Motherly Love is an enlightened love—truly pure and vast, and yet it’s unbelievably primitive. Once you’ve crouched down and bared another animal out from within your body, there’s no going back to being a civilized human being. You are now both primal animal and enlightened heart.
I want to take a giant bite out of my child, consume her, perhaps as she consumed me. Sometimes I take a restrained bite and call it a “love bite.” Sometimes, I accidentally bite too hard and get scolded. “We don’t bite, Mama!”, she reminds me firmly. It sounds strange, I know. Maybe even sick to the uninitiated. Though, I literally can’t help myself. The love I feel for my child bursts at my inner seams. I simply have no other way of relating to this kind of mad-love and whole-hearted devotion.
I’ve spent the past weeks sitting with the words “motherly love”, and as I meditate on the definition of that term I find that the meaning keeps evading me. This is a love in constant motion, shapeshifting by the season, even by the day. The love I feel for my daughter is like god-consciousness. It’s just vast and endless and everywhere. It’s an active love that you can transform to meet the moment, and it transforms you too. You needn’t chose this love. It will always choose you.
Motherly love is even more primal than animal—it’s almost parasitic. A parasite you can’t rid yourself of, and one you would never want to. It’s a wondrous parasite that steals all your nutrients, deprives you of sleep, frazzles your nervous system, tests your marriage, provokes all your unprocessed emotional baggage, and to whom you will still always offer your last bite of something yummy, who you would die for, kill for and cannot live without. It’s the most horribly incredible thing that has ever happened to me. It has hijacked me and I’m better for it. No, I’m grateful for it.
Before having my child, I had never loved someone in a way I could embody. The love I have for my child is so rich and complex, unyielding and unending, it has literally consumed me—I have actually become this love. Every love we feel towards an-other changes us a little or a lot. But “other love” has always been, no matter how intense and consuming, still yet another aspect of my life and self—a facet based on certain conditions that existed within the space of a relational contract.
See, romantic love can’t help but ask, “What will you do for me? How much do you love me?” Sometimes, even, romantic love asks, “…do I really love you? Is this real? Are you right? Are you worthy?” But motherly love is truly unconditional. The love I feel for my daughter began the moment she was conceived. I grew her. Her angelic essence emanated from my womb, vibrated in my cells and took over my system completely. Since she was born, that love has revolutionized me. It has become me.
With that miraculous fertilization of an egg our hearts can become truly enlightened, even if just conditionally to start. It has the power to free its victims from selfish, self-centeredness. It has taught me how to be a better lover to my husband. My child has shown me what my heart is capable of —a level of acceptance and forgiveness and grace that I’m not sure I could have glimpsed if not for her. I am a mother, and with that, I am love.
Some days this embodied love looks like letting go—giving space, backing off, resisting the urge to connect and kiss and hold, to allow my child the space to reject me, to be mad at me, to not want me, to not be just like me, to simply be in a state of active individuation. This motherly love was big enough to allow another human to come through me and it is spacious enough to allow her to keep moving through into her own selfhood.
Sometimes it feels as though the most precious piece of me now walks among this wild world without me. This serves as a reminder that as mother I am a passageway, a guardian, a beacon perhaps, but not a sculptor. She is just passing through and I trust that she will take what she needs on this path to finding her own way, uncovering her own essential truth.
Motherly love—a redundant term, really. Mother, in and of itself, is a like a synonym for love, as a verb particularly. It’s a thankless, messy, no-where-to-run kind of love. A love too big to ever be satiated, and one that can illicit its opposite, rage, like few others have the power to. It’s a love you can never be cured of. Mothers of grown children will attest to the fact that they still lay awake at night worried, thinking about, and praying for their kin. It never ends.
I believe that cultivating our motherly love will be what saves our world, our relationships, our planet. My motherly love came with conception and birth, but children are miraculous and powerful. I believe there are other ways to harness that motherly love, should we seek out its unrelenting grip of deep goodness.
Jessica Mahaney is Co-Founder of Root + Rise – A Quarterly Publication For Conscious Mothering. Honoring the light and shadow of birth and nurture, Root + Rise is a collective of mothers – writers, artists, and activists sharing experiences that capture the process of mothering, the meaning behind the choices we make and creates space for each to be seen in our unique efforts and approaches. www.rootandrisequarterly.com