A Note on Mothering

Mothering is the practice of creating, nurturing, affirming, and supporting life.

Image Source: “Motherhood” by Aya Brown, 2023.

I’ve been thinking about mothering a lot. In part because my work illuminates the stories and experiences of Black motherhood throughout the African diaspora and because mothering has always fascinated me.

Lately, I have been meditating about mothering in relation to the self. Mothering myself. My fertility/biological clock/the possibility of not having a biological child that grows inside of me and feels like a mortality of sorts but I haven’t found the right words to describe it. Healing the mother wound. The people who have mothered me and their stories. Black mothers’ stories that go unspoken because they are too painful to share. The stories of breaking generational curses. Of healing. Of joy.

Over the past two years, I have sat with many of these stories. Some that are my own and others that people have entrusted me with. And through these stories, I have defined and redefined what mothering means to me in relation to mothering myself and those I am blessed to guide and mother.

There’s no doubt that my definition of mothering will forever evolve as I learn and unlearn, but something I am holding onto as I dive into the depths of mothering is that it is mine to define.

In We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood, Dani McClain states: “Mothering is done by a range of people, including grandmothers, aunts, and queer and gender non-conforming people who don’t identify as women but who see themselves engaging in, as Gumbs puts it, ‘the practice of creating, nurturing, affirming, and supporting life.’”

How beautiful is that?

I know that mothering, in all its dimensions, can be complex, painful, liberating, radical, freeing, and so much more. It is my hope that as you embark or continue on your mothering path, whatever that may look like, you find power in knowing that you have the agency to define mothering for yourself.

With love,

Tamara