10.05.2020

It has been a long time since I had a little joey of my own. My beloved cub is all grown up and still I marvel that the tall bright young man I rest my gaze on now was once that tiny blue eyed babe in my arms.

Motherhood is the most curious multifaceted adventure and it was one that shaped me in a wild wonderful way, from the inside out. It kept asking more of me and it still does, teaching me gently and sharply. Mothering is the stewardship of one soul by another for all that journey will contain, its many varied peaks and wide valleys. Motherhood is undeniably an all terrain vehicle that just keeps going.

In 1973, a very good year, anthropologist Dana Raphael coined the term matrescence to describe the whole life transition that is becoming a mother. The monumental change eagerly anticipated and totally blindsiding all at once. It utterly reconfigures your cells. The world looks so different through your mother eyes.

She who made us deserves to be honoured. Motherhood is joy and delirium and sacrifice and all kinds of love. It is unsteady and relentless, moving long and too fast at the same time. No two experiences of it are the same. We think we know what our mother carries in her heart for us but in truth we never really can. The proud ache is all her own.

Mothering is deeply personal but perhaps as a nod to its cornerstone of civilisation, it attracts scathing levels of judgement from far too many unqualified corners. I raise my hand in tribute to anyone and everyone who is mothering, doing the best they can with what they have and where they are. Right now there are a raft of extenuating circumstances drawing even more deeply on the well of motherhood. Asking more. Uncertain and open ended. Mothers are shifting gears because they have to and it is as magnificent as always for our world to bear witness to.

So today, on this one day of the year that honours a role that claims all of them, here's to that. Because it has an enormous hand in the reshaping of our tremoring world, one little heart at a time.

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Words and image c. Kerrie Basha 2020