Last night I popped by my local grocery store, expecting the quiet lull of a rainy Saturday night — a handful of locals returning glass milk bottles and dropping a cheeky slice of brown butter cake into the grocery cart. The throng, then, startled me, and the roving line of harried teenagers and husbands clutching peach roses and wilted yellow tulips quickly clued me in. I’d forgotten, again — too many years chafing up against the expectations of this commercialized holiday.
I’m not nearly as interested in “mother” as a noun — a state of being, an identity — as I am in “mothering” as a verb — a practice, an offering.
“Mothering” means all different kinds of people can do it, all the time. “Mothering” is expansive, inclusive. It offers belonging to aunties, godmothers, cousins, sisters, friends, neighbors, daughters — even internal parts of self.
I mothered this morning, grating fresh nutmeg over a steaming cup of coffee before I settled in to write.
I mothered when I snuggled a restless nephew into the cocoon of my body, half an hour past his bedtime. I mothered when I stitched quilts for the godchildren I would never meet. I mothered when I wrapped a stack of warm dal paranthas in a paper towel-lined square of tin foil, dropped them off at the gated edge of Columbia’s campus for the students camped by Hind Hall.
I am mothered by the stacks of books that line my studio, left with pencils sticking out of them to rifle through each evening. I am mothered by the glass tupperwares of leftovers and Costco-sized groceries my parents fill my trunk with whenever I return home from visiting.
I am mothered by the sea, every time I go loping barefoot through the as-yet frigid Atlantic saltwater.
I mother these essays into being.
I mother in my practice of birth, sex, and death work, offering presence and witness for the hardest and most intimate of transitions.
I mother every time I facilitate a new group, offering container and steadiness for the things that must fall apart before we can put them back together again.
On this Sunday of Sundays — what is your practice of mothering and being mothered? Where do you do the work of care labor, and where do you accept it?
May your mothering bring you to ever more liberatory practices of intimacy, friend.
