Wisdom came to me, late in life. Motherhood did not. I gave birth to my oldest child, a daughter, at age 18. Sixteen months later, I had my son, at age 20. I was clueless. Having had a mother who birthed me when she was just 17 and my father only 15, my role models for appropriate parenting skills were greatly lacking. I’m not faulting my mother, knowing that she did the best she could. I was damned angry at... Read more

I am not a mother, yet from the beginning of my life I have mothered. I am a hen without chicks, but instead puppies, kittens, ducklings, cubs, and bunnies fall in line after me. When I was little, I nurtured stuffed dogs and walruses. When I was a teenager, I came up with crafts and games for my young babysitting charges. When I was a young woman, I helped pay my way through seminary by taking care of a professor’s... Read more

Motherhood is one of the most sacred and beautiful mysteries of the universe, un-matched in its deep-seated power and enigma… The unprecedented way that a women engages when she enters motherhood, exists on a level that she could never have known occurred within her, until it comes upon her… To become a mother is certainly a right of passage, that organically and divinely activates a woman in such Beautiful ways… Her motherhood shapes her in ways that nothing else in... Read more

It’s the first class of my Spring Sacred Ritual session. Ladies of varying ages, enter the room. Hesitant, and curious. A few appear unsure, as if they are in the wrong place, one or two are down right impatient to get started, and a couple are silent and thoughtful as they take in the sights and sounds. The beginning of every session fills me with awe, wonder and expectation. Awe and wonder because they have come, expectation because of all... Read more

Though I am in my sixties now and well past menopause, I still dream from time to time that I am nursing a baby.  These dream babies, however, are able to talk — and so we converse.  I awake with strange, inexplicable feelings of connection.  When a child grows in the womb and is then born into the world, the process of individuation begins — the separation of the One into the separate soul, traveling through one particular lifetime. As... Read more

In therapy, in my late thirties, my therapist commented that it was a wonder that I had such a positive outlook on life having, as she said, “raised myself.” Oh, I had a mother, alright; I was her first born. She went on to have ten more… and to become a world famous physician. We all pretty much raised ourselves. But here’s the thing, somehow, her amazing optimism penetrated every one of us and so, despite incest, sexual abuse, one... Read more

It is May, and mothers are on our minds. Mothering is something that most of us do, whether we have given birth or not. Sometimes it is towards children, animals, or plants, at other times it is directed at the men in our lives, or towards ourselves. Some of us might even feel as if we carry the entire world under our care. Mothering is also a cycle: all mothers have mothers, who had mothers too… Mothering – giving and... Read more