage by which a woman becomes the Midlife Maven.

It begins the moment a woman’s body first whispers that the change is coming. And it continues through every gate of the descent, every release, every meeting with what has not yet faced. This passage holds you through the underworld, and walks you back up to the light when you are ready.

And when this passage completes, this when the woman arrives.

Not the day our bleeding stops, my loves. When the midlife maven arrives. When we find ourselves able to stand on new ground and recognise that we have arrived, after a long journey. When the woman you have been becoming is the woman you are now living as. When the Midlife Maven is no longer something rising in her but someone she is.

A woman is in menopause from the moment her body begins to call her into this passage.

A woman is post-menopausal when she has arrived as the Midlife Maven. Not before.

The body marker is one piece of evidence along the way. She is not the gateway. She is one of the many gateways. She is the biological marker of a passage whose true completion lives in the soul.

When you feel her, my loves, you will know.

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The Three Movements of the Passage

In this redefinition, the rite has three movements. A woman may be in any one of them. And the official biological markers do not, by themselves, tell her which.

The Entering.

What the clinical world calls perimenopause. Her body begins to change. The first reckonings begin. The threshold has opened. She is being summoned, gently or with the subtlety of a brick through the window.

The Walking.

The deep middle. The reckoning. The release. The dismantling of what no longer fits. The meeting with what has been waiting in the basement of the self for decades. Her body may still bleed. She may bleed irregularly. She may have stopped. The clinical markers do not name what is happening in the soul. The Walking can last a very long time.

The Arriving.

The integration. The return from the underworld. The Midlife Maven settling into the body as a lived way of being. The new shoreline becoming visible. She may come a year after a woman’s last bleed. She may come ten years after. She comes when she comes.

These three movements are the actual architecture of the passage. The hormonal markers are inside her. Not the other way around.

Why I Am Writing This

I want to tell you, why this reframe matters to me so deeply that I have been carrying her quietly for years before publishing her here.

Because the longer I have done this work, the more I have understood that the clinical definition of menopause is not a neutral piece of medical language. It is the same erasure, dressed in a different costume. The same cultural project that wrote our blood out of sacred consciousness in the first place, now writing our arrival out of it on the other end.

We were not greeted at our first threshold. I wrote about that in the previous article in this series. And now we are being processed at our second threshold the same way. Through clinical markers that tell us when our ovaries have stopped, and tell us nothing at all about who we have become.

This is, my loves, what blood mysteries activism actually is. It is the slow, patient, long-term work of restoring sacred language to what was made profane.

Our blood mysteries are the cyclical wisdom of a woman’s body across her whole life. The menstrual cycle as a navigation system. Ovulation as a knowing. The bleed as a returning.

And underneath them, three great hormonal thresholds at which our bodies undergo their most profound transformations.

Puberty was the first. The threshold at which we received the capacity to create. To become Creatrix in our own body, whether anyone honoured that in us or not.

For some of us, motherhood was the second. Some women walked her. Some did not, by choice or by life. Not having walked her does not mean a mystery was missed. The shape was different. The depth was no less.

And now, perimenopause. The third. The threshold at which we lay down the Creatrix who creates in the body, and become the Creatrix who creates herself.

This is what the menopausal passage actually is. Not an ending. The third great blood mystery of our lives.

And what is being awakened in us as we cross this has a name. I have come to call her the wild knowing. The body wisdom that lived in us before we were domesticated, before we were taught to override our no and soften our truth to fit a room. She is what every cycle we have lived through has been quietly metabolising into knowing. And now, when the blood is no longer leaving us, that lived knowing is being held within.

And here is something else that is beyondamazing. Menstrual blood contains pluripotent stem cells. The medical establishment has been documenting this for nearly twenty years. Regenerative cellular gold, the same biological wisdom medicine has spent decades searching for in other places, sitting inside our bodies the whole time.

We have been making medicine. For decades. And pouring her out.

And in this passage, for the first time in our adult lives, that gold begins to be held within us instead of released. This is the alchemical shift at the centre of menopause. The Midlife Maven is being made of her.

Her blood is gold. Until menopause, she has been giving her away. Now she holds her.

I will be writing about this more deeply in a piece coming very soon.

None of this was ever meant to be reduced to symptoms and dates.

Feminine spirituality, my loves, has always been rooted in our cyclical nature. Our blood was the original calendar. The original altar. The original initiation. The cultures that knew this honoured us. The cultures that lost it began, very slowly and then very systematically, to write us out.

And every clinical definition we accept without questioning is a small further inch of that erasure.

To redefine menopause as initiation is to take a small inch of that erasure back.

Which is what we are doing here, my loves.

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The Long Way Home

I want to tell you something, because this work would not be possible without the women who came before me.

I was not given any introduction to my own puberty. I wrote about that in the previous article. But the loss of the lineage went deeper than the moment of first blood. I had no navigation system at all. No way of charting my own life. No older woman pulling me aside with a cup of tea to say, here is the wisdom you carry in your blood, here is how to live by her.

So I spent much of my twenties and thirties looking for her. Searching, in the way a woman searches who knows she is missing something but does not yet have a name for it.

And then, slowly, I found her. Through the work of women who had been doing this digging long before I arrived.

I found Judy Grahn, whose 1993 book Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World introduced Metaformic Theory. Her thesis: menstruation was not peripheral to human civilization. Menstruation was the origin of it. What we call culture was built originally on women’s blood wisdom. We just somehow lost the credit for it along the way.

I found Tamara Slayton, who founded the Menstrual Health Foundation and trained generations of women in the cycle as a sacred navigational tool.

I found Lara Owen, whose 1993 book Her Blood Is Gold was one of the first to name menstrual blood as the alchemical wisdom of a woman’s body. Her title is the title I have given to my own teaching coming next, with reverence and acknowledgement of the lineage I walk in.

And I found, through them, the others. The women in the small dim rooms of the early conscious-menstruation movement, holding this work for decades while the wider culture pretended it did not exist.

What they gave me, all of them, was a map. The map I had been looking for since I was a girl.

Which is why, my loves, I am writing this to you now.

Because I do not want any of you to spend twenty years looking for what should have been given to you at thirteen.

Find Yourself on This Map

So I want to invite you, to sit with this for a moment. Forget what your chart says. Forget whether you are technically in perimenopause or post-menopause according to the clinical line.

And ask the deeper question. Where am I actually in this rite?

• Has the threshold opened? Is something asking for your attention, even if your body has not yet given the official signal? You may be in the Entering.

• Are you in the deep middle? Are old structures falling away, whether your bleeding has stopped or not? You may be in the Walking.

• Have you returned? Is the new ground, the ground that was not there before, finally holding? You may be in the Arriving.

• Or you may, like most of us, be straddling two of them. The passage is not a tidy march. She is a spiral.

The point is not to label yourself, my loves. The point is to feel where you actually are. And to know, finally, that you are not failing the timeline. The timeline has failed you.

An Invitation

I am building something, my loves, for women who want to walk this passage with real guidance, real company, and the kind of devotional sacred-feminine architecture our culture has never given us at this great threshold.

It is called Metamorphosis. A nine-month Menopause Initiation into the Midlife Maven, where together we walk through the seven gateways of the menopausal passage. Enrolment opens in July.

Before that, I am opening three live evenings called The Wild Knowing. Primal Awakening on the 8th of July, free and open to every woman in this passage. The Wild Dark on the 18th of July, the deeper evening. The Untamed Chrysalis on the 30th of July, the gathering of every woman who has walked any part of this with me.

And on the first of June, I am opening a free quiz that will help you find which of the seven gateways you are walking through right now.

I will share all of these links the moment they go live.

For today, my love, the door is the PDF map at the top of this article. This is free, and is the working map of everything I have just written about. Download it and sit with it, and feel what resonates.

And if any of this has landed in your body, please share her with the women in your life who are at one threshold or the other of this great rite.

They have been waiting for this map too.

Stay close.

The door is opening.

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I have been thinking about a boys.

All of the boys. The ones we are losing right now, in plain sight, while the world that should have raised them looks the other way.

The fourteen-year-old in his bedroom in Manchester or Minneapolis or Mumbai, alone with his phone, an algorithm doing its work on his nervous system.

The seventeen-year-old in a Minnesota high school who just got an email from a National Guard recruiter telling him that enlisting could keep ICE from taking his mother.

The twenty-two-year-old who has just been hired by ICE itself, who applied along with eighty thousand others when the age cap was removed in August.

The boy in the men’s group chat passing around the Tate clip. The boy who shot the woman he had been told he was entitled to.

But I have also been thinking about the boy in our kitchen.

My older brother. Angry, lost, needing direction and holding that did not come, missing our mum in a way that was somehow even more excruciating than mine. I have written about him before. I have not written about the boy inside him.

I have been thinking about that boy a lot.

The Boys Who Broke My heart

And I have been thinking about the boys I met more than a decade ago in the eastern Congo, when I was working with the City of Joy and the women on its staff team, sharing a trauma healing curriculum I had developed called the Safe Embrace. The City of Joy is the sanctuary V founded in Bukavu for women survivors of the genocidal sexual violence that has been used as a weapon of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for thirty years. The women on the staff there have lived through what no human being should live through.

But the boys I want to tell you about, I met at the hospital. Panzi Hospital, also in Bukavu, the hospital Dr. Denis Mukwege built and tends, where the women who have survived the violence go for the surgical repair and medical care their bodies need before any of the rest of the healing can begin. The hospital is the first ground. It is where the body is given back to itself.

The boys I met there were the boys who had done the violence. Or boys like them.

They were former child soldiers. Stolen from their villages when they were nine, ten, eleven. Forcibly recruited into the factional guerrilla groups that have run the eastern Congo as a charnel house for decades. Shamed, beaten, intimidated, and broken into doing horrendous acts of violence against women. By twelve, thirteen, fourteen, they had done things their nervous systems could not metabolise and their souls could not yet understand. By fifteen, sixteen, some of them had been rescued. Pulled out by NGOs, returned to villages that did not want them back, given to programmes that were trying to reintegrate boys who had committed atrocities into communities that had been on the receiving end of them.

When I met some of these boys, they had been in the programmes for a few years. They had done their grief work, in whatever way the programmes could carry them through it. They had been received, witnessed, slowly returned to themselves by elders who refused to write them off.

And they were playing drums at the hospital.

For the women.

I want you to see this image with me, my loves. Because it is one of the most theologically loaded images I have ever stood inside.

The hospital where the women were being put back together. Surgical wards, recovery rooms, the slow medical work of mending bodies that had been catastrophically violated. The women in their hospital beds and their hospital gowns, lying in the ground floor of healing where the body itself is being given back to them. And the boys, formerly soldiers, formerly the hands of the violence, sitting at the edge of the ward, playing the drums.

Holding the rhythm for the women whose bodies they had been part of breaking.

That is what initiation actually looks like. That is what the noble masculine actually looks like, when it has been recovered from the broken boy. He does not arrive in his glory and apologise. He sits down at the edge of the hospital ward and plays the drums for the women he has hurt, and he does it for as long as it takes, and his body slowly learns what his hands were always for.

I have been carrying that image for over a decade. It comes back to me now because what we are watching unfold across the western world is what happens when there is no one to do that work with the boys.

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A word before I begin

I am writing in the language of women and men because the cultural wound has been enacted along that binary, and because the lineages I work inside are polarity cosmologies. These are a few traditions among many. There are cosmologies that do not run on polarity, and humans whose interior experience is not held by these poles. The teaching here is one way of describing reality. It is not the only way. Take what serves and leave what does not.

What the data actually says

Let me name what is happening, because it has to be named clearly before we can talk about what is underneath it.

Eighty per cent of British boys aged sixteen and seventeen have consumed content created by Andrew Tate. Only sixty per cent of boys in the same age group have heard of the British Prime Minister. Read that twice. They know the misogynist influencer better than they know the head of their own government. Fifty-six per cent of young fathers under thirty-five in the UK approve of him.

Forty per cent of adult American men, and half of younger American men, say they trust one or more men’s rights, anti-feminist, or pro-violence voices from the manosphere. Two-thirds of young men regularly engage with masculinity influencers online. Two-thirds of young men say no one really knows me.

Far-right extremism in the West has risen by two hundred and fifty per cent in the last five years. Radicalisation that once took months or years now typically takes days, sometimes hours, because the short-form algorithm has been engineered for it. Teachers in Canada are reporting misogynist and extremist beliefs in students as young as eleven and twelve.

Last year in the UK, a young man named Kyle Clifford murdered his ex-partner, her sister, and her mother. Within twenty-four hours of the killings, he had watched videos by Andrew Tate. The judge at trial called Tate a poster boy for misogynists.

Meanwhile, in August of last year, the Department of Homeland Security removed all age caps for ICE recruitment. Anyone over eighteen can now apply. The agency received over eighty thousand applications in the first week. The goal is to hire ten thousand new immigration officers, backed by nearly thirty billion dollars in federal funding. Boys who were in high school last year are now being trained to disappear other people’s mothers from grocery store parking lots.

And in Minneapolis in January, a National Guard recruiter sent an email to around two hundred high school students with the subject line I know it is scary out there, pointing to ICE operations and telling the students that if they enlisted, they might be able to keep ICE from taking their parents.

This is what the recruitment of the next generation of young men looks like in 2026. The manosphere on one side, taking the lonely ones into misogyny and far-right radicalisation through the algorithm. The state security apparatus on the other side, taking the frightened ones into enforcement work through the threat of what will happen to their mothers if they refuse. And in between, the boys.

The boys are being harvested.

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They are not lost because they hate

I want to be careful here, because the easy story is the wrong story.

The boys joining the manosphere are not joining because they hate women. Not at the beginning. Most of them arrive looking for advice on fitness, on dating, on how to make money, on how to be a man in a world that has stopped teaching them what that means. The misogyny is not the entry point. The misogyny is what they are taught once they have arrived inside an ecosystem that has them captive.

The boys joining ICE are not joining because they hate immigrants. Many of them are immigrants themselves, or sons of immigrants. They are joining because there is a paycheck. Because there is a uniform. Because somebody told them that putting on that uniform would make them somebody. Because the alternative is the slow grind of underemployment and loneliness and the suspicion, never quite spoken, that nobody has ever actually seen them as a man.

The boy in our kitchen, my brother, was not angry because he was bad. He was angry because his mum had been sick most of his life, his dad was overwhelmed, the village had not gathered around him, and there was no man in his world who could say to him I see you, you are mine, I will walk you through this. He was a boy who had been left to figure it out, and what a boy left to figure it out usually finds is a hard surface he can hit until he forgets what he is missing.

The men on Motherless were once boys whose tenderness was shamed out of them so completely that they cannot, as adults, bear to be witnessed by a whole woman with her eyes open. The men in the Epstein files were once boys who learned, somewhere, that intimacy was a thing to be taken rather than something to be entered together. The men passing the legislation against women’s bodies are sitting in the gerontocracy of broken boys, none of whom were ever called into the noble masculine by an older man who could have done it.

Andrew Tate himself was once a boy. His father, the chess master Emory Tate, was a complicated man, and Andrew grew up between Chicago and Luton, in a household and a culture that produced the man he became. The misogyny he sells now is the misogyny of a boy who learned, somewhere very young, that the only way to survive the wound of his own tenderness was to weaponise it against women. He is what happens when no one reaches the boy. He is now the recruiting officer for the next generation of unreached boys.

This is what we are looking at , its systemic, my loves.

The boys are not lost because they hate. They are lost because they are starving. And what they are starving for is the same thing my brother was starving for in our kitchen. The same thing the boys in the eastern Congo had been starving for when the guerrilla groups found them. The same thing the seventeen-year-old in Minneapolis is starving for when the recruiter writes to him with the subject line I know it is scary out there.

They are starving to be seen. To be received. To be initiated into something real. To be told, by an adult man they respect, what their strength is for.

When no one reaches them, the algorithm reaches them. The recruiter reaches them. The Tate brothers reach them. The militia reaches them. The Discord server reaches them. Someone always reaches them, because every boy has to belong somewhere, and a boy who is not gathered into the noble masculine is, by simple physics, going to be gathered into something else.

The boys are not the problem.

The vacuum is the problem.

The boy inside the man

I want to say something now that I have been saying for years and that I want to say again, because it is the diagnosis that holds the whole system together.

The boy is in there.

In every man we are watching hurt women, abuse children, bully his way into more power, legislate against bodies that are not his, post in the manosphere, drug his wife, knock on the door at six in the morning to deport his neighbours. The boy is in there. The boy who was crushed before he had a chance to grow into the noble man. The boy whose tenderness was shamed. The boy whose grief was mocked. The boy whose body learned that softness was a way to be eaten.

That boy did not disappear. He went underground. He hardened. He learned to perform a version of himself that the locker room and the playground and the family dinner could not destroy. And now, in middle age, in the late thirties, in the sixties and the seventies, he is running the world from inside a body that has been carrying him since he was nine.

What we are seeing in public is the visible expression of the boy in private. Andrew Tate is a boy. The man at the legislature is a boy. The man on Motherless is a boy. The man in the boardroom who cannot make eye contact with the woman he has been working alongside for a decade is a boy. They are all the same boy at different amplitudes, expressing through different surfaces, in different costumes, with different access to power. But the wound is one wound. The crushing is one crushing.

This is the part that almost nobody can bear to look at, because if it is true, it asks something of us. It asks us to see, in the most monstrous-seeming behaviour, the boy who was never reached. Not to excuse him. Not to absolve him. To diagnose him correctly. Because if the diagnosis is correct, the intervention can be correct. And the intervention is not more punishment for the grown man. The intervention is reaching the boy.

The boy who is currently fourteen.

The boy who is currently twenty-two and applying to ICE.

The boy who is currently fifty-six and has been a man on paper for forty years and has never, not once, been seen by an older man as the boy he still is.

All of them need the same thing.

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What these boys need

This is very close to my heart and I have been saying in my other articles in particular What Happens When the World is Fatherless. But I want to say it again because I think it is so important.

• They need to be seen. Not lectured to. Seen, as the boys they are, by adult men and women who can hold what they actually carry without flinching.

• They need elders. Men who have done their own work. Men who have crossed thresholds and come back changed. Men who have stopped pretending. Men who can say to a boy I see who you are. I see what you are carrying. Come sit with me. I will walk you through this.

• They need rites of passage. Real ones. Not the empty corporate version, not the abstract spiritual version. The kind where a boy is taken away from his mother and his phone and his algorithm, by a circle of older men, and put through something difficult, and brought back changed, and presented to his community as a young man with a name and a place at the fire.

• They need ritual, music, drumming, work, the physical body, the hands doing something that matters. The Congo boys playing drums at the hospital is not a metaphor. It is the actual structure. The body learning what it was always for through repetition, presence, witness, and time.

• They need men’s circles. Not the corporate networking version. The real one. Older men gathering younger men around fires, around tables, around grief, around the work of becoming a noble man. Boys to Men Mentoring has done this with fifteen thousand boys. The Brotherhood Program. Journeymen. The Becoming A Man programme that started in Chicago and now runs in over two hundred schools across America, Boston, Kansas City, Dallas, Washington DC, London. Coaching Boys Into Men, where athletic coaches are trained to do the work because for many boys the coach is the closest thing to a father they have. These programmes exist. They are working. They are wildly underfunded. They are the thing that actually moves boys away from the manosphere and into something whole.

• They need fathers who have done their own work. Not heroes. Fathers. Men who have sat with their own father wound, their own mother wound, their own shame, and come back capable of being present to their sons. This is the longest work and the most necessary one. The fathers of the next generation of boys are the men who are currently in their thirties and forties, many of whom have never been initiated themselves. They cannot give what they have not received. They have to receive it first.

• They need mothers who can hold them as boys without trying to make them into the men they have already failed to be. A mother who can mother her son into his own becoming, who can love him fiercely without taking responsibility for his manhood, who can call in the father, the uncle, the elder, the men’s circle, the rites of passage programme, the mentor. The mothers cannot do the men’s work, but the mothers can refuse to do it for them, and that refusal is part of how the boys are released into the work of becoming.

• They need the older men to come back into the room. This is the most urgent ask of this moment, and I want to be direct about it. The older men in this culture have largely retreated. Some out of disenfranchisement, some out of fatigue, some out of the unkind cultural air that has made being an older man feel like a kind of unwelcome. I understand the impulse. The seclusion is not the answer. The boys are being lost to ICE recruiters and militias and Andrew Tate because the older men withdrew, and the void you left has been filled by people who profit from your absence. The boys are looking for fathers and elders and finding only people who monetise their loneliness. You can do better than that. They need you to.

To the mothers of sons

I want to say something specifically to the mothers, because I know many of you are reading this with a fourteen-year-old in your house, watching what is moving through him, terrified.

You are not crazy. What you are sensing is real. The algorithm has him. The Discord server has him. The boy at school who has been getting deeper into the manosphere has him. The Tate clip his cousin sent him last week has him. You can feel him slipping, in small ways, and you cannot quite find the words to reach him.

I want to say two things to you.

The first is that this is not yours to fix alone. You cannot mother him into manhood. That is not a failure on your part. That is the architecture. Boys need to be initiated by older men into the noble masculine, and that work cannot be done by mothers, even the most fierce and present mothers in the world. What you can do is refuse to let the algorithm and the Tate brothers be the only voices reaching him. You can find the men’s circle, the mentor, the coach, the uncle, the godfather, the rites of passage programme. Bring them in. The men who are doing this work want to be doing it. Many of them are sitting around waiting for boys to be sent to them.

The second is that you have to keep loving him. Even when he is performing the Tate posture in your kitchen. Even when he is repeating things that frighten you. Even when his eyes go cold for a moment and you do not recognise him. The boy is still in there. The boy still needs his mother. Not to agree with the posture, not to soften your truth, not to manage his feelings. Just to keep loving the boy underneath the costume, while also refusing the costume itself.

Your love alone will not bring him home. But your love is part of the architecture that can hold him while the men do their work. Hold the line. Find the men. Refuse the algorithm. Pray, light a candle, keep him in your fierce attention. The boy is still reachable. He has not gone yet.

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What we do now

There is grounded action available, my loves. Let me name some of it.

Find a mentoring or rites of passage programme.

• The Becoming A Man (BAM) programme at Youth Guidance, in two hundred schools across the US and London — youth-guidance.org.

• Boys To Men Mentoring Network in California and beyond — boystomen.org.

• Journeymen Triangle in North Carolina and Journeymen Institute on Vashon Island, Washington — journeymen.us and journeymentriangle.org.

• Rite of Passage Journeys for boys in the Pacific Northwest — riteofpassagejourneys.org.

• The Brotherhood Program at Community Change Inc — communitychangeinc.com.

• Coaching Boys Into Men, which trains athletic coaches in dating violence prevention — search for it locally.

Support the older men’s work.

• ManKind Project — mankindproject.org.

• Sacred Sons — sacredsons.com.

• Evryman — evryman.com.

Send the man in your life. Donate. Talk about these programmes openly.

• If you are a father, do your own work. Find a men’s circle. Find a therapist. Find an elder. Sit with your father wound. You cannot father a boy from inside a wound you have not addressed. Start where you are. The work is available.

• If you are an older man, come back into the room. Your generation is sitting on the lineage. The boys cannot find it without you. Mentor one boy this year. Just one. The boy down the street whose father is not present. The nephew. The son of your colleague. The boy in your congregation. Reach him. Be reachable.

• Watch what your sons are watching. Not as surveillance, as company. Sit with them. Ask them what they are seeing. Do not lecture. Ask. Listen. Then offer them something else. The Brian Cox documentary instead of the Tate clip. The Wim Hof breath work instead of the Liver King supplement scam. The boys are looking for something to be inside. Give them better things.

• Refuse the framing that men cannot be reached. Refuse the language that turns all men into monsters. Refuse to write off the boys, even the ones who have hurt people, even the ones in the militia, even the ones who have already gone deep. The Congo boys came back. The redpillers in the studies are showing up on the deradicalisation forums having woken up. The men in the men’s circles are doing the work. The boys can come home. Hold that as fact, in your body, against every story that says they cannot.

What I believe

Here is what I believe in my deepest heart.

The boy is in every man we are afraid of. He is also in every man we love.

The crushing of the universal boy is the deepest wound this culture is carrying, and it is the wound from which most of the other visible wounds flow. The website. The legislation. The masculinity podcasts. The militia. The ICE recruitment. The boys who shoot the women they were told they were entitled to. All of it is what happens when the universal boy is crushed before he can become the noble man.

But the boy can be reached. The Congo proved it to me. The men who write to me every week prove it to me. The fifteen thousand boys who have come through Boys To Men prove it. The two hundred schools running BAM prove it. The fathers re-fathering themselves in their men’s circles prove it. The older men who have come out of seclusion prove it.

The current dying sick system is not destiny. It is an architecture. It can be built differently. It is being built differently, in pockets, in small rooms, in circles around fires, in school basements at lunchtime, in retreat centres in the mountains, in drumming circles in Bukavu.

We have to scale this work. We have to fund it. We have to talk about it. We have to send our boys to it and our men into the work that supports it. We have to refuse to let the manosphere and ICE and the Discord servers be the only forces moving on the boys.

The noble masculine is not dead. He is sitting at the edge of the circle. He is drumming for the women he has hurt, and he is also drumming for the boys who will come after him, the ones who do not yet know the rhythm but will learn it because someone is holding it for them.

If this piece moved something in you, send it to a mother of sons. Send it to a father. Send it to a man you know who has been doing the work quietly for years and deserves to know that what he is doing matters. The boys are waiting to be reached.

We can do this, my loves.

The boys can come home.

But only if we go and get them.

In love and devotion

Elayne Kalila

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For most of my younger life, I was a woman who knew how to incinerate a man.

This is the letter I have been afraid to write. To my enraged women. On how we speak to the men we love when the world is on fire.

I learned it young. My older brother was angry, and he was bigger than me, and I was scared of him. I did not know how to stand up for myself in any other way, so I sharpened my tongue into something that could cut him in half before he had finished his sentence. It was not a choice. It was a survival. The only one I could find.

And then, as I grew up, I became aware. Of the horrid inequity between women and men. Of the perils and abhorrences of patriarchy. Of the long bloody history we have been living inside. And the fury I had honed in the small kitchen for my angry brother fused, suddenly, with the fury of three thousand years of women, and I became a young woman who was angry with men. Period. Full stop. I would not have said it that cleanly at the time, but my body had said it, and my mouth knew.

So I had really good practice. I learned, early, exactly which sentence would unmake a man across a kitchen, across a meeting, across a bed. I became the castrating queen. I was effective. And it cost me everything I most wanted.

I know I am not alone in this.

After thirty years of working with women, I know only too well how easily we hone this ability, the blade of our words, used to protect and to obliterate at the same time. We get good at it because we had to. We pass it down to each other without quite meaning to. We mistake the sharpness for sovereignty, and only later, sometimes much later, notice what it has cost us, and the people we love.

I have spent the last decades learning a different art. A different kind of sharpening. The art of saying the true thing in fewer words, without the desire to destroy underneath them. The art of letting my words mean what they mean, without arming them first.

What I have learned, slowly, is that the less I say, the more easily I am heard.

When I share a feeling in a thousand words, building the case for it, explaining it, justifying it, anticipating every defence and pre-emptively dismantling it, the feeling itself disappears underneath the construction. The person across from me, regardless of who they are, stops being able to find me. By the time I am done, I have made my feeling airtight, and unreceivable.

The same feeling, in twenty words, lands.

This is not about men needing it simpler, or women being too much, or any of the old tired stereotypes that get reached for in this conversation. This is about something more interesting. The thousand words are not for him. The thousand words are old armour. The thousand words are the part of me that learned, very young, that my feelings would only be received if I could prove they were warranted, justified, defensible.

The heart-forward woman in me does not need her feelings to be justified and she does not need a sword in her mouth either. She just feels them. And speaks them, cleanly, in as few words as it takes. And lets the room do what the room does.

I am still learning her. Some days I do this beautifully. Some days I absolutely build the thousand-word case again, or feel the old blade rise, and watch the room go quiet, and notice it too late. Ha.

So this is the letter.

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A word about the title

Hysterical comes from the Greek hystera, meaning womb. For more than two thousand years, this word has been used against us. Hippocrates believed the womb wandered through a woman’s body causing chaos. Medieval doctors burned women for hysteria. Victorian physicians sent us to asylums, prescribed forced bed rest, performed clitoridectomies, called every woman’s grief and rage and refusal a disease of the female mind. Freud built his early career on diagnosing us with it. The American Psychiatric Association did not remove hysteria from its diagnostic manual until 1980.

The word has been weaponised against every woman who refused to be quiet. Against every woman who knew the truth before the room was ready to hear it. Against every woman who was right and was told she was crazy. Against every woman whose body said no and whose culture said that is your problem, not ours.

I am taking it back.

What this culture has called hysterical is, in fact, often the most accurate response a we can have to a world that has gone insane. The rage is correct. The grief is correct. The refusal is correct. Our bodies that scream when they can no longer bear what we are being asked to bear is not malfunctioning. It is telling the truth.

So when I call this piece Hysterical, I am not using the word the way it has been used against us. I am returning it to its root. Hystera. The womb. The seat of life-giving power. The body that knows. The voice that names. The fire we have been told for two thousand years was our disease, when it has always been our medicine.

This is the letter from inside that medicine.

Link to The Hysterical Reckoning

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What we are sitting with

I have spent the last weeks writing into the reality of this moment in three pieces — Motherless, Fatherless, and Severed. The Mother in exile for ten thousand years. The noble masculine missing alongside her for four thousand. The Sacred Marriage driven underground for both. The first three pieces did the diagnosis. This one is the practice.

[Link to Motherless]

[Link to Fatherless]

[Link to Severed]

Something has been moving through all of us across these weeks. And what has become clear is that the conversation now has a fourth question, and the fourth question is ours.

We have named the wound. We have seen it. We are on fire. We have refused the premature reunion.

Now what?

How do we carry this rage. How do we speak now. How do we walk out of a dance that has been running for thousands of years, without either swallowing our fire, which we will not do, or letting it burn down the very people we are trying to call home.

That is what this piece is about. And before I go any further, I need to be very clear about the ground I am standing on.

To my women readers

I am not asking you to swallow your truth, diminish your rage, manage their feelings, or make yourself more palatable.

I am not asking you to take responsibility for men’s inability to hear us. I am not asking you to carry one more ounce of what was never ours to carry.

What I am asking is different. And I know it is much harder.

I am asking us to grow up without losing one drop of our fire.

Because here is what I have learned, in my own body, after thirty years of watching this loop run inside myself and inside the women I love. Our righteous rage burns the room down and changes nothing. It feels powerful in the moment, and then we are alone again, and the men we love are further away than they were before we opened our mouths. And the structures we are raging at are still standing.

The flamethrower has not worked. We have thousands of years of evidence.

The awakened feminine — midlife maven, empress, queen, whichever name lands true for you — might.

This is not softening. It is exactitude. The sword we carry when our heart is open is sharper than any flamethrower has ever been, because it cuts cleanly through the specific structure doing the specific harm. And it does not waste itself on the men we love, who are not the structure.

It is time for us to take the raw rage we rightly feel and forge it into sword. To find the sacred beneath the flame.

A note as I begin. I write in the language of women and men because the cultural wound has been enacted along that binary, and because the lineages I work inside —Hermetic, Celtic, Alchemical, Tantric, Magdalene — share a polarity cosmology. These are a few traditions among many. There are cosmologies that do not run on polarity, and humans whose interior experience is not held by these poles. The teaching here is one way of describing reality. It is not the only way. Take what serves and leave what does not.

The fury is real and the fury is holy

We are furious. We have every reason to be.

The Epstein files keep opening and closing and opening again. We have an administration legislating women’s bodies as though women themselves have nothing to contribute to the conversation about their own bodies. There is the daily ordinary violence in homes we will never see, in numbers so staggering that to sit with them is to feel something in our hearts actually break. There is the Motherless website, the Telegram group, the drugged wives, the eyelids held open, the twenty dollars a viewer.

And right now, there is a reckoning that millions of us are walking through at once, where we are saying what the actual fuck is going on and what can I do about it? And we are saying it at full volume.

This is our sacred rage. This is our holy fire. This is, IMHO, exactly what this moment is asking of us.

And…

What I know from my own life is this. We rehearse the maiming sentence in the shower, in the car, in the hour before he comes home from work. We have rehearsed it so many times that some of us have forgotten we could say something else.

And when we deliver it, when we turn toward the men in our lives with that fire at full volume, something happens we need to talk about honestly.

They shut down. They close. They protect.

They go quiet, or defensive, or cold, or away. Sometimes all four in an afternoon.

And we are left holding the fire with no one to hand it to. And we get more furious. And the next time we speak, the fire is hotter. And the next time they hear us, the wall is thicker. Round and round we go, in a loop that has been running in our relationships, our families, our workplaces, our parliaments, for generations.

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What the loop has cost us

On the personal level. It means you have spent more nights than you can count alone in the bed next to a man who used to be able to reach you and now cannot. There is a sentence you have wanted to say to him for ten years, and you have not yet found the way to say it that does not blow up the room.

On the relational level. It means your son is fourteen and has already learned to flinch when you walk into the room, because he does not yet know which mother he is getting. It means your father called and you could not pick up the phone.

On the generational level. Your mother was furious her whole life and never had a way to forge it, and she passed it down to you. Your daughter is watching you now. She is learning her whole life from how you handle this.

On the cultural level. Thirty years of feminist anger and the structures are still standing. The men who run the world have learned to wait us out, to weather the storm, to know that maiden rage will burn itself out eventually. The patriarchy, IMHO, would actually like us to keep running this loop. A diffuse rage is a manageable rage.

On the spiritual level. We have not yet become the women we were supposed to become. The priestess in us, the one who knows how to wield fire with precision, has been waiting for us to grow into her, and we have been too busy being the maiden to come and meet her.

That is what the loop has cost us. That is what running it for one more decade would cost the women coming after us.

I am not interested in paying that price again.

The young woman’s rage and the awakened woman’s rage

The young woman’s rage is raw and necessary. It is the scream of the girl who has been silenced, and she had to scream. Nobody gets to tell her not to. I have been that girl. You have been that girl. We all carry her, and we always will.

The awakened woman’s rage is something different. It is still fire. It is still real. It is still dangerous, in the good way. What it is also is aimed. It knows what it wants to illuminate. It can hold itself long enough to ask the question instead of only delivering the verdict. It can speak to the person in front of it as though that person has the capacity to rise.

We have been doing the young woman’s rage for generations. I built a whole life out of it. Some days I still do.

But we have many years of evidence now. The young woman’s rage has not moved the men.

The awakened one might.

Why the frequency matters

When we speak to the men from pure rage, we are not actually speaking to the noble masculine. We are speaking to the defended boy underneath the armour. The boy who learned very young that feeling anything was dangerous, and that being vulnerable was a way to get hurt.

And the defended boy does what defended boys do. He hides. He hits back. He runs. Every time.

The noble masculine, the man we are actually trying to reach, lives underneath that boy. He is the part of him that wants to protect. That wants to build. That wants to be trusted by a woman he respects. That wants, at the deepest level, to be worthy of the love he is being offered.

He cannot be summoned by force. He can only be invited. Not begged. Not bargained with. Not coddled. Invited.

When we speak from the awakened woman in us, that is the frequency he can hear. Not because the words are softer. Because the aim is true.

This is a different frequency entirely. Bodies know the difference.

How we speak to the men now

These are not a formula. These are the practices I am learning, ungracefully, mostly in the middle of my own kitchen.

One. Speak to what you want to see.

The noble masculine will not show up when you are addressing his broken self. You are not making contact with him, because you are not speaking to him. You are speaking to the wound, and the wound will defend itself.

Speak past the wound. I know you are more than this. I am talking to the man I know is in there. Watch what happens. Sometimes nothing. Sometimes a crack of light. Sometimes a whole landslide of relief, because somebody finally saw him.

Two. Voicing, not unloading.

There is a difference between this is how your actions affected me and this is everything wrong with you and your entire gender and the five thousand years of your mistakes. Both might be accurate. Only one is survivable across the table.

When I need to unload, I take it to the sisters, to the page, to the earth, to the scream in the car with the windows up. When I need to voice, I bring it, clean, to the man in front of me.

Three. Refuse the either-or.

Do not let the conversation become either I love you or I am furious with you. Either you are the noble masculine or you are the monster.

Both is the only true answer. You love him and what he did is not okay. You need him and he has failed you. He is capable of more and he is, right now, not meeting you. Stay in your own ground. Speak what is true. Want him to receive it. And do not require that he receive it in order for you to remain whole.

Four. Call him by his real name.

His real name is not men. His real name is not the patriarchy. His real name is the one his own father probably never called him.

When I have spoken to the noble masculine in a man directly, not as flattery, not as manipulation, but as genuine address to the part of him I know is real, I have watched men change in my lifetime. Not all. Some. Enough to be worth doing.

Five. Stop doing it for them.

This is the one I have to keep learning. Ha.

It is not our job to heal him. It is not our job to parent him. It is not our job to carry his unprocessed grief on top of our own. Our job is to stop mistaking his uninitiated self for who he actually is, and to hold the door of initiation open while he decides whether he is going to walk through it.

Some will. Some will not. Both are true. Neither is our responsibility.

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What it actually sounds like

Because theory is lovely, but what most of us need is language we can use on a given Tuesday.

What is happening to women right now is real. It is in this house. It is in this bed. It is in this body. And I need you to be the kind of man who can hear that without collapsing, because I am not willing to carry this alone anymore.

I am not asking you to agree with me. I am asking you to be with me while I tell you the truth about how I feel.

When you shut down, I lose you. And when I lose you, I lose the person I was supposed to be building this life with. I do not want to lose you. I want you to stay.

I believe you are capable of more than you are currently doing. That is why I am still in this conversation.

When we speak like this we are still on fire. Still in our truth. Still unwilling to be silenced. And we are speaking to the man we love as though he is capable of rising. Because he is. Most of them are. Most of them have simply never, in their whole lives, been spoken to that way.

The piece I know some of you will push back on

We do have to take responsibility for how we use our words.

I know. I can hear the intake of breath from here. Ha. Stay with me.

This is not because the men deserve our careful packaging. It is not because their feelings are more important than our truth. We have done quite enough of that for one civilisation, thank you.

It is because we are calling ourselves into our truth and power and awakened heart. We must be willing to grow into our maturity too. Because our words carry frequency. Because what we speak into a room we are co-creating, whether we like it or not. Because the wild feminine, unharnessed, does not birth the new world. She burns the old one down, and then the next generation inherits the ashes and has to start again from nothing.

We are not here to leave our children ashes.

We are here to call in the noble masculine. To hold the fire and the invitation at the same time. To be both the sword and the door.

This is maturity. This is what midlife has been preparing us for. This is Saturn in Aries asking us to grow the fuck up without losing one drop of our fire.

And the ones who will not meet us

Some are too committed to the structures that protect them. Some are too afraid of what they would have to feel in order to actually change. Some are already so far inside the broken masculine that there is, in this lifetime, no reaching them.

I am not calling those men home. I am not asking you to.

I am talking about the men who can be reached. The husbands. The brothers. The fathers. The sons. The colleagues. The friends. The ones who have been waiting, some of them for decades, for a woman to speak to the noble masculine in them and mean it.

The ones who will not come, will not come. Our job is not to keep throwing ourselves against their walls. Our job is to stand in our ground, speak our truth, call forward what can be called forward, and walk anyway.

But call him forward, first.

What we do now

For the women.

Find your altar. A corner, a windowsill, a shelf. A candle. A stone. A photograph of the women in your line. Light it before you write a message or have a conversation you know is going to be hard.

Find three women. Make a circle that does not break. This is where the fire that needs to spray goes, so that by the time you arrive at the kitchen counter with the man you love, the fire in your hand is clean. Three women. A kitchen table. Regularity. Start it this week.

Have one clear conversation with one specific man this week. Not all of them. One. The one where the loop is running hot. I want to come back to what you said yesterday because I had a reaction to it and I want to tell you what the reaction was. Try it. See what happens.

Read. Audre Lorde’s The Uses of Anger. Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run with the Wolves. Marion Woodman on the awakened woman. Stand on their shoulders.

For the brave men who might also be reading.

Breathe before you defend. Just one breath. Long enough to ask yourself, am I hearing the wound under the fire. If you can stay in the room thirty seconds longer than your nervous system wants to, something different becomes possible.

Take this piece to another man this week. Not to a woman. To another man. Read it together. The women in your life cannot do the work of initiating other men into the noble masculine. Only you can.

Write back. Not to defend. Not to explain. Just to say I read this and here is what moved in me. Breaking the silence on your side of the conversation is part of how the loop ends.

Back to the practising

I want to come back to where I started.

Because the holy woman’s work does not happen just at the altar in the temple. It happens at the kitchen counter. In the bedroom. In the half-second before the castrating sentence comes out of your mouth, in the breath that lets you say something true and brief instead.

That half-second is the work. That half-second is where the new world is being built. One conversation at a time. One sentence at a time. One woman at a time, choosing the priestess over the maiden, choosing the forge over the spray, choosing twenty true words over a thousand defended ones.

Some days I do this beautifully. Some days I absolutely do not. Ha.

But every day I am practising. Because I am not going to be the woman who passes this loop on to the women coming after me.

We have been the maiden. We have been the castrating queen. We have been the woman with the razor sharp tongue, and we earned every inch of that fire, and I will not let anyone tell you otherwise.

But the world that is trying to be born now does not need the maiden’s fire alone. It needs ours. The forged kind. The aimed kind. The kind that knows the difference between the structure we must dismantle and the man at the kitchen counter. The kind that can hold a flame in one hand and the open door in the other. The kind that can say the true thing in twenty words and let it land.

Let us be those women.

Not because the men deserve it.

Because we know what we are.

We are the holy women of the next era. The fire is in our hands. The altar is beneath it. And the world needs all of us, sword and door at the same time, calling them home.

If this piece moved something in you, send it to one woman who needs it. Send it to one man who is ready to be in this conversation. The work is in the passing.

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FREE COMPANION TO THIS SERIES

7 Gateways of Perimenopausal Initiation

The Midlife Maven Map

A free guide to the seven gateways of the perimenopausal passage. The same map I have walked alongside countless women in. Download her below before you read on, and let her keep you company.

→ Download the free PDF map

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A Question From My Heart

I want to ask you something, my love.

Can you remember the girl you were the day your blood first came?

Take a moment with her. Where were you? What you were wearing? Who you told, if anyone? What your mother said, or did not say? Did anyone meet your eyes and let you know that something had just happened to you that mattered. Or perhaps, like most of us, you found yourself handling it quietly in the back of a bathroom somewhere, working out the practical mechanics on your own.

What I know for sure is that most of us were not greeted at that threshold, my loves. We were flung into this powerful rite of passage with no idea of where we were going or what was happening to us.

Possibly, we were handed a packet of pads. Sometimes a mortifying biology lesson at school. Sometimes a quiet aside from our mother that landed somewhere between embarrassment and resignation. And then we were sent back out into our ordinary lives as if nothing had happened, expected to manage the enormity of what had just shifted in our bodies without any language, ceremony, or witnessing to mark it.

Good luck. Godspeed. Don’t make a fuss.

Which is, honestly, the unofficial motto of how generations of women have been ushered into womanhood. Especially us.

A Note for the Gen X Reader, In Particular

I want to take a moment to name this because I think it is one of the great unspoken truths of our generation.

If you are a Gen X woman, you were one of the most unwitnessed cohorts of girls in modern history. Our mothers were navigating their own seismic cultural shifts. Our culture had just begun to acknowledge that periods existed, mostly in advertising for thin, discreet, deodorised products designed to ensure no one would ever notice you were bleeding.

We grew up in the era of the latch-key kid. We were given a great deal of freedom and very little guidance. We were expected to intuit our way through enormous bodily and emotional shifts with almost no language for what was happening.

We were sent out into our teenage years like explorers with no map. Wild and feral on one hand. Completely clueless on the other.

And I will not tell you the whole story here, my loves, because that one belongs to a memoir I am writing. But mine met me in the early 1980s, in a small English town that still felt permanently lodged somewhere around 1957. There was no ceremony. There was a padded bra and a great deal of confusion and no older woman pulling me aside with a cup of tea to say, this matters. You are crossing something. Like most of us, I was handed instructions where I should have been handed a ritual.

And I learned, in that exact unwitnessed moment, that my body was something to manage rather than something to be embraced.

I remember going to the shops to buy sanitary towels and turning bright red as I had to go to the check out with lad from my school. I was literally mortified. I wanted a hole to open up and swallow me. Even now I can feel this in my body, and it has taken me most of my life to rinse that shame out of me.

Most of us know this place, my loves. The shame that we have carried about the very seat of our power.

What I Have Learned From Thousands of Women

I want to tell you something now, my loves, because it is the ground I am writing this article from. And everything grows from here.

I have spent nearly three decades in this work. First in conscious-menstruation circles, back when reclaiming the moon time was still considered a fringe practice for a small handful of us trying to remember what our great-great-grandmothers might have known. Then for many years with women in recovery from addiction and domestic violence. And now, for a long stretch of years, with thousands of women crossing the perimenopausal passage.

And in all of those rooms, my loves, across all of those years, I have rarely met a single woman who was honoured at her first threshold.

I have rarely met a woman who was given real information about her bleeding. Let alone guided. Let alone celebrated. Let alone told that what was beginning in her body was sacred, intelligent, and hers.

Instead, my loves, we were given euphemisms that ranged from derogatory to lets face utterly ridiculous.

There was of course the curse, that time of the month, Auntie Fanny’s coming to visit (whoever she is!), and of course on the rag, the painters are in, shark week, riding the crimson wave, closed for maintenance, code red and then of course the clinical and innocuous period…

All of them designed, when you look at them squarely, to ensure that the most ancient biological wisdom of a woman’s body would be wrapped in something quietly ridiculous, mildly shameful, and absolutely not to be discussed at the dinner table.

Our bleeding was something to be hidden. Whispered about, if mentioned at all. Managed with thin discreet products designed to ensure no one would ever know. And for absolutely sure, not understood for what it actually was.

So this brings me to what I have learned in those rooms over all of these years.

Our menstrual cycle is not a curse, or something to be hated on. She is a sacred navigation system. An inner-guidance map for emotional, creative, and physical life. The shifting hormonal weather across the month is powerful information from the depth of our being. The pre-menstrual edge is information. The ovulation peak is needed information. The bleed itself is information. All of it telling us, with extraordinary depth and potency, what is true in our inner and outer worlds.

When we live by her, my loves, she becomes one of the most reliable inner compasses a woman has.

I watched women in recovery for addiction relapse around their ovulation and their PMS, because no one had ever taught them that their cycle was a map of the very emotional terrain that put them at risk. I watched women in violent relationships discover that their cycle was telling them what was true about their lives long before their mind could let them know. I watched, again and again, what happens when a woman is finally given language for what is moving through her body.

She comes home to herself.

Our blood was always a map. We were just never given the key.

So when I sit down to write to you about perimenopause, my loves, I am writing from inside almost three decades of asking women this very question, and almost three decades of watching what happens when the answer is finally given.

Perimenopause is the threshold I am writing about now because it is the another great hormonal teaching of a woman’s life. And we are arriving at her, generationally, just as unprepared as we arrived at the first one. With the same cultural silence. The same euphemisms. The same absence of older women pulling us aside with a cup of tea to say, this matters.

Which is why I am writing what I am writing. And why I want you to know that what I am about to share with you next is not theory. It is what tens of thousands of women have, in my rooms and circles and gatherings over the years, finally been allowed to say.

What Happened to Us at The Puberty Threshold

Something significant settled into our bodies when we crossed that threshold alone, my loves.

• We learned, somewhere underneath our conscious minds, that our bodies were a problem to be solved. A thing to be discreetly handled. A source of mild ongoing embarrassment to be managed quietly so as not to inconvenience anyone.

• We learned to be ashamed of the smell of our own blood. As if the most ancient signal of life-bearing wisdom in our bodies were somehow rude to mention.

• We learned to keep tampons hidden in the side pocket of our bags, slipped up our sleeves on the way to the bathroom so no one would see. Like little contraband. Like illegal substances. For something half the human race does every month.

Honestly. The absurdity of it.

• We learned to apologise, almost reflexively, for cramps. For mood swings. For taking up the space our bodies were beginning to take up in the world. For having a period at all, frankly, if we happened to bleed through onto a chair somewhere or god forbid white trousers in summer.

• We learned, most of all, that the great life-giving wisdom moving through us each month was something we should keep largely to ourselves. A private matter. A mild inconvenience. Not something to celebrate. Certainly not something to honour.

And underneath all of the absurdity, my loves, there was the heartbreak.

Because the truth is that we wanted to be seen and held. Every single one of us. We wanted the older woman with the cup of tea. We wanted someone to look us in the eye and say, this matters. You are crossing something. You are not alone.

And mostly, we did not get her.

I want to tell you one small piece of my own story here, because I think it might matter for the woman reading this who has been carrying the particular shame of being out of step.

I did not start my period until I was nearly sixteen. I was a profoundly late bloomer. While the other girls in my class were getting bras and trading whispered notes about cramps and pads, my body sat there in the most stubbornly neutral way possible, as if it had never received the memo.

I felt, in the deepest part of myself, that there was something wrong with me. That my body had filed the paperwork incorrectly. That I was not, somehow, really a girl in the way the others were.

It made the whole unwitnessed business of those years so much worse, my loves. Because I was not even being flung into my young womanhood alongside the others. I was being held in the perpetual nowhere. I was watching everyone else cross a threshold I had not yet been allowed to approach. And I had absolutely no one I could ask why.

I will tell you more of that story in the memoir. For now what I want you to feel is that whatever shape your particular late-or-early-or-painful-or-ashamed arrival took, you were not the only one. You were never the only one. There was a whole generation of us, each handling our own version on our own, with no one to ask, and the loneliness of it has been one of the great unspoken wounds we have all been carrying.

It is amazing any of us survived adolescence at all, frankly.

This is not a small thing. Our bodies crossed an enormous threshold, and our souls had no language for it yet. So our souls did the only thing they could do. They learned to handle our bodies. To manage them. To stay one step ahead of them so they could not embarrass anyone.

That handling became the operating system of our lives. For decades.

Until now.

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And Now Comes the Mirror

Here is what I want you to feel into now, my loves. Because this is the part that took me a long time to fully understand.

Perimenopause is the same threshold returning.

It is another great hormonal rite of passage in our woman’s life. Our body opening again, transforming again, asking again for ceremony, witnessing, language, and welcome. The body returning to the threshold she stood at when she was eleven or twelve or thirteen, and asking for the greeting she did not get the first time.

Except this time, she is not eleven.

This time, she has lived a whole life. She has carried, given, mothered, built, lost, loved. She has accumulated decades of being told, in a thousand small ways, that her body is a problem to be managed. And she is finished with that arrangement.

So this threshold is louder. It is bigger. It refuses to be handled discreetly. It announces itself in hot flashes at the wrong moment. In rage at the family dinner. In grief in the middle of a Tuesday morning. In a body that simply will not, this time, cooperate with the long-standing project of pretending she is not there.

She is the same threshold. She just cannot, this time, be made quiet.

And this, my loves, is the great gift of this passage.

Because we get to do it differently this time.

Two Thresholds, Both Moving

There is something else I want to name here, because it sits right inside this mirror and it is genuinely extraordinary.

Both of these thresholds are moving. They are arriving in our bodies earlier than they ever have in human history.

In 1900, the average girl in America did not begin to menstruate until she was around fourteen. In the Victorian era it was closer to sixteen. Today, the average girl in this country begins her bleeding at around twelve and a half. Some begin much earlier.

And perimenopause? Most of us are starting to feel the first whispers of it in our early-to-mid forties. Some in our late thirties. A generation ago it was thought to begin in the mid-to-late forties, sometimes later. I once again was a late bloomer- I did not stop blessing until I was 57 - but this is a whole of a different story for another moment!

What is real, is that puberty is arriving earlier. Perimenopause is arriving earlier. The hormonal architecture of a woman’s life is rewriting itself in our bodies, in real time, faster than the culture knows what to do with.

Researchers are not entirely sure why. Environmental estrogens. Changes in nutrition. Chronic stress. Artificial light. Some combination of factors we do not yet fully understand.

But the fact itself is not in dispute. The windows are moving.

Which means, my loves, that the bodies of a whole generation of women are being asked to navigate two enormous biological initiations on a timetable our mothers, our grandmothers, and our great-grandmothers never had. With almost no cultural support for either one. And almost no language for what the body is doing, or why.

No wonder we are tired. No wonder we are confused. No wonder so many of us feel that something has gone wrong with us, when in truth what is happening is that something is happening for the first time at this scale in human history.

Phew.

The Choice We Have This Time

Here is what I want you to know, my loves.

You did not get to choose how puberty met you. None of us did. We were too young, too unsupported, and too embedded in a culture that did not yet have the language to greet us at that threshold.

But you do get to choose how perimenopause meets you.

This time, you have the agency that the girl did not have. You have the resources, the seasoning, the relationships, the inner authority that she did not yet have. You have the option, for the first time, to do what no one did for you the first time.

You get to be the older woman with the cup of tea.

You get to sit down with the girl you were and the woman you are becoming, and say, this matters. You are crossing something. I am here. I see you.

This is, in a quiet way, what every single woman I have ever walked alongside in this passage has eventually done. Not because someone forced her to. Because the body, this time, finally insisted on being greeted, and she finally had enough of herself left to do the greeting.

The same threshold. The same body. A whole different welcome.

Sit With Her

I want to leave you with something to sit with, my love. Not homework. Just a gentle invitation.

If you can, find a quiet moment this week. Make a cup of tea. Sit somewhere you will not be disturbed.

And see if you can remember her. The girl you were the day your blood first came. The girl who handled it on her own because no one was holding the threshold for her.

Tell her, in whatever words come, that you are here now. That you see her. That what happened to her body that day mattered. That she did not need to manage it alone.

And then, in the same quiet moment, sit with the woman who is rising in you now. The one whose body is at the second threshold, hot and loud and demanding to be heard. Tell her too. That you see her. That this also matters. That she will not be handled discreetly this time, because you will not let her be.

Let them meet inside you, the girl and the becoming-woman, the way they should have always been allowed to meet.

That meeting is the beginning of everything.

Something Is Coming

My loves, I am building something for women who want to walk this second threshold with real guidance, real company, and the kind of devotional sacred-feminine architecture our culture has never given us at this passage.

It is called RED: The Midlife Maven Initiation: A nine-month journey through the seven gateways of the perimenopausal passage. The kind of container our mothers did not have. The kind of welcome the girl in you did not get.

Enrolment opens in July.

Before that, on the first of June, I am opening a free quiz I have been working on for some time. It will help you find which of the seven gateways you are walking through right now, and what is being asked of you in this specific season of your descent. I will share the link with you the moment she goes live.

And before that, today, the simplest and best thing you can do is download the PDF map of the seven gateways. She is at the top of this article. She is free. She will keep you company in whatever gateway you are in.

If anything in this piece has been landing in your body the way I hope it has, my love, stay close.

Tell another woman who needs it.

And know that the welcome you did not receive the first time is finally, properly, available to you now.

In love and devotion

Elayne Kalila

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The concerns I keep hearing, in many different forms:

• The site is only off temporarily.

• Where are the arrests?

• The men in the Telegram groups are still out there.

• The traffic will simply migrate to another platform.

• The men who did this have not been held to account.

I want to say, clearly, that I agree with all of you!

Of course the site can come back, and most likely will. The Dutch had jurisdiction over the hardware sitting in their territory. They did not have jurisdiction over the brand. The .com can be re-pointed to new servers in another country, and activists and reporters expect it will be. Cocoland resurfaced last month in the Coco Islands after Coco was taken down for its role in the Pelicot case.

The men who used the site have not been named, charged, prosecuted, or held publicly accountable. The Telegram groups are still active. The wider ecosystem of drug-facilitated sexual assault has not been dismantled. The architecture I have been writing about in Motherless, Fatherless, and Unmothered is still standing.

The men who did this have not been held to account

I do not want to soften any of this.

I want every reader of this page to hold the realism with both hands. The takedown is one node in a vast system. It is not the end of the work. It is not the end of the system. It is not even the end of this particular site, which can resurface tomorrow under another domain in another jurisdiction.

And…

I also want us to hold the win.

Because here is what I know about how cultural change actually moves. It does not move by anyone waiting for the perfect, total, final dismantling. It moves by the accumulation of small interruptions, each one teaching the system that its assumed impunity is not absolute. Each one training the cultural body that the firewall can hold. Each one building the muscle memory for the next interruption, and the one after that.

We live in a world that tells us, every day, that the systems we are inside are immovable. That nothing changes. That our voices do not matter. That the architecture is too vast and too entrenched to be challenged. This is the lie the architecture must tell us to keep us complicit in our own captivity.

And every time something moves, we have to mark it. As proof that the system is not what it tells us it is.

So I am asking you, today, to hold both with me, for this is what I sense is the real work.

Hold the realism. The site can come back. The men have not been arrested. The shadow is still working, in plain sight, on platforms we cannot yet see. We have not won. We are nowhere near won.

And hold the win. Three hundred of you in conversation under one post. A site with eighty-two million visitors a month taken offline by Dutch authorities. A preliminary criminal investigation opened. A wave of women refusing to look away. A wave of men reading the piece in their circles and writing back in tears. A cultural body learning, in real time, that it has more power than it has been told it has.

Both are true. Both have to be carried.

What we can do now

I have been asked, in dozens of comments, what concrete steps people can take. So here they are. Specific, named, and doable this week. So lets keep our momentum lets make this happen. Lets keep sharing and talking and taking action.

Sign the UltraViolet petition.

UltraViolet, a leading women-led gender-justice organisation, built the petition that gathered more than 28,000 signatures calling on Google and major search engines to deplatform Motherless and all replica websites immediately. The petition is still live and is now pushing platforms to prevent the migration to lookalike sites.

Sign here: act.weareultraviolet.org/sign/no_search_for_abuse

For all of UltraViolet’s current campaigns, including ongoing pressure on tech platforms, Visa, Uber, TikTok, and more: weareultraviolet.org/take-action

Follow and support the #EndEyeCheck campaign.

Zoe Watts and Amanda Stanhope launched #EndEyeCheck, a survivor-led campaign targeting the legal loopholes that allow men to drug, rape and film their partners. The campaign is calling for new legislation to make the creation, possession, and distribution of such material a specific criminal offence, and for online platforms to be held legally accountable for hosting it. They are also raising funds to build an international support network for survivors, many of whom may not yet know they are survivors at all.

Search #EndEyeCheck on Instagram, X, and TikTok. Follow Zoe and Amanda. Share their interviews. The launch report from ITV News is here: itv.com/news/2026-05-06/survivors-launch-campaign-to-end-sexual-abuse-of-unconscious-women

To make contact with the campaign team, ITV is currently routing correspondence: investigations@itv.com

Read and share the original CNN investigation.

Saskya Vandoorne, Kara Fox, and Niamh Kennedy reported the foundational piece that broke this open: Exposing a global “online rape academy” that is teaching men how to abuse women and evade detection. Every reader should know about it.

Read it here: cnn.com/interactive/2026/03/world/expose-rape-assault-online-vis-intl

For more from CNN’s wider series on gender inequality: cnn.com/interactive/asequals

Contact your representatives.

Ask them three specific questions. What is your government doing to investigate the men who used Motherless? What legislation are you supporting to criminalise the creation, possession, and distribution of non-consensual intimate imagery? What pressure are you putting on tech platforms to de-index and prevent the resurfacing of these sites?

Call. Email. Write publicly. Make them answer.

In the United States: Find your senators at senate.gov/senators and your representative at house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative. Or call the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and they will connect you directly.

In the United Kingdom: Find your MP and write directly at theyworkforyou.com or writetothem.com.

In the European Union: Find your MEPs by country at europarl.europa.eu/meps.

In Canada: Find your MP at ourcommons.ca/members or represent.opennorth.ca.

Demand the prosecutions.

The Dutch Public Prosecution Service has confirmed that prosecutors in Zeeland-West-Brabant have opened a preliminary investigation. Watch this case. Share updates. Ask publicly when charges will be filed against the operators of the platform. If you are in the Netherlands, write to the Dutch Public Prosecution Service. If you are not, ask your own justice ministry what cooperation they are offering and what investigations they are opening into the men in your jurisdiction who used the site.

Dutch Public Prosecution Service: om.nl

To report content and seek support in the US: Call the RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-4673, or chat at online.rainn.org. To report content directly to US authorities, email HSIVenturaICAC@hsi.dhs.gov.

Internationally: UN Women at unwomen.org and The Pixel Project at thepixelproject.net maintain directories of agencies by country.

In the Netherlands: Offlimits is the abuse reporting bureau and was instrumental in this takedown: offlimits.nl

Subscribe to and amplify the journalists.

Saskya Vandoorne, Kara Fox, Niamh Kennedy, and Eleanor Stubbs at CNN. Isabell Beer and Isabel Ströh in Germany. NOS and Nieuwsuur in the Netherlands. The Substack writers covering this beat in depth:

The Motherland by Daphne Delvaux: themamattorney.substack.com

Objection: objectioneverything.substack.com

Subscribe. Share. Pay for journalism when you can. Survivor-aligned investigative reporting is what moved this from a quiet horror to a global takedown.

Name the next site when it appears.

Because it will. Watch for the mirror, the lookalike domain, the migrated server. Lookalike Motherless URLs with slight variations have already been reported. When you see them, report them.

Report to Google Search: support.google.com/websearch/answer/9116649

Report to hosting providers when you can identify them. Report to your representatives.

Keep speaking.

The cultural pressure that took Motherless down is the same cultural pressure that will take down the next site, and the one after that. Speak at your kitchen table. Speak in your circle. Speak to the men in your life. Speak in your comment sections. Silence is what the architecture wants from you.

Keep your eyes open.

Do not look away from the discomfort of seeing what is happening. The architecture relies on our refusal to look. The moment we look, in numbers, in coordination, in sustained attention, the architecture starts to crack. Looking is itself a political act.

Tend your altar.

This is the long work. The wave that took down this site has been building for years. Your candle, your circle, your refusals, your sustained attention — these are not separate from the political work. They are the body of it.

The Mother is rising. The architecture is being interrupted, one node at a time. The shadow is still doing its work, and we are still doing ours.

Both are true.

Keep going, my loves. We have only just begun.

In love and devotion
Elayne Kalila

If you have not yet read the Mother’s Day piece I published a couple days ago, Unmothered, it sits alongside this one as a deepening of the same conversation — the personal, the collective, and the architectural at once.

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Three weeks ago, I wrote about what happens when a world forgets the Mother. That piece went out, and something moved. The work of journalists and survivors gained momentum, and so did the outrage and the deep heart of so many of us who shared, who refused to look away. And on Friday, the website that had taken the Mother’s name in mockery was finally taken offline.

But that website was only ever a symptom.

The deeper unmothering, the one I have been trying to name in my own body for decades, is subtler and more pervasive than that. It is the architecture of a world that has forgotten how to value the Mother, how to see her, how to reverence what she carries.

So today, on the day the world is meant to celebrate her, I want to go deeper into what has actually been missing. Not only as a moment, but as the quiet ten-thousand-year erasure of an archetype, an energy, a way of being human that we have all been starved of.

What has actually been missing

Let me say this carefully, because it is easy to misread.

The Mother, as archetype, as energy, as the central principle of life-giving and life-sustaining care, has been systematically erased from our collective consciousness for thousands of years.

This is not to diminish the millions of women, men, and people of every gender who have been mothering. The nurses. The teachers. The aunts. The godmothers. The carers. The grandmothers. The fathers who father. The partners who tend. The friends who show up at three in the morning. These people exist. Their work is real. They have kept the Mother alive in the world, in their bodies, in their devotion.

What has been erased is not them. It is her.

The role. The function. The archetype. The sacred principle that says: I receive you exactly as you are. I feed you. I tend you. I do not ask you to earn my love. I stay with you through the becoming. I refuse the chain of harm. I know the body is sacred. I know that care is holy.

In our world, this work sits at the bottom of the hierarchy. The carers are paid the least. The teachers of the young are valued far below those who trade in money or power. While the doctor sits at the upper end of the pyramid, the nurse who tends the patient through the night sits far below.

This is what unmothered means, on a collective level. Not that there is no one mothering. But that the Mother is not respected. The Mother is not revered. The Mother is not valued. Her work is not seen as essential, even though it is the most essential work there is.

And this has cost us everything.

For thousands of years we have been living in a world that does not know how to receive. That does not know how to tend. That does not know how to value the one who gives without asking for return. We feel it in our bodies. In our nervous systems. In the way we move through the world, braced against abandonment, starved for unconditional regard, unsure whether we are lovable exactly as we are.

This is the erasure I have been writing into. Not only the website. The architecture itself.

I know this in my own body, because I have lived it.

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My heart is tender and soft as I write this

It is Mother’s Day, and the morning has arrived with that particular quietness it has for me. The light is soft through the kitchen window. The kettle is on. There is a candle lit at my altar, where I lit it before I sat down to write.

I want to invite you into my heart with me, because Mother’s Day is a tender one for me, and because the wider story of the Mother’s erasure has been written into my own life.

My mum was sick my whole life. And her whole life. She had been ill from the time she was a young woman. By the time I arrived, she was already in a body that had been ravaged by illness. The longer story is hers, and is mine, and belongs to the memoir I am slowly writing. It is not for today.

What I will say today is this. She wanted me desperately. I was the girl she had dreamed of. And she could not, for reasons that were never her fault, give me the mothering she most wanted to give, or the mothering I most needed to receive.

That was the biggest heartbreak of her life. And the biggest of mine.

But here is the thing I have come to understand, sitting with this for years. Her inability to mother me was not separate from the world’s inability to mother her. She was a woman who had spent her life inside a medical system that knew how to address her body but had no language for her heart. They knew how to treat the illness. They did not know how to meet the woman inside the illness. Her broken heart. Her broken nervous system. Her deepest fears. The grief tucked away that had no language. All of that remained unseen. Unmet. Unmothered.

And the deepest wound of all is that she was never quite able to fully step into being a mother herself, even though she yearned to.

That is the heartbreak of our relationship.

And I, inheriting that wound, spent my entire life looking for the Mother. In temples. In teachings. In the bodies of older women. In my own slow body. In the earth.

She died in 2019.

And here is the strange tender thing, which I did not expect. I am only now, six years on, beginning to know her. The memoir is becoming the vessel through which I am finally meeting my mum. The girl she had been before her body changed. The grief tucked away that had no language. The dreams she did not get to live. The woman underneath the wound who was never quite able to fully arrive in the room with me.

I am meeting her now, on the page, in a way I never could when she was alive.

The body of the writing has become the body of the reaching.

The dead can be met in ways the living sometimes cannot, it turns out. I did not know that until I started this work.

What this day used to feel like

I used to dread Mother’s Day.

It wasn’t because I didn’t love my mum. I did, and do. The love did not stop when she died, and I am not sure it gets to. The love simply moved.

But this day of celebration of the Mother has always been a bit crunchy for me. It is all about celebrating the ideal, present, available, attentive, capable of being celebrated with brunches and bouquets. And my mum could not be celebrated in those ways. And I could not either, because I never had children. So the day arrived, every year, carrying a double absence I did not quite know how to hold.

I would scroll the feeds. The brunches. The mothers and daughters laughing in matching sundresses. The children handing flowers. The fathers cooking pancakes. And I would feel, in my body, the particular kind of invisibility this day produces in women like me. Not belonging to the celebration. Not belonging to the club.

I want to be honest with you. It used to hurt.

And then, slowly, almost without my noticing, something began to change.

The first messages

It started with the godchildren.

When my friends began having babies, I was there, and I mean quite literally there. In the room. Holding my beloved sisters as they laboured through the long hours when the world narrows down to the next contraction, the next breath, the slow ancient sacred work of bringing a soul through. I had the great honour of being present at the births of these babies, which changed me forever.

So when I became godmother, several times over, it was not from the outside. It was from inside the threshold itself. And that kind of bond is a particular kind of bond, a deep privilege, which begins right when they take their first breath.

I held them at their christenings. I sent them birthday cards. I showed up to school plays. I held them when they were sad. I taught them the small practices that godmothers teach, about altars and candles and the quiet ways of being in the world.

I did not think of myself as their mother. They had mothers, beautiful ones, my friends, the women I loved. I was simply a presence. An aunt figure. A second adult who took them seriously. A woman who showed up.

Then they started growing up. And one Mother’s Day, when one of them was about eleven or twelve, a message arrived on my phone.

Happy Mother’s Day, Auntie Lani. You are like a second mum to me.

I sat down on the kitchen floor and wept.

It wasn’t so much that I felt validated. It was something else. I felt seen. Seen for what I had actually been doing all those years without naming it. Seen by the small person who had been on the receiving end of it, who had decided, in her own body, that what she had received from me was a form of mothering.

The messages have kept arriving every year since. And alongside them, over the years, the messages from the women in my temple. From the priestesses I have trained. You have mothered me. You have been a mother to my soul. I would not be the woman I am without you.

These messages have done more to heal my heart than the senders could possibly know.

Because what they showed me, slowly, year after year, is that I have been mothering all along. That my role in this lifetime, whatever the long story of why, was not to bear children. But it was, and is, to mother.

And I am not the only one.

On the longer story

I want to say something briefly about the longer story, because it sits underneath this piece.

I never fell pregnant when I was younger. I assumed, for most of my life, that I simply was not able to. It was only much later, in my forties, that I conceived for the first time, and lost that pregnancy, and realised, in the wake of that loss, that having a child had been an option all along. And by then, as these things often are, it was too late.

I am not going to unpack the rest of that story here. It belongs to the memoir.

But I want to name it, because I know I am not the only woman reading who is carrying some version of that story. The woman who tried and could not. The woman who waited and ran out of time. The woman who chose not to and still grieves the choice. The woman who lost a pregnancy. The woman who was never partnered in the way that would have made it possible. The woman whose body said no for reasons she will never fully understand. The woman who is forty-five or fifty-two or sixty-three and is still, on Mother’s Day, wondering whether she is allowed to feel what she feels.

You are allowed.

And you have been mothering, whether you know it yet or not.

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We all mother

We all mother. All of us. Regardless of whether we bore children. Regardless of whether we partnered. Regardless of whether our own mothers reached us or could not. Regardless of gender, regardless of biology, regardless of what the Hallmark cards say. And this is not to eclipse those who are doing the incredibly hard work of mothering and parenting their birth children, please dont hear me wrong, I see you and honor you so deeply.

And here is how I see the Mother returning to us…

The teacher mothers. The aunt mothers. The godmother mothers. The midwife mothers. The therapist mothers. The eldest daughter, who was forced into mothering before she should have been, mothers. The friend who shows up at three in the morning mothers. The neighbour who cooks the meal when someone is grieving mothers. The priestess mothers. The witch mothers. The hospice nurse mothers. The trans woman who has chosen the feminine path and tends every soul who comes through her door mothers.

We mother our friends. We mother our students. We mother our partners, sometimes, when they were not mothered enough. We mother our own younger selves, the small girls in us who are still waiting for someone to come and reach them. We mother the world, when the world cannot mother itself.

And the women who did bear children, who showed up for the thousand small daily labours of feeding, holding, witnessing, surviving the exhaustion of it, you have done one of the holiest things a body can do, and I bow to you today. Today is yours, fully and rightly.

But it is also ours. The mothers who have been mothering without the title. The women who held the children who were not theirs. The women who held each other. The women who held themselves when no one else would.

Today is for all of us.

What the Mother is

Because we have been so long without her, I want to name her. As a felt presence. As the qualities that live in a body when the Mother is in it.

• The Mother is the one who receives. Who looks at what is in front of her and does not flinch. Does not try to fix it before she has met it. Does not require it to be different in order to love it. The Mother is the principle of unconditional receiving, which is the rarest frequency on the planet right now, and the one we are most starved of.

• The Mother is the one who feeds. The soup. The breast. The held hand. The place to sleep. The honest answer. The piece of bread and the cup of tea. She is concrete, specific, embodied, and she does not ask anyone to earn what she offers.

• The Mother is the one who tells the truth. Gently, mostly, but truthfully. She does not flatter. She does not lie. She does not collude in the avoidance of what is actually happening. The world we are inside has been so starved of truthful mothering that most of us cannot tell the difference, anymore, between honest love and managed niceness.

• The Mother is the one who holds the line. She is soft and hard, both, in service of life. She will tell you no when no is what you need to hear. She will let you fall down when falling down is what your becoming requires. She will not rescue you from the lessons you have to learn, and she will not abandon you while you are learning them.

• The Mother is the one who knows time differently. She moves at the speed of growing things. She does not rush the fruit on the tree. She does not pull the seedling out to check whether it is doing what it should be doing. She trusts the unfolding, and she trusts that her presence is what the unfolding most needs.

• The Mother is the one who knows the body is sacred. Her own. Yours. The earth’s. She does not split the holy from the physical, the spiritual from the embodied. She has been so thoroughly driven out of the cosmology of the West, where holiness was relocated to a disembodied heaven, that we are still learning, slowly, painfully, that the Mother and the body are the same thing.

• The Mother is the one who refuses the chain of harm. She will not hand on what was done to her. She will absorb the cost of breaking the pattern in her own body, so the next generation does not have to. The Mother is the principle that says, this stops with me.

These are the qualities the world has been starved of. These are the qualities we have been calling home, every one of us, in every act of mothering we have ever done.

When you mother the friend who is grieving, you are calling her home.

When you tell the truth, gently, to someone who needed to hear it, you are calling her home.

When you refuse the chain of harm in your own body, you are calling her home.

When you receive someone exactly as they are, without flinching, without fixing, you are calling her home.

You are how she returns.

And the Mother who is rising

The Mother is rising. I know this in my bones.

She has been in exile for ten thousand years. She has been mocked by the men who used her name to label their pornography. She has been driven out of the public imagination of the West, her temples torn down, her priestesses burned, her midwives criminalised, her wisdom rebranded as superstition.

And still she has not stopped. Still she has lived in the bodies of women who refused to forget her. Still she has been carried, in the candles lit on Sunday mornings, in the soup made for the friend in grief, in the daughter held while the mother was dying, in the godchild’s message on Mother’s Day, in the priestess teaching her sisters that they are sacred.

She has been here all along. We have been calling her home, every one of us, with every act of mothering we have ever done.

Today, I am asking you to name her out loud.

What to do today

• If you have a mother who reached you, call her. Tell her exactly what she gave you, in specific language. You made me feel safe. You taught me to love books. You showed me what tenderness looked like.

• If you have a mother who could not reach you, light a candle anyway. Speak to her in your body. I see you. I see what you could not give me. I see what you carried that made it impossible. I love you anyway. If she is still alive, call if you can. If you cannot, do not force it. The honouring is in your body, not in the phone call.

• If your mother has died, light a candle. Tell her something you wish you had said. Or sit in silence. Both are real. And know, from a daughter still meeting her own mum years after she died, that the meeting is possible. The relationship is not over. It simply moves into a different chamber.

• If you mothered, in any of the forms I have named, let yourself feel today. Receive what you have actually given. It is a holy thing.

• If you are grieving, a mother, a child, a child you wanted, a child you lost, a mothering that was never offered, let yourself grieve today. Mother’s Day is not only the celebration. It is also the wound. Both belong here.

• If you are a priestess, a teacher, a sister, a friend, a witch, an aunt, a godmother, a midwife, a therapist, a healer, light a candle and name the women you have mothered. Name them out loud. Bless them.

And if you can, name the Mother out loud. The Great Mother. The one we have been calling home for so many years. The one whose return is not finished, and whose return is happening. Speak to her. Tell her you remember.

She is here.

She has always been here.

She lives in every act of mothering we have ever done, named or unnamed, biological or chosen, witnessed or invisible.

Today, my loves, we honour her.

Happy Mother’s Day, in every form it takes for you.

I love you. I see you. I am with you.

The Mother is rising. And we are the ones bringing her home.

In memory of my mum Margaret Anne Bourne

In love and devotion,

Elayne Kalila

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UPDATE: for resources on next steps please see this article

I sat down at my desk this morning and my inbox was full of women and men sending me the same news.

Motherless dot com, the site I wrote about in What Happens When the World Is Motherless three weeks ago, has been taken offline by Dutch authorities.

Prosecutors in Zeeland-West-Braband have opened a preliminary investigation. The servers, hosted by NFOrce Internet Services in the south of the Netherlands, were forced to comply within twelve hours. The site is gone. As of last night.

Lets feel this one together.

The site is gone.

The site that sat at the top of the search results for what does the worst of the masculine wound produce when it is left unattended for ten thousand years, the site with the eighty-two million visitors in March, the site with the eyecheck tag and the Telegram groups and the drugged wives, has been taken down by a sovereign government. Because enough of us, in enough places, refused to let it stay up.

This is what we are going to talk about today. Because I want every woman who shared Motherless, every man who took it to his men’s group, every reader who wailed on the floor and then sent it to three more people, to know what your fire did.

Your fire did this. Your fire, alongside the fires of many others, did this.

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Who moved this

I want to name, clearly, who did the work to make this happen. Because the win belongs to many,.

The journalists. Saskya Vandoorne and her team at CNN, who broke the original investigation in late March 2026. Isabell Beer in Germany, whose reporting on the same network of platforms began the international scrutiny. Isabel Ströh, who has been documenting the German Telegram networks for months. The Dutch broadcasters NOS and Nieuwsuur, whose local reporting in the wake of CNN’s investigation finally moved Dutch authorities to act. These journalists did the dangerous, painstaking, body-shaking work of looking directly at content most of us cannot bear to know exists, and turning what they saw into evidence the rest of us could carry.

The survivors. Zoe Watts, a British survivor of intimate partner drug-facilitated sexual assault, and Amanda Stanhope, who have just launched the #EndEyeCheck campaign. They named the wound after the very mechanism the men were using to confirm her unconsciousness, eyecheck, the tag they would post to prove she could not see them.

The survivors took the wound and turned it into a public reckoning. That is the alchemy of the true healing They are the women whose bodies carried this and who decided, against everything that would have been easier, to stand up and use what happened to them to protect the next woman. Find them. Follow them. Share their work. They are the ones who made this real.

The advocacy organisations. Robbert Hoving and Offlimits in the Netherlands, who pressured Dutch regulators publicly. The dozens of women’s organisations in Europe, the UK, Canada, Germany, who amplified the reporting. The grassroots networks that turned a story into a movement.

And you. The readers. The women and men who read Motherless and refused to scroll past. Who sent it to the men in your lives. Who took it to your circles. Who wrote to your representatives. Who shared it with such force that within forty-eight hours of publication it was being read in twenty-six countries. The cultural pressure that comes from a wave of women refusing to perform okayness any longer is one of the most powerful political forces on this earth. You are part of why this happened.

I want to say this clearly, my loves. Our voices moved this. Not alone. With many others. But yes. Our voices were part of the wave that took this site down. The energy is real. The fire is real. The pulse is real.

What this confirms

I want to say something I have been holding in my body for a long time, and that the news this morning has confirmed.

Our work works.

The prayer at the altar works. The piece written through tears at the kitchen table works. The forwarding of an article to three women you know works. The men’s circle reading the piece together works. The conversation at the dinner table works. The naming of the wound out loud works.

It does not always work fast. It does not always work in ways we can measure. Sometimes it works underground for years before it surfaces. But the energy is not nothing. The fire is not theatre. The collective body of women who refuse to look away, and then men who stand with them has weight, and that weight moves things.

A little less than three weeks ago I sat at my altar with tears running down my face and wrote a piece about a website I had only just learned existed. I sent it out into the world with no expectation of where it would go. It went further than I imagined possible. And it landed in the inboxes of people who were already moving, the journalists already investigating, the survivors already organising, the regulators already considering, and added to the pressure that finally forced the issue.

That is how this works. Not one person. Not one piece. A wave. A wave of bodies, voices, prayers, articles, posts, conversations, refusals, that finally crests in the place where it must.

The tide is turning.

We are the wave. All of us. Together. And the wave just took down a site that should never have been allowed to exist.

Take a breath, my loves. Let your body register this. We did something.

What comes next

The regulators have warned, rightly, that the site can come back. The Coco platform that Dominique Pelicot used to recruit more than seventy men to rape his ex-wife Gisèle was taken down, and a similar site, Cocoland.cc, has just resurfaced with its domain registered in the Coco Islands. Motherless can do the same. The men who used the site are still out there. The Telegram groups are still active. The wider ecosystem of drug-facilitated sexual assault has not been dismantled by one takedown.

So we do not rest. We celebrate the win, we honour the survivors, and we keep going.

Here is what to do this week, my loves.

• Follow Zoe Watts and Amanda Stanhope. Share the #EndEyeCheck campaign. Their work is far from finished, and it is exactly the kind of survivor-led organising that produces the next victory.

• Follow the journalists. Saskya Vandoorne. Isabell Beer. Isabel Ströh. Their reporting is the engine. Subscribe, share, support.

• Pressure your representatives. The takedown happened in the Netherlands because Dutch citizens and journalists pressed their authorities. Your country has its own version of NFOrce, its own version of the regulators who have been looking the other way. Find them. Name them. Pressure them.

• Keep talking about it. At your kitchen table. In your circle. With the men in your life. The cultural pressure that took Motherless down is the same cultural pressure that will take down the next site, and the one after that. Do not let the conversation die because the visible target is gone.

• And tend your altar. Tonight. Light a candle. Name the survivors. Name the journalists. Name the women who threw their phones across the room three weeks ago and the men who took the article to their circles. Name the wave. Name what you did. Name what you will keep doing.

We are not in the end zone. We are in a moment of confirmation. The work moves things. Our voices matter. Our hearts make a difference.

The pulse is real, my loves.

Light another fire tonight. We have only just started.

In love and devotion

Elayne Kalila

FREE COMPANION TO THIS SERIES

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My love, here is what nobody told me about perimenopause.

And I want to speak straight from my heart with you here, because we have been given a story about this passage that is almost entirely about what is breaking down and falling apart. From the hot flashes and the wild hormones to the thinning hair. Then there are the mood swings, and the the brain fog, and the grief for what was. And then there is the awareness that our relationships and marriages are changing and sometimes unravelling. Our old roles and identities are shifting…everything is changing!

A bit of a clusterfuck, frankly, if you ask me.

So I think that it is time for us to weave a different story about what is happening as we go through this extraordinary time of our lives. This is a story that I have been living my way into for over a decade now. The one I wish someone had sat me down and told me when this passage first came knocking on my door.

This phase of our lives, the one our culture has clinically labelled as perimenopause, is in truth a potent chrysalis.

I am serious. The caterpillar does not simply close her eyes and wake up as a resplendent butterfly. Inside that silken shell, she dissolves. Her entire body breaks down into liquid. She becomes almost unrecognisable in the dark. And only then, slowly, does she begin to take on a new shape.

That is what perimenopause is, my loves.

That is what is happening to me. Right now. Inside the silken shell of this passage, I am being remade. And so are you.

I have been writing my way through the breaking-down part for months now, in the four articles that have come before this one. Sharing with you what perimenopause has been doing to my nervous system, and the slow, sometimes humbling, sometimes hilarious art of learning to be with it differently. Naming the uncomfortable grain-of-sand friction of this passage, and how it has been building, slowly and inconveniently, into something that I am beginning to recognise as a pearl.

We have been looking together at the ancient word hysteria, and at what was buried underneath it for centuries that women like you and I were never meant to find. And then, drawing on eleven years of my own descent and well over a decade of walking alongside thousands of women in theirs, I have mapped the seven gateways of this passage. The map our ancestors had, my loves, and we somehow misplaced.

What I have not yet written about, and what every fibre in me has been preparing to write about all along, is who is forming inside the dissolving.

And here is what I can tell you, after eleven years of walking my own descent and well over a decade of walking alongside thousands of women in theirs.

There is a woman taking shape inside this passage. An actual woman. Possibly in your house. Possibly inside your own skin right now. And she has been waiting her entire life to come forward.

She is the one who finally said the thing she had been not-saying for thirty years. She is the one who quietly walked out of the marriage, or the job, or the friendship that everyone agreed was fine, while she had been knowing for a decade that it was not. She is the one who stopped attending things she did not want to attend. She is the one whose laugh has changed lately, and you cannot quite say how, but you can feel that it has.

Phew.

She is real. She is an archetype with a lineage. She has a name.

I call her the Midlife Maven.

If this is your first piece, welcome. This is the fifth article in The Hysterical Reckoning, a series about the perimenopausal passage. The previous four pieces are sitting just below this one on this Substack. Read in any order. They will catch you up. This piece is the one I have been building toward all along.

Here are the links:

Menopause - When the Nervous System Loses Its Tolerance for Bullshit

Why Everything Is Suddenly Irritating You in Perimenopause (And What It’s Trying to Show You)

The Hysterical Reckoning: What They Called Madness Was Actually an Initiation

The Seven Gateways of the Menopausal Initiation: Where Are You in the Descent?

Why She Needs a Name

I have been thinking about what to call her for years now. Yes, years.

And the reason matters: she cannot rise in any of us without language to name her. We need a word. We need a face.

Look. We have plenty of language for what is wrong with the menopausal woman. Entire industries are built on it. We have words for her hot flashes and her hormones, her thinning hair and her thickening waist. We have a whole vocabulary of decline.

What we do not have, and please notice this the next time you reach for the menopause section of any bookshop, is language for the woman she is becoming. We do not have an archetype for her. We do not have a face for her on the cover of any magazine. We do not have a story we tell our daughters about who she might one day be.

This is not an accident, my loves.

It is a strategy. Plain and simple. Because a culture that gives a woman no image of her own ripening, is a culture that can keep selling her the dream of being twenty-nine forever. And a woman who cannot picture who she is becoming on the other side has very little reason to walk fully into the becoming.

So I have given her a name.

The Midlife Maven.

A maven, in the older sense of the word, is a trusted expert. A connoisseur. A woman who knows. The Midlife Maven is the woman who has walked through the descent and now knows, in her body, things she could not have known any other way.

She is who I am writing toward.

She is who you are becoming.

She is who this entire series has been pointing at, all along.

I wrote in the second article of this series about the edgy grain-of-sand quality of perimenopause. The friction that builds, slowly and inconveniently, into something resembling a pearl. The Maven is the pearl, my love. The years of irritation, the relentless small sufferings, the long journey of our bodies towaredds a point where they can’t keep colluding, all of it has been making her, layer by patient layer, this whole time.

If you have been feeling the friction without yet seeing the pearl, that is because she is still forming.

It is because pearls only become visible at the end. As in every great initiation the jewel, or gold is what comes from the process.

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The Archetype We Almost Had

Here is the thing about the Midlife Maven that took me a long time to fully understand. And I mean it took years.

She is not a brand new archetype, my loves. But she is also not, exactly, an old one we simply lost.

She is something more interesting than that. And I want to tell you what I have come to feel about her, because I have been turning this over in my own body for so long now.

She is the archetype that has been trying to fully arrive in us, in fragments and flashes, for centuries. I see her glimpsed in the wise woman at the edge of the village. The healer. The midwife. The grandmother who somehow lived long enough to become formidable. The witch, who was almost always older, almost always knowing, almost always inconvenient to the men in charge.

Our ancestors caught flashes of her, my loves. They had names for those flashes, and ceremonies, and sometimes a place in the circle reserved for her, when the conditions allowed.

But the conditions almost never allowed.

And this is the part that makes my heart ache when I sit with it, even now. Every culture organised around feminine compliance has felt threatened by her, and has set about, with extraordinary persistence, making sure she does not fully rise.

Burned. Institutionalised. Medicated. Diagnosed. Dismissed. The third article in this series, The Hysterical Reckoning, went into the long historical detail of how this has been done. The witch trials. The lunatic asylums. The slow medical pathologisation of a woman whose only crime was that she had stopped complying.

What was being targeted, in every one of those eras, was her.

The Midlife Maven.

The woman who has come through the passage and is no longer governable. The woman who, given enough time and the right conditions, would step into her full power and shape the world around her.

She has been suppressed, my loves, before she was ever fully formed. And I think part of why so many of us are exhausted right now, even when we cannot quite name why, is that we are carrying the long inherited grief of all the women who came before us and were never allowed to fully arrive.

And yet.

Here is what is different now.

She is rising anyway. In her millions.

Forty-three million of us, in the United States alone. All walking the same passage at the same time. All being met, in some form or another, by the woman she has been waiting her entire life to become.

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The Phase With No Name

There is something else I want to name here, my loves, because it sits right at the heart of why we have not had a fully formed archetype for her until now. And honestly, I think it is something we have all felt without quite having the language to say.

We have always been told that there are three stages of a woman’s life. Maiden. Mother. Crone.

Lovely, is it not? A neat little trinity. The girl, the giver, the wise old woman in her cottage at the edge of the wood. Three archetypes that have shaped how we have understood ourselves for thousands of years.

There is just one rather large problem with it.

It is missing an entire phase.

And I don’t t know about you, but the first time I really sat with this, properly sat with it, I had this strange disorienting feeling. Like I had been handed a map of my own life with a whole continent left off it. We are talking about twenty to thirty years of a woman’s adult life, sitting in the middle of her existence, with no archetype, no name, no ritual, no honoured place in the story we tell about who women are.

Just an unmapped middle, my loves. A no-woman’s land between mothering and elderhood.

Why?

Two reasons. And it is the meeting of the two that has kept her so well hidden until now.

The first reason is biological.

Hear me out here, because the numbers tell a story we have not been told. They certainly were not told to me. I had to go looking for them myself, and when I found them I had to sit down for a moment.

In 1850, the average life expectancy for a woman in the United States was around 39 years old. By 1900 it had crept up to about 48. Today, in 2026, the average woman in this country will live to almost 80. We have, quietly and within a handful of generations, doubled the length of our adult lives.

Take that in, my loves. Doubled.

And while we have been doing that, something else has shifted at the other end.

In 1900, the average girl in America did not begin to menstruate until she was around 14 years old. In the Victorian era it was closer to 16, and in centuries before that, even later. Today, the average girl in this country begins her bleeding at around 12 and a half. Some begin much earlier.

And perimenopause? Most of us are starting to feel the first whispers of it in our early-to-mid forties. Some in our late thirties.

Now do the maths with me.

Our great-great-grandmother became a woman at sixteen, became a mother shortly after, was likely still in active mothering when she died at forty. The few women who did make it past their mothering years often did so already worn down by illness or repeated childbirth. There was no long, vigorous middle. There were not enough Mavens, alive at the same time, in good enough health, to constitute a recognised stage of life.

So she existed in flashes, my loves. The rare grandmother. The unusual healer. The witch who managed to live long enough to be feared.

Now for the second reason. And this is the one I find harder to write about, because it asks us to look at something we have all been carrying without quite knowing we have been carrying it.

Even when she did appear, she was not allowed to lead.

The few women in human history who did live long enough, and stay strong enough, to fully come into their power were systematically prevented from holding it. From governing. From leading. From standing in the public square in their full embodied wisdom and being named the wise women of their communities. They were tolerated, sometimes, in the private. In the kitchen. In the herbalist’s hut at the edge of the village. They were rarely tolerated in the seat of power.

And when they pushed against that line, my loves, they were burned for it. Or institutionalised. Or quietly written out of the historical record, while their younger, more compliant counterparts were elevated.

I feel this in my body when I write it. I imagine you might feel it too.

So it has been a double erasure.

Biology made her rare. Patriarchy made sure that even when she did arrive, she had no place to stand.

And between those two forces, an entire phase of women’s lives slipped through the cracks of the story, unnamed and uncelebrated. We went, in the cultural imagination, straight from active mothering to old lady, with no powerful, vital, embodied middle phase in between.

No wonder so many of us reach our forties feeling lost. No wonder we cannot find ourselves on any map.

There is no map. There has never been one.

Until now.

We are entering perimenopause earlier and living far, far longer than any women in human history. We are healthier. We are educated. We are connected, in our millions, to other women walking the same passage. And we are finally, painfully, slowly, beginning to step into seats of leadership that women before us were not permitted to occupy.

Which means many of us will spend twenty, thirty, even forty years in a phase of life the old archetypes never had room to fully imagine.

We are no longer in active mothering. Whether we mothered children, mothered businesses, mothered communities, mothered movements. The intensive years of that mothering are behind us.

And we are absolutely not crones. Not yet. The body is still strong. The mind is still sharp, sharper in some ways than it has ever been. The fire is still burning.

So what are we?

We are what every previous era was reaching for and never quite got to keep. We are the archetype she was always trying to be, finally given the conditions to fully form.

This phase, my loves, is the gold of our adult life.

It is the season in which we are crowned inside our own journey. Not by anyone else. By ourselves. By the long, slow, hard-won knowing of who we actually are.

We have been here long enough to know our gifts. To know our strengths. To know what is ours and what was never ours and we have, at last, stopped trying to make fit. We have lived enough life to recognise the patterns. We have weathered enough of our own weather. We have come through enough that we can finally, properly, share the potency of who we are.

And here is the part that is so often missed. We still have life force. Decades of it. We are not at the end of anything. We are arriving, fully formed for the first time, with the energy and the time and the embodied wisdom to actually shape the world we live in.

That is the Midlife Maven.

That is the gold.

That is the phase that has no name in the old story.

And that, my loves, is exactly what we are here to name. Together.

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She Has Stopped Pretending

The first thing to know about the Midlife Maven, my loves, is that she has stopped pretending. Stopped pretending to be other than who she is. Stopped editing herself for the comfort of the room. Stopped smoothing the conversation. Stopped smiling at the joke that was not funny. Stopped calibrating every word against what the room could handle.

Yeah. That pretending.

I know it sounds simple. It absolutely is not.

The pretending we are talking about is not a single act of dishonesty. It is the entire architecture most women have spent their lives quietly constructing. The thousand small adjustments by which a woman makes herself bearable, palatable, easy to be with.

Gone.

And not in a defiant way. The Maven is not standing on tables setting things on fire. She is not having a midlife crisis.

It is just that the architecture has finally collapsed because the woman holding it up has run out of strength, and discovered, to her enormous surprise, that the thing was never load-bearing in the first place.

What is left is whatever is actually her.

And what is actually her is not the curated version, my loves. The one you spent forty years polishing and somewhere along the way began to mistake for yourself. It is the older, rawer, more eccentric, more particular thing that was always underneath.

She is letting that thing be itself now. She is letting it move through her life without translating it for the comfort of anyone in the room.

That alone is a quiet revolution.

She Has Stopped Proving Herself

She has also, and this might be the bigger one, stopped proving herself.

Not in an exhausted, I-give-up sort of way. In a much deeper, much more dangerous way: she simply does not need to anymore. Not to her mother. Not to her partner. Not to the boss she once danced for. Not to herself.

Phew, right?!

She was tested. By her own life, by loss, by the long passage. She found out what she was made of. She survived things she was not certain she would survive. And she came out the other side knowing certain things, in the body, that no one can take from her now.

She has the receipts.

I know, I know. It sounds funny. It is also exactly right.

The shift this creates in a woman is hard to describe to anyone who has not yet tasted it. The Maven who is no longer trying to prove herself is suddenly, almost accidentally, magnetic. She is sitting back in her seat instead of leaning forward to manage the room. She is not straining. She is not pitching. She is not auditioning for the right to take up her own space. She is just there, fully, taking up exactly what she takes up. And somehow that becomes the most interesting thing in the room.

She has stopped spending her power on managing herself down.

All of it is hers now. Every single watt.

She Lives in Her Body

The body of the Midlife Maven is a body that has been somewhere, my love.

It has been ill. It has been exhausted. It has been thinned and softened and rearranged in ways no skincare regime can address. It has been the site of more intimacy with reality than most things we used to call spiritual practice.

And it has not been the enemy.

This is the part nobody quite tells you. The body in this passage does not betray you. It refuses to keep colluding with you. There is a difference. The difference matters more than I know how to say.

I wrote about this in the first article of this series, about the menopausal nervous system as one of the most precise instruments for truth we have. About what happens when the hormonal buffering that once allowed us to tolerate intolerable things begins, finally, to dissolve. About the forty-three million women in this country whose bodies are recalibrating, simultaneously, in ways no culture has ever quite seen before.

The Maven is the woman on the other side of that recalibration. She has come to trust her body’s signal completely. She has learned, often the hard way and always in her bones, that what the body knows is older and more reliable than what the mind argues.

She has stopped fighting her body. She has stopped trying to fix it back into a younger shape, or punish it for the changes it is insisting on, or apologise for the space it now takes up. She has finally met her body where it actually is. And inside that meeting, she has found something I did not really think was available to a woman in midlife at all.

She has reclaimed her erotic aliveness.

I want to be careful with this one because the culture has done a thorough job of teaching us that this phase of life is the end of our desirability. That is a lie, my loves. A very profitable lie. But a lie all the same.

What is true is this. A woman who has come through this passage with her body tended carefully and her relationship to her own pleasure intact is a woman whose erotic life is, often, more her own than it has ever been. Not for performance. Not for anyone else. As life force. As aliveness. As something that belongs entirely to her.

She is sexy because she is alive. Not because she is auditioning.

This is one of the great unspoken victories of the initiation. It deserves to be spoken. Loud and clear.

She Is at Home in Not Knowing

The Maven has spent time in the dark, my loves.

The real dark. The kind we do not talk about politely. The kind where every coordinate you have been navigating by stops working and the new ones have not yet revealed themselves.

And she did not dissolve in there.

That is the thing she discovered. The thing she would not have believed before she went through it. That she could be in the not-knowing and remain. That the ground could go and she could still be standing. That the dark, it turns out, was not empty.

What this gives her on the other side is a particular kind of freedom that is hard to describe. She does not need certainty in order to act. She does not need the path to be clear in order to step. She does not require the future to be predictable in order to be at peace today.

In the place where she used to need to know, she now has curiosity.

This is, I want to point out, deeply unusual. Most adults around her, regardless of age, are still organising their entire lives around the avoidance of uncertainty. The Maven is not. She has been to the worst version of not-knowing, and it did not destroy her. So she has stopped being afraid of it.

That is its own kind of liberation. And here is the thing. It is contagious. People around her start to feel it without quite knowing what they are feeling.

She Is Devoted to Herself

The Maven is devoted to herself in a way she once could not have imagined being.

Now, I want to be careful with this one because the phrase self-care has been so thoroughly commercialised that it now mostly means buying things. Sheet masks. Bath salts. The occasional bubble bath if we are lucky.

That is not what we are talking about, my loves.

What we are talking about is a daily, non-negotiable, no-longer-controversial-to-her-own-conscience orientation toward her own needs. She rests when she is tired. She says no without writing a paragraph to justify it. She nourishes herself the way she once nourished everyone else, which is to say with attention, with care, with the absolute assumption that it actually matters.

She has stopped outsourcing her own wellbeing to a world that was never going to prioritise it.

She is doing it herself. And because she is finally doing it, plain and simple, she is doing it well.

This is not selfishness.

I am going to say it again because the training around this runs deep. I have been undoing it in my own body for years.

This is not selfishness.

This is what becomes possible when a woman finally believes, in the cells of her body, that her own life is worth tending.

She Speaks Plainly. And She Knows When to Be Quiet.

The Maven does not explain herself.

She does not justify. She does not qualify. She does not soften her words in advance to manage how they will land.

She speaks. And then she stops.

Trusting that what she said was clear. Trusting that it was true. Trusting the room to receive it, or not, without her over-investment in its reception.

I know, my love. This sounds simple. Anyone who has spent decades in the female art of pre-emptive softening knows it is anything but.

What she has, that she did not have before, is the willingness to be misunderstood. She would rather speak truthfully and be misread than soften her truth into something more palatable. She would rather mean what she says, even if it means saying less.

This requires a self-trust that is hard-earned. And she earned it. By living through everything that has happened in her life, and finding that she was still here.

She also knows when to say nothing at all.

Yes. This too.

She has stopped feeling responsible for filling every silence. She has stopped needing to fix every awkwardness in the room with words. She can sit with what is happening, including discomfort, including disagreement, without rushing to resolve it.

The silences the Maven keeps are as eloquent as the things she says.

She Is Funny. And Magnificently Ungovernable.

I want to say something about her humour, my loves, because I think it is one of the most overlooked qualities of the Midlife Maven.

She is funny. She is properly, genuinely, sometimes alarmingly hilarious.

Not in a sharp or defensive way. Not in the way of a woman using wit as armour. In the way of a woman who has watched human nature for long enough to find it absurd. Who has been on the meat hook, returned, and now finds herself standing in the supermarket queue noticing how everyone is performing their entire lives at the till.

It is hard not to laugh, frankly.

She can crack you open with a laugh before you realise she was being serious. She uses humour the way you use a key. To open something that was locked. To let air into a room that had become airless.

She does not take herself, or any of it, too seriously anymore.

And this is the quality, my loves, that makes her, in the most delicious way, ungovernable. You never quite know what she will do next, because she does not consult anyone’s rulebook. Including the one she used to live by. She responds from what is real in any given moment. That is rare enough to be riveting.

She is not chaotic. She is sovereign.

There is a difference. A very important difference.

And this is, by the way, exactly why a culture organised around feminine compliance has historically found her so threatening. A woman who has stopped consulting the rulebook, who responds from her own knowing rather than from social calculation, who can crack an entire room open with one well-timed observation, is not a woman the old order knows what to do with.

Which is rather the point, isn’t it.

She Holds the Whole of It

What none of this gives the Maven, in case you are picturing a permanently serene woman in linen, is an exit from the difficulty of life.

She is not above it. She is not done with it. She is in it, my loves. The same as you. The same as me.

She still loses people. She is still watching the world come apart in real time. She is still navigating ageing parents, growing children, friendships shifting, a body that continues to change shape on her.

What she has is the capacity to hold all of it without breaking.

She can grieve without losing herself. She can be moved without being swept away. She can love what is passing without grasping it. She can be devastated and clear-eyed in the same hour. She can hold joy and sorrow together in the same heart and not feel torn between them.

This is what initiation gives you that nothing else can. The capacity for both. For everything. The room inside yourself for life as it actually is, not as you wish it would be.

She has built that room. By going to the underworld and finding it was full. By coming back and discovering that the things she had been running from were not stronger than she was.

That, my loves, is the Maven.

She Is You

I want to end where I began, with one small revision.

The Midlife Maven is not a fantasy. She is not waiting for you at the end of some perfectly completed healing journey. She is not reserved for the women who walked the gateways with more grace, or less mess, than you have managed.

She is you, my love.

She has always been you.

She is what was underneath the long performance. The accommodations. The good girl. The capable one. The woman who learned, very early and very intelligently, to be loved by being agreeable. The Maven was there the whole time, waiting with extraordinary patience for the moment when enough would fall away that you could finally come home to her.

She is the oldest thing about you.

And she is not arriving from somewhere outside. She is rising up through everything you have already lived and survived and been changed by, the way Inanna climbs back through the seven gates of the underworld. The gateway map I laid out in the fourth article of this series, where she descends through the seven thresholds and surrenders something at each one, then climbs back through them and reclaims, transformed now, everything she laid down on the way in.

She is what perimenopause is building.

She is what the descent was for.

You were never falling apart, my loves.

You were being remade.

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An Invitation

This series has been a path. Each piece a stone laid on it.

The simplest and best thing you can do is download the PDF map I have made for this series. It is free. It carries the seven gateways, the markers of each one, and a way to begin locating yourself on the map. It is the same map I have walked alongside countless women in. It will keep you company in whatever gateway you are in.

FREE COMPANION TO THIS SERIES

7 Gateways of Perimenopausal Initiation

The Midlife Maven Map

A free guide to the seven gateways of the perimenopausal passage. The same map I have walked alongside countless women. Download her below before you read on, and let her keep you company.

→ Download the free PDF map

If anything in this series has been landing in your body the way I hope it has, my love, the door is opening.

Stay close.

She is rising.

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Before I tell you about Beltane, I have to tell you about my father.

My father was a Morris man. Which means that on the first of May, every year of my childhood, he would get up before dawn, put on the white clothes, and go out into the cold English morning to meet the other Morris men at the top of the hill, and they would dance the sun up.

I went with him sometimes. A small girl in the dark, half asleep, watching him lift the harmonium out of the back of the car and set it up on the wet grass while the men with bells on their legs gathered round him in the half-light. And then he would play. And they would sing. The old folk songs. The May Day songs. Songs my body knew before my mind did. Songs that had been sung at this hour, on this hill, on this morning, for longer than anyone could remember.

That is how I was raised.

Beltane is not an idea I came to in a book about pagan revival. Beltane is my father in white at dawn, with his hands on the harmonium and the old songs coming out of his throat into the cold morning air. It is the smell of dewy grass through the soles of small feet. It is the bells on the dancers’ legs. It is the moment the first edge of the sun came up over the hill and the men danced harder, because that was the whole point. They were dancing the sun in.

I have written, in Fatherless, that I was not well-fathered. That I raised myself from fifteen on. That I know the wound of the absent father in my own body. All of that is true.

And.

This was the thing he gave me. He could not father me in the ways I most needed. But he handed me this. The living thread of an ancient masculine tradition that had survived four hundred years of Puritan suppression and was still being carried, before sunrise, on a hill in the English countryside, by men who got up to dance the year into being.

He passed me the Beltane fire. And it has stayed.

So when I write to you today about this High Holy Day, I am writing from inside something that has been running through my body since I was small.

This is my personal holy day. And this morning, sitting at my altar with my tea, the fires of last night still warm somewhere in the back of my body, I am writing to you because something has happened in the last week that I have to tell you about.

A man wrote to me.

I have been receiving letters from men in numbers I genuinely did not expect after Motherless and Fatherless went out into the world. Beautiful, bone-honest letters. Men telling me they have not stopped thinking about the pieces. Men telling me they took them to their men’s groups. Men telling me they cried in a way they had not cried since their fathers died.

But this letter did something else.

He said, and I am paraphrasing because the letter is private, that he thought it was time. Time for the men and the women to come together. Into a shared space. To look at each other. To begin the conversation our species has not yet been able to hold without it collapsing into the same old pattern.

And I felt my whole body answer.

Yes.

And…

That and is what this whole piece is about. That and is the entire teaching of Beltane, and the entire reason the ancients lit two fires and not one, and the entire reason the May Queen and the Green Man do not meet in the village square but in the consecrated ground, after the fires have done their work, in the ritual the whole community has prepared for.

Yes, my love. Yes, beloveds. Yes to the men beginning to ask. Yes to the longing in all of us for a different ending to this story.

And…

Not yet collapsed into, not rushed, not patched-up survivors of the same wound finding each other in the dark and calling it union. Not the unreckoned masculine reaching for the rising feminine and pulling her back down into the same pattern she has spent everything to climb out of.

Sacred Marriage is not the relief of two exhausted people leaning on each other. Sacred Marriage is what happens when two whole human beings, each with their own ground beneath them, meet in the consecrated field and weave something neither one of them could weave alone.

That is what Beltane is for. That is what the maypole is. That is what the fires are. And that is, I believe with my whole body, what we are being asked to remember right now.

Let me share with you what the day actually is, and you will see why it matters.

What Beltane actually is

Beltane is one of the eight great holy days of the Celtic year. The cross-quarter days. The hinges. Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh, Samhain. Older than Christianity. Older than Rome. The rhythm of a people who lived close enough to the earth to know what the earth was doing, and to mark it with fire and circle and song.

Beltane sits exactly halfway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. The threshold of summer. The day the cattle were driven up to the high pastures. The day the maypole went up in the village green. The day the young men and women went into the greenwood together, and did not come home until morning, and what happened there was not shame but sacrament.

The name comes from the Gaelic Bealtaine, traced to the bright fires, or possibly the fires of Belenus, an old Celtic god of the sun. The word holds the heat of the season turning. The earth in full yes.

The central rite was fire. Two great bonfires built side by side, the cattle driven between them, the people walking through and leaping over them. Embers carried back to relight home hearths that had been ritually extinguished, so every fire in the village would be lit fresh from one great central source. That is what a sacred culture looks like.

And in the middle of the village green, the maypole went up.

The maypole is one of the oldest images we have of the Sacred Marriage. A tree freshly cut, stripped of all but its highest branches, raised tall in the centre of the gathering ground. Then the ribbons. The flowers. The dancers, women and men together, moving in opposite circles, weaving patterns that took the whole day to complete.

The pole is the masculine. The Green Man rising. The vertical axis. The dance and the ribbons are the feminine. The May Queen blooming. Movement and pattern wrapping the standing thing. Together they make a single woven image of two principles that need each other to be what they are.

And then, with the fires lit and the maypole woven, the young men and women went into the woods.

The sexual rites of Beltane were a living prayer. The body-to-body union of the young in the greenwood was understood as direct participation in the fertility of the land. When the human couple lay down on the earth and joined, the land itself was being blessed. This is the oldest theology of sex on the planet — human union as the visible echo of the cosmic union that turns the wheel of the year.

When the church came in, it did not understand this, or perhaps more accurately, understood it perfectly and decided to crush it. The maypoles were torn down. The Puritans outlawed them in 1644. Sex became sin. The body became shame. The Sacred Marriage was driven out of public life and into the secret schools and the bodies of the women who refused to forget.

We are still living inside that suppression. And we are, finally, coming out the other side of it.

Masculine and Feminine Principles

Before I introduce you to them, I have to say something clearly, because it shapes everything that follows.

The Green Man and the May Queen are not men and women. They are not a simply biological pair. They are archetypal frequencies, the masculine and feminine principles that live within every human being, regardless of body, regardless of identity, regardless of who we love.

What the alchemists called Sol and Luna. What the Tantrikas call Shiva and Shakti. What the Taoists called Yang and Yin. The vertical, rooted, standing principle. And the flowing, weaving, blooming one. Every soul is woven of both. Every body, of any configuration, carries both.

The Sacred Marriage is the inner union of these two principles within every human being, and the outer meeting of whole humans who have done enough of that inner work to meet each other in the consecrated field. The trans woman becoming the Queen in her own body. The trans man reclaiming the Green Man in himself. The non-binary soul weaving the inner Maypole within. The cisgender woman and man doing the same descent in their own forms. The medicine is the same. The work is the same. The Whole has no exclusions.

So when I write, in what follows, about these two meeting, I am writing about a meeting that happens at every layer. Within the soul. Between souls. Across the cosmos.

The Green Man and the May Queen

The Green Man is one of the most ancient images of the masculine in the European imagination. The foliate head. The face peering out of the leaves. The Lord of the Greenwood. You can find him carved into the stones of churches across Europe, even churches built deep inside the centuries when his worship was forbidden. The masons who built those churches were the heirs of an older tradition, and they would not let him be erased. So they hid him in the corbels and the ceiling bosses. A leaf-covered face peering down at the congregation. A reminder. A refusal.

He is the masculine in its noble form. Knowing itself as part of the earth, not above it. Growing upward like a tree, with roots as deep as its branches are high. Dying in autumn and coming back in spring. Fundamentally in service to life.

His ancestors are everywhere. Cernunnos, the antlered Celtic lord. Pan in every Greek wood. Dionysus. Osiris, dismembered and reassembled by the love of the goddess. The horned god of every shamanic tradition who knows the way between the worlds because he has died and come back. Yes, even Jesus carries the frequency of the Green man.

The May Queen is his counterpart, his beloved, his match. The feminine in her flowering. The earth in full bloom. The maiden who has stepped into her power, the woman whose body is the visible signal of the season’s yes. Crowned with flowers. Dressed in white and green. Carried through the village in procession.

She is Inanna in her radiance. Aphrodite arriving on the shore. Brigid in her flowering aspect. The Shulamite in the Song of Songs, dark and beautiful and unashamed and going out, deliberately, to find her lover.

And on Beltane, these two meet.

Not as a man and a woman in a transactional encounter, but as two divine principles, recognising each other across the consecrated ground, and choosing to meet. The Green Man does not take the May Queen. He honours her. The May Queen does not bow to the Green Man. She receives him. His strength serves her flowering. Her body meets his standing. They make this together, or they make nothing.

That is the Sacred Marriage. The hieros gamos. The central rite of every mystery school the human species has ever built. And it is what we are being asked to remember

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What We Have Been Living Without

I wrote, in Motherless, about what happens when the feminine is exiled from the cosmos for ten thousand years. I wrote, in Fatherless, about what happens when the noble masculine is shot in a field and replaced with the corpse of a soldier. Those two pieces tell, between them, the diagnosis of what we are inside.

This third piece is about what happens when both have been exiled. Because what is most thoroughly destroyed is not either of them alone. It is the relationship between them.

Let me, once again, share with you what I feel we have been living without.

On the personal level.

• It means you have never seen, in your own life, two whole human beings meeting each other in their full sovereign aliveness, weaving something together that neither one could weave alone.

• It means you have not yet felt, in your own body, what it is to be loved by someone who has done their own descent and arrived at you on their own ground, not leaning, not collapsing, not asking you to be smaller so they can stay upright.

• It means the closest you have come to Sacred Marriage might have been a moment in a forest, a song in your headphones, a half-second of recognition with a stranger across a room — a glimpse, and then gone, and you did not have the cosmology to know what you had glimpsed.

On the relational level.

• It means most of the marriages around you are held together by the children, by the mortgage, by the fear of being alone, by the slow accommodation of two people who never quite met each other in the first place.

• It means most of the sex you have had, even the loving kind, has carried somewhere inside it the unreckoned weight of one person bringing more presence than the other, and the conscious one quietly absorbing the cost.

• It means you have watched friends marry their wounds rather than their partners, and you have done it yourself at least once, and you only recognised it years later, after the unwinding.

• It means there are conversations you have wanted to have with the man you love for ten years, and you have not had them, because the consecrated ground for them does not yet exist between you.

On the cultural level.

• It means we have no public ritual for the meeting of two whole humans. We have weddings, which are property exchanges in nicer clothes. We have ceremonies, which are mostly performance. The Sacred Marriage, the actual rite, has not been performed at scale on this earth for at least a thousand years.

• It means our culture confuses sex with intimacy, intimacy with attachment, and attachment with love, and most people will live their whole lives without knowing the difference.

• It means we have built whole industries on the failure of partnership — the divorce industry, the dating apps, the relationship coaching economy — and almost none of them are pointing at the actual missing thing, which is the cosmology that would make real partnership possible.

• It means the children are watching all of this. They are growing up inside our forgeries of the Sacred Marriage, and they are learning what they think love is from what we have been able to manage, which is not much.

On the archetypal level.

• It means the hieros gamos, the central rite of every mystery school the human species has ever built, has been driven out of public life for a thousand years.

• It means the maypole was torn down, the May Queen was demonised as a whore, the Green Man was carved into the corbels of the cathedrals because he could not be allowed in the open, and we are the descendants of that suppression.

• It means the wedding image at the heart of the Song of Songs, of the Sufi poetry, of the alchemical texts, has been reduced in the mainstream imagination to either a religious ceremony or a romantic comedy, when it was always pointing at something cosmological.

• It means we have inherited a story in which the divine pair has been ripped apart and we are not sure they were ever real.

On the spiritual level.

• It means we do not know how to descend together. We do not know how to grieve together. We do not know how to be initiated together, which is what real partnership actually is.

• It means the body has not been allowed to be sacred, and so the union of bodies has not been allowed to be sacred either, and so the union of souls cannot find ground to land on.

• It means we have lost the cosmology in which the meeting of two whole humans is itself a participation in the turning of the world.

• It means we have been trying to do the Sacred Marriage with the cosmology of the marketplace, and wondering why it does not work.

• That is what we have been living without. That is the air we have all been breathing. Forgeries everywhere we look. The real thing nowhere we have been taught to see.

This is what happens to a species that has lost its central rite.

But, my loves. Listen.

Some of us are remembering. Right now. The man who wrote to me this week is part of that. The thousands of women writing after Motherless. The men writing after Fatherless. The boys in the men’s circles. The girls in priestess training. The Green Man is waking up in the forests of the men. The May Queen is rising in the bodies of the women. The fires are being lit again.

And the question of this moment is whether we can hold the holiness of what is being asked.

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To the Man Who Wrote to Me

You know who you are. And if you are reading this, I want to answer you publicly, because I think the answer is for all of us.

Yes.

Yes, it is time. Yes, the men and the women have to come together. Yes, the next phase of this work cannot be done by either of us alone. The longing in your letter is a longing I share, and my whole body answered the moment I read your words.

And.

Not before, not yet, not the way we have done it every other time we have tried to do this and watched it fail.

I am going to be specific.

What I am not available for, and what I do not believe any of the women doing this work are available for, is being summoned into a shared space before we have each tended what is ours to tend. I am not available to be the woman who closes the gap that was made by your absence from your own work. I am not available to soften my voice so that men who have not done their grief can sit comfortably in a circle with women who have. I am not available to slow my own becoming, so that the speed of return is determined by whoever in the room is moving slowest.

This is not because I do not love you. It is because I love you exactly, fiercely, accurately, and the version of you I am in love with is the one who has done the work. The Green Man. Not the patched-up patriarch in better clothing.

What I am available for is the conscious meeting that happens after both have done enough of their own descent to arrive at the consecrated ground as sovereign beings. Not as the wounded reaching for the wounded. As the reckoned reaching for the reckoned.

For the men, that means the work I named in Fatherless. The grieving of the unfathered. The meeting of the wounded boy. The descent into your own shadow. The finding of your circle. The reclaiming of your voice. The willingness to be witnessed by another whole human being and not disappear.

For the women, that means the work we have been doing for years. The reckoning. The release. The body. The unknown. The self-devotion. The Inanna descent that strips us of every layer until we know what we are without anyone’s permission.

This is not a checklist that gets completed. This is a lifetime of practice. But there is a threshold inside it. A moment at which a man can be present in a room with a fully embodied woman without armouring or collapsing or projecting. And a moment at which a woman can be present in a room with a fully embodied man without making herself smaller or scanning for danger or losing her own thread.

That threshold is the consecrated ground. That threshold is the maypole. That threshold is where the Green Man and the May Queen actually meet.

We are closer to it than we have been in three thousand years. We are not yet there.

So my answer to you, beloved man, is this. Yes. I will meet you there. You go and do your work. I will continue mine. And when we have done enough of it, on whichever Beltane that turns out to be, we will find each other in the consecrated field, and we will weave something neither of us can weave alone.

Until then, I bless your descent. I bless your circle. I bless the elders you are seeking and the boys you are blessing and the silence you are finally breaking in the rooms where your brothers have been silent for too long.

I am not far away. I am rising in my own body, on my own ground. And the Sacred Marriage is closer with every breath we both take toward our own becoming.

What This Beltane is Asking

So here we are. The fires are lit. The maypole is woven. The veil between the worlds is thin in the way the wheel of the year only allows it to be at this particular hinge.

For the women in this circle: do not abandon your descent for the lure of premature reunion. The maypole does not rise from a barren field. The May Queen does not crown a man who has not yet stood for himself. We have done that. For three thousand years we have been the women who closed the gap, who softened our voices, who absorbed what should have been absorbed by elders and circles and the man’s own work. And it has produced the world we are now inside.

Do not do it again. Stay with your reckoning. Bloom only when you have done what is yours to do, and only with men who have done what is theirs.

For the men reading this: become the Green Man. Not by performing it. By doing the work I named in Fatherless. Meet the wounded boy. Grieve the father you did not have. Find your circle. Descend into your own shadow. Reclaim your voice. Learn to be witnessed. The women you love, the daughters who are watching you, the sons who are learning from you, are waiting.

For all of us, women and men and every soul on the spectrum that the binary cannot hold: light a fire tonight. Even a candle. Even a match. Stand with the fire and say the names. Bealtaine. Beltane. May Day. The High Holy Day of the Sacred Marriage.

And then say the prayer. From your own body. Something like:

May the Green Man rise.

May the May Queen bloom.

May they meet, this time, in reverence.

May the land flourish again.

And then go on with your day, knowing that you have done a small piece of the oldest medicine on the planet, and that you have done it on the day the medicine was meant to be done.

The Pulse Is Real

I am ending this where I ended Fatherless, because it is the truest thing I know.

The pulse is real.

The Mother is rising. The Father is rising. And rising alongside them, the relationship that has been driven underground for ten thousand years is beginning, in our bodies and our circles and our letters to each other, to remember itself.

I want to say something here that I have been holding back, because it is the truest thing I know about all of this.

We have never actually been severed.

The culture has been severed. The rite has been severed. The cosmology has been severed. The public memory of what we are has been severed. All of that is real, and the piece you have just read is the diagnosis of it.

But the Sacred Marriage itself cannot be severed. It is the architecture of being. It is the way the universe is built. The Green Man and the May Queen live in every body, every soul, every breath. The masculine and feminine principles have never stopped weaving each other into existence. They could not stop. The cosmos does not work without them.

What has been severed is our ability to see it. To name it. To gather around it. To practise it openly. To live inside the cosmology that knows what it is.

That is what we are recovering. Not the marriage itself. The marriage has been here all along. We are recovering the eyes that can see it. The voice that can name it. The fire that can hold space for it. The community that can witness it. The cosmology that can carry it.

We were never apart. We only forgot how to remember.

This Beltane, may we hold the holiness of what is being asked of us. May we not collapse the work for the comfort of premature union. May we tend the fire long enough that when we do come together, we come together as the gods of our own myths.

The Green Man rises. The May Queen blooms. The maypole goes up in the village green of every kitchen and bedroom and circle and forest where two whole people are learning to meet.

The Sacred Marriage is not behind us. It is not even ahead of us.

It is here. It has been here all along. Waiting for us to remember how to see it.

And the seeing begins, beloved, with this fire, lit tonight, on this old holy day, in this old world that is ready, at last, to remember what it has always carried.

In love and devotion,

Elayne Kalila

P.S. As I wrote in Motherless and Fatherless*, this medicine is for every soul. The trans women becoming the Queen in their own bodies. The trans men reclaiming the Green Man in theirs. The non-binary souls weaving the inner Maypole within. You are doing the deepest archetypal work there is. You belong inside this conversation. You have always belonged inside it. The return of the Whole has no exclusions. It cannot. That is the whole point.*

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When I finished What Happens When the World is Motherless and sent it out into the world, I thought I had written the piece.

I hadn’t.

Almost the moment it went live, something flashed into my awareness with a clarity I had not been expecting. A sudden visceral knowing that the piece I had just written was only half the story.

The world is not only motherless. It is fatherless too.

And you cannot bring the Mother home by herself. It is not that kind of restoration. The Mother and the Father have always belonged to each other. The severance of one is the severance of the other. You cannot mend half of a torn thing.

If the Mother has been in exile, the noble masculine has been missing right alongside her. He disappeared when she disappeared, exiled by the same patriarchal forces that pushed her aside. He has been absent for as long as she has been absent. And we cannot bring one home without the other.

So this is that piece.

Why I have to write this

A word to the women before I go any further. Because I can feel the risk that this piece could be misread, and I need to close the door on that misreading before it opens.

I am not writing Fatherless because I have gone soft on men.

I am writing it because the Mother cannot come home to a world that has not also called the noble masculine home. She will not be safe. She will not be revered. She will not be held in the dignity that is hers. She will be, exactly as she has been for the last few thousand years, met by a masculine that does not know how to honor her, because it has never been taught. And we will find ourselves in the same endless story we have been trying to break for generations.

This is the cycle we keep running inside.

We call the Mother home. We rise. We find our voices. We reclaim our bodies. We gather in circle. We become more ourselves than we have been in thousands of years.

And then we meet the men. And many of the men have not done their work, to heal from the ravages of patriarchy, and what it has robbed them of. And so the Mother in us, newly risen, is met by the same unconscious, unreckoned, untutored masculine that has never known what to do with her. And she is wounded again. And we go back into hiding. And the whole thing resets.

This has been the shape of it for thousands of years. I am writing Fatherless because I do not want to run this loop one more time.

The return of the Mother without the return of the Father is not the return of the Mother. It is only the first half of a motion that collapses back on itself if the second half never arrives.

That wall must come down. Not by us hammering at it from our side. By the men on the other side of it doing the reckoning that has been waiting for them for so very long.

I am writing to the men now, as fiercely as I have ever written to us. Not because I have gone soft. Because I have gone deeper. Our work and their work are one work, done in two directions. Neither half completes itself without the other.

The Mother rising without the Father rising is how we got here the last time. I am not doing it again.

And to the men reading

I want to turn to you now, briefly, before I go any further.

I know many of you are here. I know some of you wrote to me. I know some of you are standing quietly at the back, not sure yet if this is for you.

You are.

This is for you. Not as spectator. As participant. As the one I am writing toward.

What I am about to say is going to land hard in places. I am not going to soften it. I owe you more than that, and so do you. But I want you to know, before we go in, that I am writing from love. Fierce love. The kind that refuses to let you stay asleep in the counterfeit of yourself that patriarchy has been handing you for four thousand years.

You are not the problem. You are not the enemy. You are the one we have been waiting for, alongside us. The one whose return is inseparable from hers.

So stay. Read all the way through. The piece is for you as much as it is for any of us.

Let us begin.

What came back

The morning after Motherless went out, I lit the candles on my altar.

I had been reading the responses for hours. Tea going cold next to me. I was a bit shocked at the chord of resonance the piece had struck.

Women who had wailed and thrown their phones across the room. Women in shock and disgust. Women who said they did not know they had been carrying this their whole lives until they read it, and then they could not stop. Women saying they are ready to stand, to circle, to call the Mother home.

And then there were the men.

I was not expecting the men. Which goes to show the depth of the issue. I had gotten so used to my own internalised idea that men do not want to hear from us women about things like this.

When their messages came pouring in, I sat at my altar and I cried. I felt something I have not felt in a long time inside the slow flood of these months. The Epstein files. The legislation. Roe. The website. The children. The whole unreckoned machinery of it grinding forward in the ordinary news cycle of our mornings.

Men I have never met, writing from their kitchens and their desks. Men crying. Men furious with a clean, specific fury I recognised instantly as the noble masculine finally handed something to stand against. One man wrote, as a man, I do not tolerate this. Period. End of story. Another wrote that not since reading bell hooks’s The Will to Change has a piece of writing challenged me as a man so deeply.

I have been feeling so much these last months. I know you have too. But reading your messages, I started to feel the visceral sense that I am not alone.

And reading all of your messages, 1000’s of them, I could feel a pulse of goodness underneath the horror. The pulse of the desire in ordinary people to be more human with each other. The pulse of the yes that keeps rising even now, even inside this, even after everything..

And from that altar, with the candles lit and my face wet, this companion piece began to write itself.

A note on where I am writing from

If I am being honest with you, and I am, I know this wound in my own body. I was not well-fathered. I have raised myself from fifteen on. I am, decidedly, unparented.

I am not writing this from the warm middle of a well-fathered life, offering tidy wisdom about men to women who have been mauled. I am writing it from inside the same longing a lot of us are carrying. And still, I still love the men. I still believe in the noble masculine. And I want to tell you what I mean by that.

What patriarchy actually is

I want to name something that will land uncomfortably for some of us. I am going to name it anyway, because I think we are ready.

Patriarchy is not the masculine winning.

Patriarchy is the masculine broken.

Read that again if you need to. I had to, the first time I thought it.

For thousands of years we have lived inside a structure we call patriarchy. And we have, with quite good evidence, identified it as the source of most of what has gone catastrophically wrong on this planet. The wars. The extraction. The legislation of women’s bodies by men who have not earned the right to name a single one of our organs. The worship of force over tenderness. Dominance over relationship. Empire over earth.

All of that is real.

And the men are not patriarchy’s beneficiaries. They are its foot soldiers. Its casualties. Its orphans.

Patriarchy took the noble masculine out into a field somewhere about four thousand years ago and shot him. Then it put a uniform on the body and told every boy born since that this was what a man looked like.

That was never what a man looked like.

That was the corpse of one.

The noble masculine

Somewhere underneath all of it, there is an archetype that has been waiting a very long time to be named.

He is the protector, and the steward. The one who stands between the vulnerable and the harm. Whose strength is in the service of what he loves, rather than at the throat of what he fears.

He is the father who blesses, not the one who withholds. The one who sees his child and says yes. You. Exactly as you are. I am here. You are safe.

He is the lover who worships, but does not seek to own or posses. The one who kneels before the feminine because he recognises what she carries, and rises alongside her because his ground is different and his ground is also sacred.

He is the elder who holds. Who has sat with his own shadow long enough to no longer project it onto someone smaller. Who has grieved his own father’s absence, and chosen, consciously, not to recreate it.

He has been missing so long that most men alive today have no living memory of him. Their fathers did not embody him. Their fathers’ fathers did not embody him. Each generation has been handed a counterfeit and told it was the real thing.

Imagine being handed a counterfeit of yourself at birth, and spending your whole life trying to live up to something that was never you.

That is what has happened to men under patriarchy. And we are asking them to hear our rage about it.

[Image: The Green Man. Ancient figure of the noble masculine. Earliest cave representations from 25,000 BCE.]

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What a fatherless world actually feels like in the body

Let me tell you what fatherless means. The felt texture of it from inside my body. I am asking the men reading to linger here especially. This is not an indictment. This is a map of what has happened to you too.

On the personal level.

It means there has never been a man in your life whose shoulder you could lay your head on and feel the world go quiet.

It means you learned early that if you wanted to be safe, you had to become the one watching the door.

It means you walk to your car at night with your keys between your fingers. Nobody taught you. You simply absorbed it, the way a plant absorbs light.

It means your nervous system runs a threat assessment every time a man gets too close on a train, and you call it normal, because it is.

It means you have not been held by a man, really held, stilled, met, seen, in so long you cannot remember what it felt like.

On the relational level.

It means your father loved you and did not know how to reach you.

It means your brother was taught to armour at eight and has not cried in front of you since.

It means your husband loves you and cannot name three things that are alive in him right now.

It means your son is thirteen and has already learned to say I’m fine when you can see from across the room that he is not.

It means you have been in partnership with a man for years, and at some point the touch became functional, and neither of you has the language to begin the conversation that would bring it back.

It means your daughter is looking for a father in every boy she kisses. She does not know why. You do. And you cannot bear it.

On the cultural level.

It means the boys are killing themselves in numbers we refuse to look at.

It means the men are dying of loneliness, and the medical system calls it a hundred other names.

It means a boy can make it to twenty-five without a single adult man ever asking him how he actually is.

It means the men who legislate our bodies have never once paused to examine why they feel the compulsion to.

It means the men who run the extraction industries cannot feel the earth under their feet any more, because you cannot feel what you have been trained since boyhood not to feel.

It means there is a grabbing, narcissistic, wilful little boy’s hand in the highest office in the land, elevated there by the very culture that spent forty years pretending his violence toward women was locker room talk.

It means the Epstein files. The names. The drugged women. The children. The men who knew. The full-altitude demonstration of what happens when the unreckoned masculine reaches the top of a pyramid and finds that nobody has ever asked it to stand for anything.

On the archetypal level.

It means the Good Father has been exiled from our cosmology just as thoroughly as the Great Mother.

It means when a boy reaches for a template of the sacred masculine, he finds a soldier. When he reaches further, he finds an emperor. When he reaches all the way down, he finds nothing.

It means the only model of masculine divinity we have left in the dominant story is a jealous, punishing, solitary sky god who demands obedience and destroys what displeases him.

It means every myth of initiation, where the boy was once taken by the elders and handed back to the village as a man who had known the underworld and returned, has gone quiet.

It means there is no Osiris. No Green Man. No wounded healer. No holy king. No consort of the goddess in the dominant imagination. Only the uniform. Only the corpse with the uniform on it.

On the spiritual level.

It means the men do not know how to grieve.

It means they do not know how to descend, how to rest, how to kneel, how to belong.

It means a boy can make it to forty without ever having knelt before anything, and then we wonder why he cannot stand for anything either.

It means a generation of men has been trained that the only legal emotion is rage outward. And so everything else, the grief and the fear and the tenderness and the love, has metastasised into precisely the rage we are now watching externalised onto women, children, the earth, and each other.

It means we have built an entire civilisation on top of the wound of the missing father, and we have called the wound progress, and we have called the wound strength, and we have called the wound masculine.

That is fatherless. That is the air the men have been breathing. That is the air we have all been breathing.

The noble masculine would never stand for what is happening right now. He would block the way. He would throw his body between the powerful and the child. He would say no to his brothers and mean it. He would feel the earth underneath him.

His absence is what we are paying for. In bloodshed. In greed. In the abuse on the bodies of women and children. In a culture that cannot feel itself.

And the men who are doing the harm are also the men whose fathers never blessed them, whose elders never initiated them, whose culture handed them a counterfeit of themselves and told them to perform it or die.

Both are true. And if we cannot hold both, we cannot heal this.

The pulse underneath

What I am clear on is that, something is stirring.

It is not the revolution, yet. Not the arrival of the Father at scale. Not the end of patriarchy. Let us not confuse a first tremor for the shift itself.

But something. Something I have not felt in thirty years of doing this work.

Men are beginning to answer.

One wrote that he read Motherless and took it to his men’s group the next day. They sat in the silence afterwards and then one of them started talking, and then another, and they were there until midnight. Another wrote that he cried in a way he had not cried since his own father died. Another that he had been waiting his whole life for a woman’s voice in this space to tell him how to help.

We have been waiting over three thousand years for this. Longer, really. Through every witch trial, every silenced girl, every drugged wife, every legislative erasure, every generation of women who died without ever being met.

A handful of men writing to say this is terrible and I am with you is not the arrival of the noble masculine at scale. It is a few trees beginning to move in what is still an almost windless forest.

But the trees are moving.

I am not asking you, sisters, to throw a parade. Nothing about this rewards the basic fucking minimum that ought to have been the baseline for thousands of years. I feel the slight intake of breath at even naming it. I feel it in my own body.

And.

If I cannot feel the pulse of goodness beginning to rise in men, even now, even here, then I have lost the thread of what this work is actually for.

This work is not the accumulation of grievance. This work is the restoration of the Whole. The Mother, yes. And the Father. And the relationship between them, severed for ten thousand years. And the ordinary humans, women and men, whose bodies carry the pain of that severing, and whose bodies also carry, somehow, still, the pulse of what could be otherwise.

The return of one is the return of the other. This is the work of anyone awake inside the end of this long era.

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For the men who are reading, which I know so many of you are

I want to speak to you directly. Because the question you are most likely carrying, if this piece has moved something in you, is what do I actually do now.

Not a list of tasks. A map of the inner territory first, and then the outer action that follows from it.

You cannot call the noble masculine forward in the world without first calling him forward in yourself. Skip the inner movement, and the outer one will collapse the first time it is tested.

These are my invitations. They are very similar to the work my sisters and I have been doing for years, to recover and heal from the insanity and cruelty of patriarchy.

Meet the wounded boy inside you.

• Every man is carrying one. The boy who was not fathered, not blessed, not seen. The boy who was told his tenderness was dangerous, his tears were weakness, his fear was shameful.

• Most men have spent their whole adult lives pretending that boy is not there. Reclaiming the noble masculine begins with meeting him. Not fixing him. Just meeting him. Letting him speak. Letting him cry. Letting him be seen, possibly for the first time ever.

Grieve the father you did not have.

• Almost every man alive is carrying a grief about his own father. Either he was absent. Or present but armoured. Or he loved you and did his best and still could not teach you how to be a man, because nobody taught him either.

• That grief, moved, is what frees you to father differently. It is also what lets you stop looking for a father in every older man you meet, which is what unfathered men do without knowing they are doing it. Let it come.

Feel what you have been trained not to feel.

• Tenderness. Fear. Sadness. Longing. Need. These are not unmanly. They are the parts of you that were exiled when you were too small to defend them.

• You were told, somewhere between four and twelve, that real men do not feel these things. That was a lie. The difference between the great men and the rest is that great men had elders who taught them feeling is strength. Most of us did not.

• Start small. One feeling a day. Name it. Let it stay longer than it wants to.

Find your elders.

• Real ones. Men ten, twenty, thirty years older than you who have done this work themselves. Men who can see you. Men who can bless you.

• If you do not have any, go find them. Men’s circles. Therapy rooms. Recovery communities. The books of the men who wrote about this before us. You are not the first man to need an elder. Find yours. And when you do, let him see you.

Descend.

• Into your own shadow. Your own rage. Your own capacity for harm. Your own pornography use. Your own silences. Your own complicities.

• Most men skip this part. They do the nice parts of men’s work and avoid the underworld. The noble masculine does not. He is the man who has been there and come back. Who has reckoned honestly with what he has done, and what he has watched other men do and stayed silent about.

• You should not do this alone. This is what the circle is for. This is what the elder is for. But it has to happen.

Come home to your body.

• Your body is not a machine you drive. It is where you live. Most men have abandoned their bodies to the point where they cannot feel their own feet on the floor, cannot feel the difference between hungry and anxious, cannot feel whether they are tired or just running on momentum.

• Feel your feet right now. Feel your chest. Feel your breath. A man who is not in his body cannot father anything. Not a child. Not a company. Not the earth.

Reclaim your own voice.

• The voice that knows what you actually think, feel, want. The voice that has been performing something slightly other than itself since you were ten.

• Find it. It is in there. It is probably quieter than the performed voice, and more tender, and it probably says things you have been trained to swallow. The noble masculine speaks in his own voice. He does not speak in the voice the culture handed him.

And then, learn to be witnessed.

• This is the deep one. To reclaim the noble masculine is, at the deepest level, to develop the capacity to be seen by another whole human being and not disappear. Not armour up. Not shut down. Not run. Stay.

• Let her eyes be on you. Let your son watch you cry. Let your elder bless what is actually in you.

• This is the work of a lifetime. You will fail at it constantly. The willingness to keep practising is the thing.

When this begins to move in you, the outer work becomes almost obvious. But for specificity, here is what it asks.

• Find one other man this week and read this piece with him. Talk about what moved in you. If you do not have another man to do this with, notice that. That is the first wound.

• Find a men’s circle. The ManKind Project. Evryman. Sacred Sons. Your local men’s grief group. If none exist near you, start one. Three men. A living room. Regularity.

• Read. Robert Bly’s Iron John for the theory. bell hooks’s The Will to Change for the heart. Richard Rohr’s Adam’s Return for the initiatory frame. Start with one.

• Interrupt the joke. The next time you are in a room of men and it lands wrong, do not laugh. One sentence, from a man, in a room of men, does more than a thousand women writing essays. “You are better than that, mate”. Stay in the room after you say it.

• Teach your sons with your body. Not with the lecture. With the way you speak about women when you think nobody is listening. They are always listening.

• Use your power. Whatever power you have. Promote the woman who deserves it. Believe the woman who reports it. Refuse the deal that requires you to look away.

• Come back. Come all the way back. Nobody is asking you to kneel. We are asking you to stand.

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For the women

• Tell the men in your life that you see the noble masculine in them. Directly. Out loud. I see the man in you who is more than this. I am talking to him. That sentence, spoken from the mouth of a woman who loves a man, is one of the oldest pieces of medicine there is. Most men alive today have never once, not ever, heard a woman say it.

• Name the good men out loud. Your father, if he was. Your grandfather, the uncle, the neighbour, the teacher. Say their names. Tell the story. Name the men in your life who are doing the work, the ones in circle, the ones in therapy, the ones showing up. Put them in front of the boys in your life as templates. Every time you name a good man out loud, you bring the archetype one inch closer to the surface of the culture.

• Bless the boys in your life. If you are a mother, a grandmother, an aunt, a teacher, a neighbour, a sister, a friend, bless the boys. Out loud. Tell them they are good. Tell them their softness is strong. Tell them their tears are welcome. Tell them they are not what the algorithm says a man is. Tell them what a man actually is. They will remember your voice for the rest of their lives.

• Send your husband, your brother, your father, your friend, to his own work. Not with contempt. With fierce love. Tell him you cannot do his grief for him. Tell him you cannot father him into himself. Tell him there is a circle of men waiting for him, somewhere, and his job is to go find them. Then let him go.

What I know in my bones

I began this piece at my altar, the morning after Motherless went out into the world, with the candles lit and my face wet. I want to end there too.

We are living through something. All of us. Women and men. The slow flood of these months, the files, the laws, the website, the ordinary horror of the news cycle. I am not going to pretend it is not happening. We are inside it.

And I am here to tell you, from the middle of my own body, that I can feel the pulse.

The pulse of goodness rising. The pulse of the desire in ordinary people to be more human with each other. The pulse of women waking up in numbers that frighten the structures that depend on us sleeping. The pulse of men beginning, tentatively, some of them, to answer.

The Mother is rising. I know this in my bones. She has been rising in my body and in the bodies of the women around me for years now.

And what became clear to me, in the writing of this piece and in the reading of what came back, is that the Father is rising with her.

He has to be. They have always belonged to each other. The one cannot come home alone.

So I am watching for him, The noble masculine, and I am calling him forward. The one we have not been allowed to meet for thousands of years. The one whose face is emerging, slowly, in the writing of the men who are finding their own voices in response to ours. The one who is stirring in the boys we are blessing. The one who is waking up in the men sitting in circles at midnight talking about grief for the first time in their lives.

He is coming.

Call him forward. Name him out loud. Refuse anything less.

The noble father is rising, beloveds.

The pulse is real.

Meet him.

P.S: A note on language and belonging

Since Motherless and Fatherless went out into the world, I have received a thoughtful and important letter from a reader who is a trans man, asking where the trans and non-binary community fits inside this framework. I want to answer publicly, because the question deserves a public answer.

The Sacred Feminine and the Sacred Masculine are not biological categories. They are archetypal frequencies. They live in every human being. We all carry both within us, and the work of Sacred Union — what the alchemists called coniunctio, what every wisdom tradition has understood at its depths — happens inside every soul, regardless of the body it lives in.

When I write in the language of women and men, I am writing into a cultural wound that has been enacted along binary lines. The website. The legislation. The Epstein files. The structures of patriarchy that have hurt all of us. Those have been organised through a binary, and exposing that binary is part of the diagnostic work of the series.

But the medicine — the calling home of the Mother and the Father — is for everyone. There is no version of this work that does not include trans women, trans men, non-binary people, and every human being who has felt the severance and is finding their way back to the Whole. The trans women who mother. The trans men reclaiming the noble masculine in themselves. The non-binary souls integrating both within. You are doing the deepest archetypal work there is. You belong inside this conversation. You have always belonged inside it.

If my language has not always made this clear, I want to make it clear now. The Sacred Reckoning is for all of us. The return of the Mother and the Father is the return of the Whole, and the Whole has no exclusions. It cannot. That is the whole point.

Thank you to the reader who wrote in. Your letter is the kind of generosity that makes this work better.

In love and devotion Elayne Kalila

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A note before you begin, my love. This piece moves through tender and activating territory. If today is not the day, please put it down. Make yourself a cup of tea. Come back when you are ready. The work will still be here. x

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I am sitting at my kitchen table reading the CNN article.

I have my tea next to me. The morning is ordinary. The light is coming in the way it always comes in. And I am reading a sentence about men lifting the eyelids of their drugged wives on camera to prove they are fully unconscious before they rape them.

I read it once and my brain stops and refuses to let it in.

I read it again.

Then I hear myself say it out loud, because that is the only way the words are going to land in my body.

“The website is called Motherless.”

And when I hear my own voice say it, something tears open. The horror moves through me in a wave that starts in my chest and keeps going. I am shaking. My hand is over my mouth. I hear myself say, out loud, to an empty kitchen.

What the fuck.

What the actual fuck.

What can possibly be next.

Because it is not just this, my loves. It is this, landing on top of the Epstein files, on top of the SAVE Act. Landing on top of the erasure of Roe Vs. Wade. And of everything else we have been absorbing month after month after month, each one a little more surreal than the last, each one a little more impossible to metabolise before the next one arrives.

This is the Handmaid’s Tale. We are in it. We are living in it. We are reading it in the news with our morning tea.

And I sit there, at the table, with the horror still moving through me, and I realise something that I want to bring to you now. Because I think it is the only place to begin.

The website is called Motherless.

Read that. Out loud if you can. Let it sit in your mouth for a moment.

Motherless.com. Sixty-two million visits in February alone. Twenty thousand videos of what the men on the site call “sleep content.” Tags like #passedout and #eyecheck. In those videos a man lifts the closed eyelid of his drugged wife on camera, to prove she is fully under, before he films what he does to her.

A Telegram group linked straight off the site. About a thousand men strong. They trade dosages the way other men trade fantasy football tips.

Bottles of tasteless liquid for a hundred and seventy-five dollars a pop, shipped anywhere in the world.

Livestreams of assault at twenty dollars a viewer. Crypto preferred.

This is not the dark web. This is the indexed, legal, ad-supported internet. This site had more monthly traffic than most newspapers. And the name at the top of the masthead is Motherless.

I want us to stay with that. Because the men who built this have told us exactly what they are. They always do. The name is the confession. The name is the unveiling.

Apocalypse does not mean destruction. The Greek root, apokalypsis, means to uncover and pull back the veil. And what we are watching right now, in the ordinary news cycle of April 2026, is the veil being pulled back on what a motherless world actually produces. This is not an archetype on a bookshelf. This is men, in their millions, congregating to render their own wives unconscious so they can use their bodies without the inconvenience of being witnessed.

Sit with that for a moment. They cannot bear to be seen by her. They need her eyes closed. They need her absent from her own life. They need her as object. The whole erotic charge is her unknowing.

What kind of man needs a woman drugged to touch her?

A motherless one.

I want to say very clearly, I have zero interest in shaming the men who have found themselves inside this machinery, and zero interest in protecting the men who built it. Those are two very different conversations, and I can hold both. As a psychotherapist, as a woman devoted to the return of the divine feminine and the Mother, what I am interested in is the diagnosis. And the diagnosis is written out in clear sight.

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What a motherless world actually feels like in the body

Let me tell you what motherless means. The felt experience of it, on every level we live on. Let this one land slowly, my love. Let yourself feel where each sentence hits in your body.

On the personal level it means..

You have never once in your adult life laid your head in someone’s lap and been stroked until you fell asleep.

When you are sick you manage it. You order the soup. You cancel the meetings. You text your mother an update if you have one. Nobody comes.

When you cry you cry alone, usually in the bath, usually at night, and you clean yourself up before you come out.

Your body has been braced since you were a small girl and you do not remember what unbraced feels like. Your shoulders are up near your ears right now. Drop them. Feel how fast they come back up.

You learned to mother yourself before you were out of primary school because there was not enough to go around, and you have been doing it ever since, and you are tired in a way that sleep does not touch.

On the relational level it means…

Your friendships are transactional and you know it. Voice notes. Schedules. Catching up. You love these women and you would do anything for them and you have not actually been held by one of them in a year.

Your daughter came home bleeding for the first time and you ordered her pads from Amazon and asked if she was okay and she said yes and you both moved on.

Your own mother is ageing and you do not know how to be near her grief, or your own, so you phone once a week and keep it light.

You have a husband or a partner or a lover, and the touch between you has become functional, and neither of you quite remembers when it stopped being anything else.

There are women in your neighbourhood whose names you do not know, and if one of you collapsed in the street, the other would call an ambulance and go home.

On the cultural level it means

Birth is a medical emergency managed by strangers in a room with fluorescent lighting.

Death is a medical failure managed by strangers in a room with fluorescent lighting.

Menopause is a deficiency to be corrected.

Menstruation is a hygiene problem.

Ageing is a cosmetic crisis.

The wisdom of a woman at seventy is worth less, socially and economically, than the smoothness of a woman at twenty five.

There is no cultural container for grief that lasts longer than a funeral.

We call a woman hysterical when she is telling the truth and composed when she has learned to swallow it.

The word crone, which once meant keeper of the deepest wisdom, is now used as an insult.

Your local high street has three nail bars and zero elders.

On the archetypal level it means…

The Great Mother, who for tens of thousands of years was the central image of the sacred, who was Inanna and Isis and Asherah and Tiamat and Sophia and the Shekinah and the Black Madonna and a thousand other names, has been exiled from our cosmology.

We live inside a story that begins with a father god alone in the sky. Alone. No partner. No mother. No consort. Just Him.

When a little boy looks up at the heavens looking for the divine, he is told to look for a man.

When a little girl looks up at the heavens looking for herself, she is told to look for a man.

The feminine has been cut out of the very shape of the sacred, and so has the body, and so has the earth, and so has everything we are made of.

On the spiritual level it means…

We do not know how to die well.

We do not know how to be born well.

We do not know how to grieve, or how to descend, or how to rest, or how to belong.

The body is treated as an obstacle to holiness rather than its temple.

We are ashamed of what makes us alive.

We have severed the cord that once connected every human being to the earth, to the ancestors, to the dark mysteries, to the rhythm of the moon, to the knowing in the blood.

We have a generation of seekers who are spiritually starving in a world where spirituality is a booming industry.

We have built an entire civilisation on top of a wound, and called the wound normal, and called the civilisation progress.

That is motherless. That is the air we are all breathing. Motherless.com did not invent this. It is just the loudest part of a song we have been humming for a very, very long time.

And yes, this is why Roe came down. And yes, this is why the SAVE Act threatens to disenfranchise millions of women who changed their names when they married. And yes, this is why the Epstein client list is treated as background noise rather than a five alarm fire. And yes, this is why Motherless dot com had sixty-two million visits in February.

They are the same story. They are the same severance. They are the same machine, wearing different uniforms.

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The ten thousand year severance

I have been tracking this for more than three decades, and I will tell you what I know.

The erasure of the Mother is of course not a recent thing.

For most of human history, and I mean most, stretching back tens of thousands of years, the sacred was feminine. We have her figures carved in mammoth bone and limestone, dating from twenty, thirty, forty thousand years ago. Wide hipped. Full breasted. Pregnant bellied. Held in the palm of the hand like a prayer. She is all over the archaeological record of our species, long before anyone was writing anything down, long before anyone was building temples to a sky father. She was the first image we made of the holy.

Around ten thousand years ago something began to shift. As agriculture took hold, as property took hold, as patriarchal structures of lineage and ownership began to replace older cooperative ways of living, the Mother started to be displaced. Slowly at first. Then not so slowly.

By about four thousand years ago the rewriting was well underway. In the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation story, the great goddess Tiamat is split in half by her grandson Marduk, and her body becomes the raw material for his new world. That is not a metaphor I invented. That is on the clay tablets. The primordial Mother, dismembered, and her body used as building blocks for a male cosmos. This is the founding text of the world we still live in.

Then came the last two thousand years in earnest. The temples of the goddess were systematically destroyed. The priestesses were murdered or forcibly converted. Asherah, who had been worshipped alongside Yahweh for centuries, was written out of the Hebrew Bible. The Great Goddess of the Mediterranean world, in all her many names, was declared demonic. The Gnostics who remembered Sophia were persecuted as heretics. Mary Magdalene, the apostle to the apostles, was rewritten as a prostitute by a pope in the sixth century. The Black Madonnas were hidden in crypts. The village wise women became witches. Something on the order of hundreds of thousands of women, possibly millions across the centuries, were tortured and burned by churches and states for carrying the old knowledge, for being midwives, for being healers, for being eccentric, for being old, for being beautiful, for being poor, for being alone.

Every midwife replaced by a surgeon.

Every birth moved from the home to the hospital.

Every girl taught that her body was shame.

Every boy taught that softness was weakness.

Every grandmother dying alone in a facility where nobody knew her name.

I am writing this list long on purpose, my love. I want you to feel the length of the severing. Ten thousand years of pulling the Mother out of everything. Two thousand years of putting her to death every time she tried to return. And here we are, arriving at the inevitable end of that arithmetic, and we are shocked that men built a website called Motherless and sixty two million people visited it in a month.

Motherless.com is the logical outcome. It is what you arrive at when you remove the Mother from the cosmos long enough. The men there were not imported from some other world. They are our world. They are our sons and our husbands and our fathers and the man who delivered your package yesterday. Some of them are us on a different timeline.

Of course this is where it ends. Where else could it end?

Venus Of Willendorf created over 25,000 years ago.

To the men in our lives

And this is where I have to stop, and turn, and speak directly to you.

The men reading this. The ones who saw the CNN headline and felt sick in your body. The ones who are not doing this and cannot imagine doing this. I love you. I need more from you. And I am going to be specific.

Your silence is the oxygen this fire breathes.

The men on Motherless were not raised in some separate society. They were raised in the locker rooms and the group chats and the fraternities and the dinner tables you were also in. They heard the same jokes. They passed around the same early porn. They learned the same lessons about what a woman is for. The only difference between them and you is where you drew the line. They kept going. You stopped.

The question for you now is what you do with the ones who have not stopped yet.

One man. One real conversation. This week. I am asking you for that.

Ask your best friend what he actually watches. Ask your brother what he is teaching his son. Ask your father if he has ever really looked at any of this. Break the silence in the group chat the next time a joke lands wrong. Be the one who does not laugh.

Sit down with the boy in your life, whoever he is. Your son, your nephew, the kid you coach. Before the algorithm finds him, if he is still young. After it has found him, if he is not. Tell him what those images are actually designed to do to his nervous system. Tell him what a woman is. Tell him what he is. Tell him the truth about the first time you were shown something you wish you had not been shown, and what it cost you.

Become the elder. This role has been empty for three generations. It is waiting for you. You do not need a title. You need a willingness to say the true thing in a room where nobody else will.

If you are a man in a position of leadership, a pastor, a coach, a manager, a teacher, a father, name this from the front of the room this week. Do not wait until it is safe. It is never going to become safe.

This is what it means to mother men. Yes. I said mother. Because real mothering has never been soft. Real mothering sets fierce limits. Real mothering says no. Real mothering names the thing. Real mothering does not indulge the tantrum. Real mothering initiates. Real mothering drags the child out of the fire whether or not the child wants to come.

The Sumerians knew this. Inanna descends into the underworld, and she is stripped of her seven powers, and she hangs on a meat hook for three days. The goddess who hangs her there is Ereshkigal, her own dark sister. The Mother has a ferocious face. She is the one who says no. She is the one who ends things. She is the one who will not let you destroy yourself.

We have lost her. We have lost her so completely that we built Motherless dot com and handed it to our sons.

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How we bring The Mother back

So how do we bring Her back.

The Mother has never come back through PR. She moves the way she has always moved. Through our bodies. Through us sharing a meal. Through sitting at the bedside. Through being in circle. Through the No that saves a life, and the Yes that makes one.

So.

• Put the kettle on. Phone your mum if you still have one. If you do not, phone the woman who has been one to you.

• Ask your grandmother what she wanted to be before she was what she became. Write it down. She is carrying something that needs to be carried forward.

• Cook for someone who is grieving. Show up with the food. Do not ask if she wants it.

• Sit with the dying. Sit with the newborn. These are the same threshold, and they are both tended by the Mother, and both of them are being tended by strangers right now.

• Tell your daughter her blood is holy before anyone else gets to tell her it is disgusting.

• Find three women. Make a circle that does not break. No content calendar. No agenda. Just the circle. This is the oldest medicine there is.

• Walk on the land and say its name. If you do not know its name, find out whose land you are standing on. She knows.

• Eat a meal without a screen. Mourn out loud when you lose something. Refuse to be alone when you do not have to be.

• Mother yourself ferociously when nobody else is doing it.

• Say no with your whole chest. Say yes with your whole body. Stop abandoning other women. Stop abandoning yourself.

This is not a spiritual hobby, my love. This is how a culture comes back from the brink.

What we do now

Here is the action. All of it. Do as much of it as you can.

• Share this piece. Do not just read it and close the tab. This story will cycle off the news in seventy-two hours if we let it. We are not going to let it.

• Have one hard conversation this week. Just one. With a man you love. About what you just read.

• Follow the reporters who broke this. CNN’s Saskya Vandoorne. The German investigative journalists Isabell Beer and Isabel Ströh. Amplify their work. They have paid for it.

• Write to your representatives. Ask them why Section 230 still shields a platform hosting twenty thousand videos of drugged women, and why the only enforcement on record is a paperwork fine.

• If you are a woman reading this and you are not in a circle, find one. Or start one. Three women. A kitchen table. Regularity. That is how it begins.

• If you are a man reading this and you want in, I will say it plainly. Find other good men and build something. Do not wait for the women in your life to convene you. That is the whole point.

And to those of us who have been doing this sacred work for years. The priestesses. The midwives. The therapists. The mothers. The writers. The healers. The witches. The ordinary women who are holding whole communities together with their bare hands.

We keep going. We deepen. We do not flinch.

The veil is lifting, beloveds. We are being shown, in broad daylight, what a motherless world produces.

What we do with the sight is the work.

Do not look away.

We are so much stronger together - remember you are not alone.

P.S. A note on language and belonging

Since Motherless and Fatherless went out into the world, I have received a thoughtful and important letter from a reader who is a trans man, asking where the trans and non-binary community fits inside this framework. I want to answer publicly, because the question deserves a public answer.

The Sacred Feminine and the Sacred Masculine are not biological categories. They are archetypal frequencies. They live in every human being. We all carry both within us, and the work of Sacred Union — what the alchemists called coniunctio, what every wisdom tradition has understood at its depths — happens inside every soul, regardless of the body it lives in.

When I write in the language of women and men, I am writing into a cultural wound that has been enacted along binary lines. The website. The legislation. The Epstein files. The structures of patriarchy that have hurt all of us. Those have been organised through a binary, and exposing that binary is part of the diagnostic work of the series.

But the medicine — the calling home of the Mother and the Father — is for everyone. There is no version of this work that does not include trans women, trans men, non-binary people, and every human being who has felt the severance and is finding their way back to the Whole. The trans women who mother. The trans men reclaiming the noble masculine in themselves. The non-binary souls integrating both within. You are doing the deepest archetypal work there is. You belong inside this conversation. You have always belonged inside it.

If my language has not always made this clear, I want to make it clear now. The Sacred Reckoning is for all of us. The return of the Mother and the Father is the return of the Whole, and the Whole has no exclusions. It cannot. That is the whole point.

Thank you to the reader who wrote in. Your letter is the kind of generosity that makes this work better.

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In my last article I made you a promise.

I told you that the map had always existed. It was an ancient map that was encoded into our blood, breath, and bones, long before Freud and the Victorian asylums. And way before the medical industrial complex decided that what was happening in our bodies at midlife, was a problem to be managed, rather than a passage to be honored.

Five and a half thousand years before any of them put pen to paper, our ancestors had already named what we are walking through. They called it the descent, and they knew it as initiation. They understood, with a clarity that our culture has spent considerable effort obscuring, that a woman who has been through the underworld and come back is not diminished. She has found her depth, power, and midlife beauty.

But my love, here is the thing about a map, knowing it exists is not the same as being able to read it! I know that from my own personal experience.

And one of the cruelest features of this perimenopausal passage, as I have written before, and as those of you in the middle of it, know in your bones, is that it offers very little in the way of signposts. Quite honestly the nature of this potent transition, is that there is very little to orient yourself to. And not much to reassure you that. what you are experiencing, is not a breakdown but a potent becoming.

So today I want to offer you the map.

This is a map of the interior terrain of this passage, drawn from the myth of Inanna, from the accumulated wisdom of the sacred feminine lineages, and from eleven years of my own descent. Not to mention the countless women I have walked alongside as they traveled through theirs. So buckle up buttercup, we are about to go on a ride.

You will remember that Inanna, Queen of Heaven, descends through seven gateways on her way to the underworld. That number seven is profoundly significant. We find it echoing across so many of the great archetypal maps of the inner life: the seven chakras moving up the spine of the body, the seven Sisters of the Pleiades holding their ancient watch in the night sky, the seven Seals of the body in the book of Revelation, the seven Demons or Powers cast out in the Gospel of Mary, the seven Veils of Salome surrendered one by one in the sacred dance, the seven Deadly Sins as a map of the ego’s deepest attachments, the seven Stages of Alchemy through which raw matter is transmuted into gold.

Seven. Over and over again, in traditions separated by continents and centuries, the number seven appears as the structure of transformation itself. As if we know at the deepest soul level, that real change does not happen in a single moment of surrender. It happens in layers, and thresholds, in the often slow, challenging and deliberate work of letting go.

At each of Inanna’s seven gateways, she surrenders something of who she has been. Her crown. Her jewels. Her lapis lazuli measuring rod. Her golden ring. Her breastplate. Her robe of royalty. Until she arrives at the very bottom, stripped of everything she had used to know herself, to stand naked before her dark sister Ereshkigal.

The menopausal passage moves through seven gateways too.

I have come to know them as the Seven Powers of the Midlife Maven, because what each gateway ultimately gives you, when you have moved through it rather than around it, is a form of power that could not have arrived any other way.

My guess is that you are moving through one of them right now. You may have been through several, and you may find yourself, as many of us do, cycling back through one you thought you had already completed, because this initiation is not linear. It is, like all things truly feminine, spiral in nature. And just when we think we have completed it - we are thrust into a whole new cycle of birth, life and death.

What I want to say to you about the journey into midlife, into our power and our beauty and our absolute gorgeousness, is this:

There is no right way to do it.

There is no one journey that looks the same as another. And even though there is deep archetypal resonance in the gateways, even though the map holds true across all of us, how you do you, as you move through them, is as individual as your soul blueprint.

What will challenge you, what will initiate you, what will bring you to your knees, how it will all go down for you, that is going to be utterly and precisely designed for your soul’s journey. It will find the exact spot in you that requires the pressure. It always does.

But as with all things archetypal, the map remains the same. Because the map is not the land itself. It is simply the direction of travel.

And here is the only thing I know for certain that is true for every single one of us:

There is only where you actually are.

And the map is only useful if you can find yourself on it.

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Gateway One: Reckoning

This is often where it begins, though we rarely recognize it for what it is at the time.

It can sometimes be nebulous, and it can be right in your face, but something shifts in the way that you see yourself, your life, and what is actually important to you. And once it shifts, loves, there is no going back.

The best way I can describe this first gateway is that what was once possible to overlook becomes, suddenly and seemingly without your permission, impossible to unsee.

The dynamic you have been quietly working around. You know the one. The relationship that has needed a real conversation for three years. The work situation where you smile and show up and perform competence while something in your gut churns every single morning. The family role you stepped into so long ago you forgot you chose it.

The yes that has been costing you more than you admitted. The yes that comes out automatically, before you have even had a chance to feel whether you mean it. Before you have had a chance to breathe.

All the roles that once felt like a core part of who you were and that you were very attached to, whether it was to be the amazing mum, or the super reliable colleague, or perhaps even the woman who never asks for too much, or maybe anything at all!

Ring any bells?

And here is something that I find absolutely fascinating, and that I think gives this gateway a whole other layer of meaning. Neuroscientist Lisa Mosconi has spent years studying what actually happens to the female brain during perimenopause, and what she has found is extraordinary. Our brains are not declining, they are actively rewiring. And part of that rewiring specifically affects our capacity for perception, for pattern recognition, for seeing clearly what we have been tolerating. In other words, the reckoning is not just psychological. It is neurological. Your brain is literally changing in ways that make the bullshit harder to ignore. Which means the clarity you are experiencing is not you losing your grip on reality. It is you gaining access to a more honest one.

And here is something else that makes this passage even more powerful. What comes up at this gateway is often not only our own unresolved material. Researchers in the field of epigenetics are now beginning to understand that we carry the unprocessed wounds of our maternal lineage in our very cells. What our mothers could not face, what their mothers could not face, has a way of surfacing through us at exactly this threshold. The reckoning is personal. And it is also ancestral. Both things at once. This one in particular was massive for me personally and I will be sharing more about this in future articles, and in my upcoming deep dive program.

The hallmark of this first gateway is that this is the time when you become clear that something needs to change, even if you are not yet sure what it is. And this is, by the way, usually the case, at least in my experience. I can’t tell you how many times I heard myself say, “I know that something needs to change but I have no idea what it is.”

The truth is that your old life and way of doing things simply doesn’t seem to fit anymore. It’s like a pair of shoes you have been wearing for twenty years that are suddenly, inexplicably, two sizes too small. And that is not just because you hit perimenopause, although this can really happen too. Take my word for it!

What I have noticed is that for some of us this arrives cumulatively. It takes years of overextension, of saying yes when we meant no, of pushing past what our body was asking for, of absorbing the cost of all the decisions and choices that were not quite aligned with the deeper truth of our heart’s knowing. All of this builds and builds until one day the weight of it simply cannot be ignored any longer.

And for some of us it arrives as a wake up call. A moment, often unexpected and often uninvited, that makes the cost of remaining in the old way of being utterly and completely untenable. That was what it was for me, and it came through my health. I will share more of that story in Gateway Three.

But whether it arrives gradually or all at once, what becomes very clear at this gateway is this: whatever we have been avoiding fully dealing with, we cannot move forward without dealing with it. The reckoning will wait. Until it won’t. And one thing I know for sure, it will not go away until you have listened fully to whatever it has to say.

And once you have started to listen, you will begin to see that this awareness is a one-way door. Because the truth is, once you have seen what you have been avoiding seeing, you cannot unsee it. Whatever “it” is has landed into you in a way that cannot be ignored. And if you do try to ignore it, it has an uncanny way of just getting louder and louder until it is almost deafening!

What I have noticed in myself, and in the many women I have been working with, is that this gateway can arrive so gradually, that we explain it away for years. We attribute it to stress, to our work, to the world that has gone completely insane, and we name it as bloody perimenopause. And what’s more, we assume it will pass. And that is where we start to veer off course...

Because it doesn’t just pass.

The truth is that this reckoning is not coming from outside you. It is coming from inside, from a deep intelligence that is only now waking up, and that has been waiting, sometimes for decades, for the moment when you are finally ready to receive what it has been trying to tell you.

This, my loves, is a holy reckoning.

The question to sit with at this gateway: what am I seeing now that I can no longer pretend I am not seeing?

You have just passed through the first gateway.

The reckoning is the moment the clarity arrives. And as I said, it is a one-way door.

What follows is the map of everything that comes after it. Six more gateways, each one asking something different of you. Each one delivering, when you have moved through it rather than around it, a power that could not have arrived any other way.

The descent. The dark. The body. The voice that finds its way back. The life that begins to reorganize around what is actually true. And finally, the emergence into the woman who has been waiting at the other end of all of it.

If you felt something shift in you reading Gateway One, what comes next is for you.

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