Womb-Love
Mother’s Day strikes tender chords, some of which are sweet and others which are strident. Mothering is our first, primal relationship (whether that parenting person identifies as female or not). My mothering experience was… complicated. On the one hand, I know without a shadow of a doubt that my mother loved me and risked her own health to have me. I also know that because of her subsequent health she abdicated a lot of my early mothering to my oldest sister, a child herself. She too only showed me deep love, even though the rearing of me robbed her of her own childhood.
The need to be mothered stays with us, and there is a part of us that remains that small child which, through therapy, learns how to re-parent from our own maturity. When we don’t do the work to heal that inner child, it can be difficult to learn self-care, so our pain, abandonment, and resentment comes out in unhealthy ways in our later relationships. How we are mothered determines how we learn to have compassion for self and others.
Compassion is one of the names of the Divine, both in Judaism and in Islam. Rahim or Rachamim can best be translated as womb-love. It’s not the commercial flowers and candies the capitalist machine manifests on this day. It is gut-wrenching. It is laborious. It is consuming. It is the superpower which allows us to move cars and rubble off the suffering. Compassion calls us to action when we see suffering. It is an active love.
Knowing this, it is no surprise to me that for 30,000 years before patriarchy, the face of God was the face of the mother. And even since the rise of patriarchy She continues to appear over these subsequent 5,000 years. Her names are many: Mary, Quan Yin, Kali, Tara, Durga, Danu, Asherah, Isis. Her faces are myriad. Now, as then, her love is what we yearn for when we feel lost, scared, confused, exhausted.
Compassion has been sorely lacking of late. In the post-pandemic world, the phrase compassion-fatigue has become all too common a refrain. I think it is central to the moment we are finding ourselves in, politically. When our needs are not met; when we feel unheard and unseen; when we are fearful, the wails of that inner child escape into the world. Whereas good mothers will hold us, feed us, rock us, our current culture abandons us, and worse, pits our screams and needs against those of the other “children.” Rather than cultivating our compassion for one another, this regime withholds love and hope and blames the “others” who are suffering for our own suffering.
The patriarchal paradigm breeds fear and resentment. This is precisely the goal of authoritarianism; if we are scared because our needs are not being met then we can be controlled. Not loved, not fed, not reminded of our worth – fearful and needy – we’ll settle for scraps.
We desperately need some womb-love. We need to cultivate empathy and compassion for one another. I’m reminded of the childhood rhyme about the old woman in a shoe; a patriarchal (and white supremacist) perspective fostering lack. It is in complete opposition to earlier anthropomorphisms of the Divine that were feminine in nature; when the deities (male, female and fluid genders) brought an appreciation of the world’s abundance and sustainability; when we honored all life and shared its gifts with reverence. Our indigenous teachers still instill this understanding of our interrelatedness with All That Is. They recognize that we are killing our Mother, Earth, with our extractive and exploitive culture.
How do we step back from divisiveness, fear, othering? We need to mother each other – to nurture and nourish ourselves and each other. We need to listen to and bear witness to the hurts and hunger that our human siblings (and non-human relations on this planet) are expressing. When we can hear each other’s pain and speak our own, we will find Compassion (womb-love) flowing to us and through us. As this Mother’s Day draws to a close, allow yourself to be suckled by Divine Love; carried in compassion, and made whole through Womb-Love. The world desperately needs your mothering.