A Letter To Society:“Mothering as a Way of Returning”

Dear Society, I have been thinking about the words mother and motherhood for a long time now.

Not as duties.Not as fixed roles.Not as the ideas society keeps folding women into.

But as something more fragile, more mysterious, more alive — an experience that has shaped me quietly from within. One that keeps returning through different women, at different times, in different ways.

Sometimes the word mother arrives like a wound.Sometimes like shelter.Sometimes like a soft space inside my chest that I do not yet fully understand — but keep returning to anyway.

Motherhood was never something simple or whole in my life. It came to me in fragments. In absences. In the kind of longing that turns into silence. And yet, it also arrived in the gentlest of gestures — through women who held me without naming it, who stayed when they didn’t have to, who showed me that mothering is not always born from the body.

Sometimes, mothering is simply attention.The way someone places a glass of water in front of you — without asking why you are thirsty.The way they notice the tremor in your voice.The way they protect your becoming.

So when I speak about motherhood now, I do not mean only the woman who gives birth.

I mean the many women who have mothered me — and one another — into being.Through truth.Through boundaries.Through patience.Through tenderness that asks for nothing back.

This letter is written from reverence.

For the women who raised children alone.For the women who never became mothers — by choice, by chance, by heartbreak — and yet carry a mother’s capacity for care in their hands.For the step-mothers who enter a story already in motion and learn to love inside small, complicated spaces.For the adoptive mothers whose love grows from choice.For the women who lost children and keep breathing into that emptiness.For the women who still ache.For the girls who are still learning what it means to be held.

And for every woman who has ever carried a world inside her — whether or not she ever carried a child.

The more I sit with it, the more I realise that motherhood cannot be contained inside a single definition. The moment we try to fix it in place, something sacred slips away. To me, mothering feels closer to a river — always moving, always changing — sometimes gentle, sometimes fierce, sometimes disappearing underground while still flowing on.

It is a living experience.Not a title.

Maybe what I am searching for is a way to remember motherhood as something fluid — the way older tribal communities once held it. As something shared. Collective. A space where a child belongs not only to one woman, but to the wider circle of life. Where care is not owned or measured. Where no woman is required to erase herself in order to love.

I am not writing this to argue.I am not writing this to prove anything.

I simply want to open a quiet space — where we can sit together with the vastness of mothering. To honour its beauty, its grief, its complexity, its divinity — without demanding that it be simple.

Because beyond the word motherthere is always a woman.

And inside every story of motherhoodthere is a human heart — still learning how to hold and how to be held.

This letter is my way of bowing to them.

I do not come to these words as an outsider, nor as someone trying to define them. I come as a woman who has been mothered in fragments — by women of bone and dream, by strangers and friends, by those who stayed and those who, for reasons the world may never understand, could not. And so motherhood, to me, is not a closed door. It is an experience that lives and moves and transforms — never quite finished, never held inside a single meaning.

I have seen the women who birth — their bodies becoming thresholds between worlds. I have seen how devotion is expected to come wrapped in silence, how the story of the “good mother” is told again and again until even exhaustion must look graceful. And I have seen the mothers who do not fit into these stories — unmarried mothers, single mothers, widowed mothers, abandoned mothers — women who continue to gather their lives with both hands, even when the world has no kind word for them. I have known women who have not borne children and yet have mothered entire universes — feeding, tending, guiding, holding — sometimes openly celebrated, sometimes quietly shamed, sometimes never named at all.

There are mothers who leave, too. Some by body. Some by spirit. Some by illness. Some by the weight of something the world never bothered to understand. And there are children — grown and still-growing — who keep reaching into the past for a scent, a voice, a touch that might tell them why love sometimes arrives in incomplete forms. Even here, I have learned that absence does not mean the lack of love — only that love, too, is sometimes fractured by circumstance.

And then there are the women who walk into families already in motion — stepmothers who are so often written into stories as shadows or villains, though in truth they are simply women — standing gently inside complicated rooms, trying to offer care where history has already laid down its roots.

And I think, too, of the women who say no — who choose not to mother in the way the world expects them to. The ones who must carry questions the way others carry children. Are you selfish? Are you incomplete? Are you less woman? And somehow, they continue anyway — quietly, bravely — carving a life that belongs to them.

Somewhere among all of this, I began to understand that motherhood is not one face. It is a constellation — and each star carries its own story.

And still, beneath all these lives and choices, there is the whispered truth that for centuries a woman’s decision about whether or not to mother has rarely belonged entirely to her. Family, faith, class, the state, the body — all have spoken over her voice at the very moment her voice should have been enough. Even now, when autonomy is spoken aloud more often, the reality is uneven. Motherhood remains, for many, not simply a calling of the heart but an expectation stitched tightly into the fabric of gender.

And for those who step into it, there is another quiet truth — the way a woman’s body can become public property when she is most vulnerable. The way care sometimes forgets tenderness. The way pain can be dismissed. Consent assumed. Dignity diluted in the name of efficiency or authority. These are not accusations — only memories women carry in silence, folded away like old cloth. And sometimes, this is where the story of erasure begins — the slow fading of the woman behind the role, the way love is translated into disappearance.

Because in so many places, the “ideal” mother is the one who learns to vanish gracefully. Her dreams become secondary. Her exhaustion becomes invisible. Her fullness becomes inappropriate. And somewhere in all of this, society calls her erasure love.

But love, I have learned, has many languages — and not all of them require a woman to disappear.

Slowly — gently — some women began to ask different questions. Must love mean self-loss? Must devotion mean silence? Must instinct replace the truth that caring for another is also labour — emotional, physical, spiritual — holy because it is real, not because it is invisible?

These questions do not confront. They do not condemn. They simply open a window.

Because I have also seen another kind of mothering — one that is rooted in presence rather than sacrifice. A mothering that allows a woman to remain a woman — thinking, longing, laughing, creating, resting — while her arms remain open. A mothering not bound by titles or bloodlines — where friends become quiet sanctuaries for one another, sisters hold grief together, elders pass down tenderness instead of judgment, strangers pour tea into shaking hands and call it care. Here, mothering becomes something shared — like water passed between cupped palms.

And in the wisdom of older tribal and earth-rooted communities, I sense this truth was once known — that a child is not raised by one woman alone, but by a circle. That care is a communal act. That the burden softens when love is allowed to belong to many hands.

So when I speak of motherhood, I do not speak of a pedestal or a lesson or an argument. I speak of a living experience that has shaped me. Of the women — flawed and divine in the same breath — who have taught me what it means to stay, what it means to leave, what it means to return to yourself and call that act love.

This letter is not an answer. It is an opening. A way of saying that perhaps the world changes not by defining women more tightly — but by loosening the grip around what we think they must be. By allowing motherhood — like river water — to be both force and tenderness, both shelter and wildness, both lineage and personal truth.

And maybe, if we can learn to see motherhood not as an institution but as a living, breathing experience — held in many forms, carried by many lives — we may also learn to mother the mother, and to honour the woman beneath the name. And perhaps, beneath all the noise of the modern world — beneath the expectations, the judgments, the loneliness, the breaking and rebuilding — there is a much older remembering waiting for us. A remembering that becoming a mother, or even standing in relation to the word mother, is not just a social role — it is a spiritual threshold. A doorway into a deeper becoming. A chance to expand beyond the small borders of the self and enter a space where love, responsibility, surrender, boundary, and awakening live side by side.

For me, motherhood — in all its forms — feels like a path of returning. A way back to the wisdom that women once carried as naturally as they carried water or stories or seeds. We were always more than caretakers. We were the ones who listened to the earth. Who read the sky. Who remembered the songs. Who stood between worlds and guided life from one side to the other. We were portals. We were wisdom keepers. We were bridges between the seen and the unseen.

Somewhere along the way, motherhood became an institution rather than an experience. Something regulated, measured, judged, and isolated — instead of held, shared, honoured, and supported. And in that separation, not only women suffered — the wisdom did too. The threads connecting us to the ancient knowing loosened. Mothering became work done in private instead of knowledge held in community. Women began to disappear into the very role that was meant to expand them.

But the truth — the quiet, luminous truth — is that mothering still carries within it the possibility of spiritual evolution. Whether we mother a child, a dream, a body of work, a forest, a community, or our own inner selves — we are given a chance to transcend what is small inside us. To soften ego. To deepen compassion. To sit with mystery. To learn presence. To practice love — not as self-erasure, but as conscious, grounded devotion.

And what we choose to do with this experience — that is our free will.

This is not a destiny forced upon every woman.It is not a mandate.It is an invitation.

An invitation to remember our expansiveness.To return to the wide, quiet space inside.To recognise that we are not only givers of life — but carriers of wisdom, holders of stories, translators of the unseen.

To mother, in its truest sense, is to participate in the great continuity of life — not as servants to an idea, but as awake, breathing, evolving beings walking a sacred path back to ourselves.

And maybe the way forward is also a way back — back to the circle, back to care as community, back to reverence, back to listening. Back to the place where motherhood is not a cage, but a current. Not a burden, but a becoming. Not an obligation, but a living river of love — flowing through us, shaping us, and then continuing on.

May we return to our expansive knowing.May we remember the lightness that comes from truth.May we honour every form of mothering —and the sacred woman at the centre of it.

And may we meet each other there — gently, openly, in stillness. Love, Afrah