Content warning: grief, child abuse, adverse childhood experiences, relationships to mothers.
I prefer it as a verb, this particular type nurturing. It is then not enclosed in the confines of false dichotomies. Mothering is the dusk amplifying of new universes who yawn to life, weeks if not days old. We hold them to our chests, providing space to expand and ripple outwards, room and board for their cries and growing questions. Is it ever an action: changing, affirming, offering. Embracing, enduring to the edge of reason. Mothering cannot be contained in one day of celebration or grief. There are many who choose and many who cannot. Yearning so deep it makes event horizons look shallow, otherwise fear and courage in tandem, fighting for a new universe alone.
Many of our universes began with other-mothers, ones whose hands we still hold. Ones whose hands we squeezed and whose arms we folded, one last time, much too soon. Some wanton mothering left us believing we were paradoxes too complex to comprehend by any human mind, and we were left behind. All universes are complex, all young ones worthy. It is not just the singular birth of a star but an entire galaxy, and far be it from us to neglect the need to lay down in awe. We who were treated much less than a star, we who must know we are such galaxies.
To mother a trillion pinpricks of light, to bring forth existence and care, is divine power — hence the time immemorial desire to control and harness the fortitude of each galaxy-bringer. To break them and call them weak. To forget their names when all they deserved is honor. Such is the inheritance society often offers those begotten to mothering.
And yet, they cannot stop a mother so much as they can grasp and hold fast to an ever expanding universe. Such an endeavor is fundamentally impossible. The only confines are conceptual, methods to convince us that mothering is an act of softness and lesser beings when the continual act has always been courage embodied. Mothering is not fragile nor is it quiet. It is labor and breath of life. When Genesis called woman “helper” in English, the truth was lost in translation. Ezer kenegdo is no mere helper but closer to sustainer. Life-giver. Ally.
Let this message not be usurped then: mothering moves the universe. May it ever weave the fabric of spacetime.