Unmothered
A Mother’s Day letter. For the mothered, the unmothered, the ones who bore children, the ones who did not, and the ones who have been mothering all along.
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.
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.
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
Thank you so for the gift of this essay Elayne. The section called “what a mother is” was particularly moving, and I passed it on to my daughter. It’s an unacknowledged truth that true mothering is not always complacent and soft, but tells the unwelcome truth and is fierce when needed.
I can’t wait to read your memoir ❤️
Elayne, Oceans of thanks for your brilliant, incisive powerful essays.. and much love to you. I sm so grateful to have found you in the turbulent internet currents!
I have read all of your essays, wept often & shared them on… for I have been (with sister-colleagues) fighting all my life in these ‘trenches’ —& it is heart-breaking to see our toxic civilization (I call it Shrivelization) sliding backward in many ways, globally.
But I also witness radiant bolts of energy & beauty— like your mind & spirit—& I rejoice. I am a VERY old lady now.. blessed to be the mother of daughters—& grandmother to twin boys (I had hoped for girls, LOL—) but my daughter (a licensed counseling psychologist, & feisty wood-switch) & her husband (a ln activist for good & a Green Man in many good ways) are raising them with passionate love, humor & consistency—& I marvel… that these 18 month old boys have the amazing luck & a fighting chance to become Healthy Men. I pray to the Great Mother (in her thousand thousand forms) that this may be so.
And I pray for your well-being & that your words find and inspire/ignite a hundred million hearts & minds toward deep health & a new world. More thoughts to come,
With love,
Diana