Can I be deeply honest with you for a moment? I am becoming less and less interested in talking about motherhood. Which, yes, I realise is a little strange for someone who has talked about little else on her socials for the last couple of years…

Let me explain.

As humans we naturally are drawn to a pack, to a ‘tribe’ - and motherhood is no different. It is comforting to feel seen and recognised and part of a community that is just like you.

But there are problems with this too.

For starters, for all those a pack includes, it also excludes just as many. I can still remember the gut-punch I felt for nearly two and a half years as I walked by the park near my home in Berlin and watched all the gloriously happy, perfect mothers and their gleaming Bugaboos swanning about, whilst myself and my husband tried and failed and tried and failed to conceive. I felt decidedly outside the pack.

I can also remember observing in myself how quickly and willingly, when I did conceive, I leapt across what had previously seemed to me an unbridgeable divide between those with babies and those without.

And then once I became a card-carrying mother, I found that the pack I had so eagerly joined wasn’t so gilt-edged from the inside. Well, actually, it was even MORE gilded from within.

The pack I had joined, although I didn’t know it at the time, was one that exemplified a patriarchal version of motherhood. It was a straight-jacket glue gunned with semi-precious jewels and distracting gleaming baubles. It insisted that I be

BusyTogether ProductiveCalmGood

And because I felt like I wanted to belong, I tried very hard to fit in. I baked and I googled and I signed up and I joined and I self-cared and I volunteered. And I made lists and lists and lists. But it was a pretty imbalanced and prescriptive club, this patriarchal motherhood, and so I always felt a little out of place, like I never quite belonged. I felt lonely, I felt pissed off, angry, often without having a clue as to why. Not unlike how I felt walking by all those mothers in the park before I conceived.

When I look at the group of women in my life that I have ended up being drawn to, those I have formed beautiful, deep friendships with, it is notable how many of them are women who are not mothers to their own children. I don’t know why this is, but I do know that the healing and the shedding and the evolution that we are going through has far more in common than it has not.

I’ve come to think of it like an onion. Each of us has had to peel back layers. Many of those most external layers are those of societal conditioning, internalised patriarchies and patterns.

What it means to be a mother, what it means if you are not a mother, what are our expectations of success, what it means to be a ‘good girl’, or a ‘good mother’. All of this is Patriarchal Motherhood, with a big dirty capital M.

And here is where matrescence comes in. In my conversation with Amy Taylor Kabbaz I shared a couple of weeks ago, I asked her about the spiritual nature of matrescence (listen back, she is so great on it). This is for me the molten core of it all, this is the heart of the onion. This is the Beauty and the Bone, and it is where I want to hang out, what I want to explore.

It is the same deep molten work that many of my other friends who are not mothers are doing. It isn’t that we are so very different, it is rather that societal, patriarchal norms and expectations are dividing us into different packs.

But we can’t start here, at the rich deep communal heart of things. To get even close, we have to peel a few layers of the onion back first. We have to shed, grieve, compost.

So that’s what we are going to do for the rest of this issue. Pick apart the conditioning, start to see how we have internalised it, and begin to realise how much of it is quite simply just not our s**t to carry.

Next week, we are going to start peeling back those onion layers when I share 5 ways that Patriarchal Motherhood sets us up for failure and divides us from our sisters.

What I’m going to share shifted an enormous amount for me in terms of how I saw my role as a mother, why I was feeling the way I was, why my relationship was struggling, why I felt so lost. I hope they help you as much as they helped me.

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