Mother, We Need A New Definition

“Mother, Not Mother

Motherhood is often spoken about in absolutes. You are or you aren’t. You have children or you don’t. You’re in the club or you’re outside of it. But life - real life - doesn’t work like that. Care doesn’t announce itself so cleanly. It leaks through the edges of who we are. Whether it arrives through need, or instinct, or repetition, it finds its way.

Some people raise children. Others raise ideas, raise their voices, raise their siblings when no one else did. Some people hold families together without anyone ever naming what it costs them. Care isn’t always visible, but it leaves a trace.

Am I any good at it?

As a mother, guilt is par for the course. Wondering whether I’ve supported enough - or too little. Wondering whether the very act of wondering makes me a better mother, or a worse one.

But maybe mothering isn’t just what we do for someone else, but the questions we ask ourselves in the process. Maybe it’s not only about what we give, it’s about how deeply we care about the shape of what we leave behind.

Maybe the doubt is the proof that something important is being done.

The Illusion of Measuring Up

Spend five minutes online and you’ll see it - the polished kind of parenting, framed in muted colours and clean corners. Expert advice in gentle fonts. Montessori shelves. Children who never seem to shout. And beneath it, a quieter message: if you tried harder, maybe you could be like this too.

It’s not that the advice is wrong. But it assumes you began with solid ground beneath your feet. It skips the part where care wasn’t modelled - where you grew up with distance, or volatility, or a kind of love that left you guessing. If parenting now feels hard, it's not always because you’re failing. It might be because no one ever showed you how this kind of closeness works.

We don’t start from scratch. Most of us inherit an idea of mothering long before we ever consider becoming one. And whether we try to follow it or run the other way, we’re still in conversation with that original script.

The Versions We Don’t Talk About

There are people who mother without ever being called maternal.

The teacher who watches out for the quiet children in class.
The friend who notices what you didn’t say.
The aunt who puts thought into everyone’s birthday and always brings a jumper in case you forgot one.

And then there’s the kind of mothering that feels like a reversal - the way many of us end up caring for our parents. The paperwork. The appointments. The gentle reminders, and the not-so-gentle ones. The way you explain the same thing again and again - about passwords, or prescriptions, or what the doctor actually meant.

It can be strange, being the adult in the room with the people who once held that role. Especially if they didn’t hold it well. Especially if you’re doing for them what they couldn’t quite do for you. It’s not always easy. But it’s still care. And even if no one thanks you for it, it reshapes the story.

Is All Care Mothering?

Care is everywhere - in friendships, in leadership, in workplaces, in the way we pass tissues or remember the hard date no one else has marked. And yet, when we talk about deep, consistent care - the kind that’s emotional, physical, invisible - it can often feel like mothering.

Maybe that’s because mothering has become shorthand for the kind of care that’s taken for granted. The kind that’s unpaid, unnoticed, expected. The kind you’re supposed to give without needing recognition.

But care and mothering are not the same thing. You can mother without caring - if the word is handed to you because of biology, not effort. And you can care beautifully without ever using that word at all. Still, they’re often linked - because the kind of care that sustains people, the daily emotional glue of a household or a life, is the kind of care we’ve learned to associate with mothers. Whether that’s fair or not is another question.

Is Mothering Female?

For many women, the idea of being maternal isn’t a decision. It’s something expected. Implied. In the air. Even before children enter the picture, there’s a sense that femaleness means softness, means giving, means availability. Good girls help. Good women tend.

So mothering gets tangled up with being female - even though not all women are maternal, and not all maternal people are women. The expectation sticks, whether you match it or not.

It’s not just about who mothers - it’s about who is supposed to. And who gets questioned, or praised, or left out when they don’t.

Some women feel deeply connected to mothering. Some feel trapped by it. Some live outside it entirely. There’s no one right relationship - just a long cultural shadow, and the quiet work of noticing which parts of it we’ve chosen, and which parts we’ve inherited without asking.

How It Begins

A lot of us absorbed the idea that mothering should be natural - something soft that lives in the body, not something we have to think about. But for many, it starts differently.

It starts with effort. With a kind of clumsy love. With not knowing what to say but saying something anyway. With showing up even when you’re not sure how to be helpful. That counts too.

Sometimes, maternal instincts don’t come in a rush. They arrive slowly, like language - first halting, then habitual. And sometimes, they don’t arrive at all in the expected form. They show up sideways - in protection, in noticing, in remembering what someone else forgot.

It’s not about being naturally nurturing. It’s about deciding, in small moments, to care anyway. No matter what the cost.

What We Leave Behind

For those without children, the idea of legacy can feel abstract - like something you missed, or sidestepped, or never earned. But legacy isn’t always a name in a family tree. Sometimes it’s a line that stuck. A dinner you cooked when someone didn’t know they were hungry. A way of being that softened something hard in another person.

There are stories people carry that begin with you - it’s just that you may never hear them told around the dinner table.

And so we come back to this word - mothering.
Is it a helpful word? A heavy one? A tired one?

Maybe all of the above.

It’s been used to box people in. To load them with more than their fair share of care. To create standards no one can meet. But it’s also a word that holds a kind of everyday love - something steady and improvisational and deeply human. Something that moves across generations, not just through bloodlines, but through gestures. Through memory. Through the decision to keep caring when no one else is looking.

Mothering might not be the right word for everyone. But maybe it’s still a useful one - if we can stretch it, accept it, and love it, despite its flaws.

As a mother would.