Our beloved black lab mix, Bailey, is asleep with her head resting on one of her many stuffed animals she mothers so tenderly. She carries her babies from room to room, holds them in her paws, settles them under her chin, shows them to guests, and sometimes resists setting them down at the doorway before going out.
An animal communicator once asked us if she had been a mother because she talks about being a very good mother to her babies. And indeed, we often tell her what a good mama she is. To our knowledge, she’s not given birth, but she is a natural-born mother — gentle, attentive, protecting her young. Generous and generative.
Today is Mother’s Day.
The day arrives, as it always does, holding everything at once. Beautiful for some. Tender for some. Impossible for some. Both for many.
I have been thinking about how many shapes mothering takes.
The birds outside have been fighting over a birdhouse all week, and now they have settled in to build. I saw a video recently of a mama bird intricately weaving leaves into a nest — patient, exact, working in a language she did not have to learn.
The bighorn sheep mamas in the park do not tend their lambs the way the elk do, and so we humans post volunteers on the road through Rocky Mountain National Park to make sure the cars do not hit the babies crossing. The community becomes part of how the mothering happens.
One spring evening at Marys Lake I watched a small herd of mama elk teaching their calves how to frolic — the long-legged kicks and turns, the calves trying to imitate, the patient repetition of joy. Mothering as joy passed down. Mothering as instruction in delight.
Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about an apple tree that hangs over a pond: That tree has been a good mother. Most years she nurtures a full crop of apples, gathering the energy of the world into herself and passing it on. And about strawberries that return each year to the field that mothered them. Every life-bearer is mothering, each in the shape her body asks of her.
Last year on Mother’s Day I wrote about being reflectors, not replicators. That the deepest mothering work is to be a clear mirror — to see the eternal being our child is, here for as long as breath holds, distinct from us, on her or his or their own journey. That doing this requires our own ongoing inner work, and that our children, in turn, are some of our best teachers, showing us what is next to be healed.
It is one thing to grow old. It is another to grow into elderhood. And it is one thing to see mothering in a narrow way — biological, gendered, prescribed — and another to see it in the expansive, mystical, nature-based way the world keeps showing us. The bird weaving leaves. The community that watches the road. The apple tree above the pond. The dog with her babies under her chin. The teacher tending what she has not borne. The elder mothering forward what she will never live to see. Each is mothering. Each is doing the work the world relies on.
In the same chapter, Kimmerer writes about a tiny pond plant called Hydrodictyon — Latin for the water net. Inside each cell, daughter cells form, neat replicas of the mother. In order to disperse her young, she writes, the mother cell must disintegrate, freeing the daughter cells into the water. And then the question every mother knows in some form: What does a good mother do when mothering time is done?
Her answer:
A fishnet catches fish. A bug net catches bugs. But a water net catches nothing, save what cannot be held. Mothering is like that, a net of living threads to lovingly encircle what it cannot possibly hold, what will eventually move through it.
Mothering as a net for what cannot be held. The holding that ends in opening.
What a gift it is to mother small children. The little hands in yours. The hugs and the tears and the laughter. Everything new because it is new to them, and through their eyes, new to you again. The way each age and stage opens like a door no one had described to you. It is one of the great gifts of a life.
There is nothing like the breaking of your heart when there is a pain in them you cannot alleviate. When you would give your own body to take it from theirs and you cannot. When you stand at the edge of a water you cannot follow them into.
What I have come to understand, slowly, is that our children mother us, too, if we let them. They love us in their particular way that no one else will. They show us where we are not yet healed. They teach us, by being who they are, what mothering really is.
My teacher Jim Finley tells a story of a young woman in the Living School — exhausted, raising small children, wondering whether she even belonged in a contemplative program. I wake at four to try to meditate, she said, and inevitably one of the children calls out and I have to go to them. Jim smiled. You be you, he said, and I’ll be God. And then, in God’s voice: I want you to know how much it means to me that when you are so pulled in so many ways, you still wake at four in the morning to spend time with me. And I love you so much, and want so much to spend time with you, that I wake your child…..Because I want to know what it’s like to be held by you.
We have it all wrong. What Love — God — is up to in our lives is so much more than what we imagine. And our role in it, when we let go of what we think, is so much more, as well.
I am thinking today of all those for whom this day is hard. Those who have lost their mothers, lost their children, were not safely mothered. Those who longed to be mothers and could not. Those who mother in shapes the day does not name. Those whose children do not fit the categories the day assumes. Those whose mothering has had to disintegrate — like the Hydrodictyon cell — to let what they loved most go on into water they cannot follow into. Not as caveat. Part of the prayer.
Kimmerer’s chapter brings another gift. The Potawatomi teaching that women are the Keepers of Water. Women have a natural bond with water, her sister tells her, because we are both life bearers. We carry our babies in internal ponds and they come forth into the world on a wave of water. It is our responsibility to safeguard the water for all our relations. We are all water-bearers. Most of the body is water. Most of the earth is water. The teaching about women carries a particular truth, and the larger circle is also true: every body holds water, every body is held by water. The keeping is shared.
There are scientists at the edges of physics now — Veda Austin in New Zealand, photographing water in the moment between liquid and ice and finding, to her astonishment, that water seems to respond to thought, image, and intention. On new moons, the water in her photographs gathers itself into what she calls conception hydroglyphs — two circles touching, like seeds, like eggs. On full moons, it looks different again. On the day in 2024 when the sun crossed into Cancer — the sign of mothering — her water filled with eggs. The water doesn’t forget, she says. The mothers we have lost are held in the waters of memory still. The water listening to the sky.
These are the years of drought in some places and flooding in others. The valley I live in has had a winter’s worth of snow in two May days and is still asking for water. Other valleys are underwater. The keeping of water has never been more urgent, and the water itself, it seems, is keeping us — listening, responding, holding what we offer it.
Kimmerer ends her chapter this way, and it has been with me for days:
A good mother grows into a richly eutrophic old woman, knowing that her work doesn’t end until she creates a home where all of life’s beings can flourish. There are grandchildren to nurture, and frog children, nestlings, goslings, seedlings, and spores, and I still want to be a good mother.
Mothering time is not done. It is widening — over generations, across centuries, in time the cosmos holds and we don’t have to. And true mothering is like the ripples in a pond, extending forward and backward such that healing the mother wounds flows backward through the lineage as well as forward to those yet unborn who are part of us still.
Love protects us from nothing, and sustains us in all things.
May we mother forward what we can, and grieve gently what we cannot. May the mothers — all of them, in all the shapes, in all the bodies — be honored today. May we tend the water as the water tends us.
Like many, my own journey with mothering is a co-mingling of joy and grief. I love and delight in my oldest child, as he makes his way in the world — a computer science guy choosing to be a nurturing presence as a middle school teacher’s aide in a special needs classroom. And my bonus son, as well, birthing creativity in his corner of the world.
And I always miss my youngest, Bee — with me still, though I cannot hold their body close any longer. I birthed Bee, nurtured Bee, delighted in Bee, and love Bee still — every day, in every part of my life. Bee continues to teach me and to mother me, in ways I am still discovering.
I love you, Bee. I always will. The water remembers you. So will I, all my days.
This Sunday evening May 10, I continue the free, hybrid Second Sunday Series with Becoming Human — in person at Vert in Estes Park and online, 5:30–7:00 PM. June 14th’s Second Sunday is The Remembering Way. I hope you’ll join us for one or both. If something in these words is stirring in you, you’re welcome to come sit with it alongside others who are doing this work too. No preparation needed. Just come as you are — all of you. More information and registration linked here.
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