Motherhood was this realm I never dared dream of, for fear of not having children. So often we are limited by that which we fear.
We fear we won’t be good enough to raise children, we fear they will be too much and we will be constrained by having offspring. We worry we were not meant for motherhood and then we dread turning into our mothers.
I guess my fear was that I wouldn’t be fortunate enough to be a mother. That somehow I wouldn’t be one of those blessed people who found a partner and had children.
Yet, we all came into being through our mothers, and when we show care, we take on the supreme mothering role.
Whether we carry children or not, the mothering instinct is within all of us.
The primal drive to care, to nurture, to develop ourselves and others has and will continue to propel the evolution of humankind.
When we mother, we extend care beyond ourselves, to our loved ones, to others, to the globe itself.
That many species exhibit mothering, should mean that mothering is natural and easy. So why is it that taking care of our own children can often feel far from easy?
The rapid arrival of life in the digital age means that old style mothering is no longer suited to our environment.
Children now need to be cared for as unique individuals. They need help navigating the strongest peer pressures, the lure of devices and other distractions.
Their entire future health; mental, emotional and physical is at stake.
And somehow we need to do all this alone. The village of mothers sharing the raising of children is long gone. The attitude that children should silently conform is outdated. The teaching of care from mothers to daughters is either not happening or not being received. We no longer want to mother like our mothers did.
We live way down on the hierarchy of needs, grappling with satisfying the most basic of needs in our children. Our aliveness gets stuffed down.
Instead of caring we end up worrying. We worry about our children sleeping perfectly, we obsess about them eating beautifully, we angst about their health.
We get irritated and alarmed by the behaviour of our children. Our quick throw-back reactions desensitize us from reacting with true care. Oftentimes we just wish our children would hurry up and grow up.
We can not rest in our sole role of mother as our grandmothers and great grandmothers did with snail mail setting the pace of life. We now manage the finite commodity of time by multi-tasking, overtaken by the endless list.
We are never at rest and our presence evaporates.
But when we strike the balance with care; we resume confidence in our own caretaking and faith in our children’s unfolding. Then we can care without over indulging and compensating for a former apathy of care. Then we can care through taking appropriate responsibility. And then we may care free from sabatoging our care with force.
In those moments when we show our children care from that deep, sincere, heart felt place, we override all of history, all of the times when care eloped.
For our children, they know true care, they recognize it in an instant. True care transforms a situation today and extinguishes the torrent of yesterday.
Let us remember that the instinct to care is within each of us.
On this Mother’s Day may we slow down and uncover that very primal drive to care from a place of genuine concern and love for our children.
May we view our children with warmth and delight. May we find appreciation in the people they are becoming.
On this Mother’s Day let us return to love.
Yours
Anna
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