Rather than asking Mothers how we cope, I want to show you the invisible Mother Threads which will heal us all.
I am often given questions or comments by passers by about being a mother of four beautiful children. I hold them close, we are intimate and gentle. I realise I have created a new world in my family.
”You’ve got your hands full” will be thrown across the street.
“How do you manage with four?” “You’re brave!” Yet having children is very natural, I want to say. What isn’t natural is the way we live in isolated bubbles as though we never came out of our mother’s bleeding vaginas followed by our survival packs, our placenta.
This, it seems is the Mother Threads and how it plays out for me. The Mother Threads I devote so much space to healing and holding as it is for me symbolic of love. The love of the mother and the honouring of the spiritual and emotional transformations that happen to women as they become mothers.
We become the holders of love, the gateway to the ancestors, the hedgewalkers of spirit and Earth yet, none of this wisdom is being used as we are very difficult to employ and so socially isolated as this path takes us places where there is no going back to who we were. However, I believe that is the gift, we are here to create something new and reconnect with something very true.
Back in 2013, when my daughter and eldest child was born, I was a teacher, SENCo studying for my postgraduate diploma in supporting vulnerable learners. This enquiry and my own birthing experience and mother-birthing brought me to the Mother Threads. I even wrote the course and offered it to the deputy head as I was leaving and entering self employment. Of all the things I knew would make a difference in Education, it would be to support mothers and their emotional holding. This would benefit everyone.
As a SENCo I didn’t understand why were we trying to bring healing or learning to the child without considering the mother? Where had the care of the child and mother become separate? It is written somewhere in our folklore and nineteenth century fairytales: the wicked stepmother and angelic child. The loving, caring and nurturing character was never the mother but maybe a team of benevolent dwarves or a fairy godmother. The Mother was dead or emotionally unavailable which metaphorically has been true but by no fault of her own and it is in everyone’s interest to bring her back into the centre of the story by the fire as the figure in the rocking chair holding her baby to her breast or the wise woman holding emotional threads for those in need.
This narrative of absent mother, although written in fairytale continues to the present day and happens so often when strangers want to meet their inner child needs with my children or project their inner child’s needs on to my mothering. This narrative has meant that I have spent my time in so many staffrooms of professionals where the ‘mother’ has been the subject of distain and blame. It is time to restore her to her natural place of loving and being loved.
I see so many mothers who are unsupported emotionally, who are criticised for the big emotions they express (the birth of the Matre cense) a well known initiation into Motherhood no longer honoured which is often misunderstood as hysteria or postnatal depression. Really what is happening is that we are grieving what we have lost and coming to terms with this reality. We are becoming the mothers we never had and rewiring the nervous system of the next generation. The emotional and physical endeavour is huge and largely invisible.
The lens that the mother looks through to care for her children, is the same lens that is so needed in society as a whole. The outpouring of emotion is necessary to care and nurture, deep grief that it has been absent is necessary to release in this process as from the moment the mothering begins, the emotionless productive world stops.
From what I have witnessed, I have come to the conclusion and the mantra that:
When Mothers are Held, Children are Held
And this has become a central theme of my work
The truth is, and this isn’t meant to be anything other than a baseline to describe where we are at societally: We have been motherless for quite some time.
Motherless in that the mother hasn’t been heard, honoured, respected or even available to her own heart let alone her children’s. We have had that bombed out of us from war, evacuation, industrial revolution; separation of families; emotional shutdown; the transmission of trauma in the ancestral threads and so many other reasons and strands which I unravel in my courses.
This is why I devote so much of my work to the Mother Threads. It has many strands and frayed edges but it is something that holds healing for all of us.
It is no coincidence that the lack of an emotional heart, holding and voice has lead to so much disconnection from ourselves and from the Earth. Mothers are very isolated as society is not wired up to support them. When people ask me if they can help in any way, the help is this: I want you to see what I can see, I want you to feel what I feel and know that so much needs to change.
When we raise children, we raise ourselves again. At each age, we can choose to open to healing with our children and inner children or shut it down. As a teacher, my value was lost when I had my own children. The irony of this was not lost on me, it crushed and dissolved me. From what I had witnessed and felt, I was no longer able to isolate the child from their context in family. I saw countless case of families looking for labels for their children who were displaying physically what was unexpressed trauma in their ancestral line. Very often three generations would enter the room and I would see it immediately. Only I wasn’t paid to see it and it wasn’t welcome information to go on and Independent Education Plan.
When we heal the Mother Threads, we see that we are part of something much bigger and welcome. We honour our ancestors and speak to them. We know that we can change the energies and trust that our emotions are showing us wisdom that can be given voice and love.
Stories can be told by the ancestral fire and healing can be done. Whether you have children or not, whether you have a relationship with your mother or not, whether you were adopted or not. This is for you. I didn’t feel part of my family until I went back seven generations and was welcomed with open arms. Sometimes we need to do that.
When people ask me how I cope, I know that through this lens of motherhood and this heart, a new world will be created. I cope by knowing I have already distanced myself from what was and am in a world of creating a space where mothers and children are both held and supported. I know I am part of the Mother Threads being healed and the ripple out into hearts and lives is something deeply nurturing for us all as well as the mother land that holds us.