Everybody Mothers: Reclaiming Motherhood as a Creative Force
by Dr. Gertrude Lyons
Mothering is one of the oldest and most sacred practices known to humankind — yet it has too often been reduced to biology, defined only as the act of bearing and raising children. Mothering is far more expansive than that. It is, at its heart, the art of nurturing life in all its forms — not just human life, but the life of ideas, dreams, relationships, and most importantly, the life within ourselves.
When we think about mothering this way, we are truly tapping into the cosmic wisdom. Birth is the apotheosis of human creativity: The creation and birth of a human being. Is it not common sense that this would also be the experience, the life event, from which we can learn the most about living our best lives? Are we not, in all of our doing, trying to birth a vision of ourselves?
This broader understanding of mothering invites us to see every act of creation and care as part of a sacred lineage — a lineage that is open to anyone willing to tend what is tender and bring into being what longs to exist. Whether we birth children, books, businesses, communities, or our own healing, we are all, in some way, mothers. Rather than separating people who are biologically capable of giving birth and treating that as an event to be isolated from the world, by picking up the threads that connect birth and mothering to the rest of our lives, we are returning to the source of everything generative and inventive and nurturing — and above all, everything loving in the cosmos.
I believe that we need this wisdom now more than ever and that, if we are to find a way forward as a species, it will be because we re-center mother and motherhood. This is a sketch of some of the big pieces of that puzzle.
Everybody Mothers!
I still recall, with a great fondness, the unexpectedly enthusiastic response I received from women I invited to my mothering workshops who had not given birth nor decided definitively that they ever would. The message I heard from all of them was that they were shut out of the mothering conversation because they had not yet committed. We should not be separating women out like this, and I was happy to have created a space for them as part of my research, which eventually led to my dissertation. There is a wonderful circle there in which holding space for everyone to be in mothering conversations helped me to create mother-affirming scholarship. Everybody mothers!
Feminist poet and thinker Audre Lorde described creativity as a life force flowing through us — a spiritual resource meant to be used, not hoarded. When we tend to our creative impulses, we do not just produce — we participate in the divine cycle of creation itself. Each dream mothered into form becomes an offering, a way we say yes to the unseen, allowing it to take its rightful place in the world.
Feminist scholar Sara Ruddick redefined mothering as a practice anyone could embody, rooted in protection, nurturance, and fostering growth. That practice applies not only to parenting, but to all the work we do in the world. When we approach our work as something to be cared for — rather than something to conquer — we align ourselves with a deeper rhythm, one that honors both the creative spark and the need for rest.
Mother Cosmos and the Loss of Matricentrism
The cosmos is a dazzling display of fecundity. Everywhere you look, what you see is deeply integrated into a life cycle that includes multiple forms of birth. And every one of those births is a kind of creation. The cosmos is perpetually giving birth, and so are each of us perpetually birthing new tissue, new neural pathways, new human connections — all in addition to our children, our artworks, our research, and so very many other acts of creation. And so when we try to limit the idea of motherhood or the idea of creativity, what we end up doing is distorting our understanding of the very universe in which we exist.
For millennia, humanity lived in small, matricentric communities. We believe this period — the Neolithic Era — was largely peaceful, and there is virtually no evidence of war, slavery, or repression. When we moved motherhood to the margins at the end of this period, we began forming armies, enslaving people, and engaging in large-scale acts of cruelty and violence. In a perverse way, this makes a kind of sense. Valuing motherhood automatically instills a sense of the sanctity of life, and mothers are much less likely to see war and cruelty as viable options for resolving problems. To choose motherhood is to choose another, more peaceful world. I am ready for that!
You Are Everything, and Everything is You
Whatever creative acts you are engaged in are part of a cosmic dance of birth, creation, and re-creation. Own that! Know that your effort to put something original and positive into the world, whatever that might be, is like a love letter to the universe, one that says you know you are a part of something bigger, beautiful, and full of love. When you create, you are a mother, and insofar as you are, you partake of the cosmic miracle of birth and the cosmic vocation of mothering.
Dr. Gertrude Lyons is a transformational leadership coach, Podcast host, and TEDx speaker. She is author of Rewrite the Mother Code: From Sacrifice to Stardust - A Cosmic Approach to Motherhood.
