Notes on motherhood

It lives in the spaces between,

in the pauses, the repetition, in the work that goes unseen.

 

It stretches beyond any role.

It’s larger,

a current that runs through everything.

In the way the earth holds us,

in the intelligence of growth,

in the instinct to nurture, to protect, to create.

 

Motherhood is not something I arrived at,

but something that I move within.

A shifting, tender mess.

 

Always close to the surface.

My heart, my body, time,

no longer contained in one place.

 

We are often told that motherhood slows us down.

But it has anchored me,

as if something in me has widened.

Stripped away the unnecessary.

 

My story is not a singular story.

It holds many realities at once,

as if motherhood resists definition.

 

 

 

The song of the Mother belongs to all of us.

It lives in care, in attention, in the act of tending,

wether to a child, a dream, a community,

or to the fragile parts of ourselves.

 

For the mothers,

for the ones who are not.

For those who ache toward motherhood,

and those whose longing has nowhere to land.

For those who have lost,

and those who carry grief alongside love.

 

For the mothers who are raising children

in the midst of war,

in displacement,

in systems that ask them to survive more than live.

 

And for those who mother in unseen ways,

through care, through presence, through holding.

This, too, is part of the same thread.

 

Today is not only about celebration.

It is about recognition.

Of the visible and invisible labor,

of the love that expands and breaks and rebuilds,

of the quiet, constant act of giving life meaning.

 

 

 

From my bed, in the stillness between moments,

I see motherhood as an opening.

A force that reshapes us,

and, if we let it,

reshapes the world.

 

Miki West