Mothers Without Borders

As a young mother I was kicked out of the zendo because my infant made “too much noise” nursing. At the local Episcopal church I was shuttled to the back room with the kids for “Sunday school” so they wouldn’t get in the way during the serious business of hymns and sermons. By the time my children were done with kindergarten, I was done with both Christianity and Buddhism and any spiritual experience that didn’t recognize that the littlest ones were our very elders returned and should be at the center of all our mystical endeavors.

My children and I walked through the woods together instead, we rescued hurt animals as a family, and in the dark in bed we offered up our prayers of gratitude and petition to those we loved on the other side. I often found myself imaginging a wholly different kind of holy spiritual community where everyone—whatever their gender or biological situation—would show up to circle all the children with song and storytelling, care and nourishing. I imagined us meeting outside beneath the trees and under the stars, around a fire sending its sparks up into the darkness. I could imagine, too, all of the grown-ups circled by mothers and grandmothers from so many different lives. Deer and fox and bat mothers. Firefly and frog mothers. The vast old mothers of the mountains and the seas.

In the old stories the animals are always stepping in to care for abandoned children. The wolves nurse the abandoned baby. The bear takes the infant into her cave for warmth. The cat nurses the puppies and the mother owl wraps her wings around the orphan. We love these stories because they remind us that in the world of the animals mothering is very different than it is in patriarchal empires where children “belong” to their biological parents but no one belongs anymore to the earth.

Almost no one in the civilization experiment feels like they get the mothering they desire because no single individual is capable of providing that entwined circle of care, with so many hands, so many eyes, so many different kinds of hearts. The children are always being shuttled into the backroom, off to the babysitter or day care, off to school, seen but not heard, relegated to a place of their own apart from the adults. A single mother is not enough. A single teacher in a classoom is not enough. As a young stressed-out overwhelmed mother, I began longing for a group I called Mothers without Borders—without politics, theologies, ideologies, teams or nations, without gender, without species. What if we all just showed up in the world as mothers? What if every child had a vast circle of mothers instead of one woman at the end of her rope?

Mother Goose came into our lives when we rehabilitated a Chinsese goose with heavy metal poisoning who had imprinted on humans. She walked the children to and from the bus, honking the whole time. Mother Dachshund, a fierce old fixed male, walked with them through the forest ready to charge fishers and raccoons. Mama Cat left organ meats in a neat row outside my daughter’s door when she became chronically ill. All of the animals showed up as mothers. On the night when my daughter found out her genetic condition was incurable, an owl swooped up behind us and wrapped her wings around her.

What would it look like to live in a world again where we all showed up for each other as mothers? What if we recognized every child in the world as our child in some incarnation or another? As every clear-cut tree, every factory farmed animal, every person in solitary confiment as our child? What if our presidents and prime ministers, generals and chief financial officers, our tech wizards and supposedly greatest minds, led with the hearts of mothers again, saw with the eyes of mothers again, tended with the hands of mothers again?

In some ways the prayer I have held for so many decades has been answered by the feral fellowship The Way of the Rose, where children can run our meetings, pray along, tend the fire, nurse, do what they need to do along with the grown ups, where everything is free and leaderless. But it is a wholly different world that I am praying for, a wholly different way of being and understanding who we are on this earth and how we belong to each other.

July 22 was the Feast Day of Mary Magdalene and in many ways she is the first disappeared Madonna, the first mother written out of the story, torn in half to make a virgin and a whore. If you want to see how the Virgin Mary and Mary of Bethany are really the same person you can either read the glorious Madonna Secret by Sophie Strand or just study the Gospel of Luke, as Sophie did, and see how the end of the story was cut off to become the beginning, to hide the Mother in plain sight. On July 26 it will be the Feast Day of St. Anne, the Grandmother of Jesus. Between these two women, hidden goddesses, lost mothers, holding out their hands to us, is an opportunity for each of us to imagine a world with enough mothers again.

I will be writing more about St. Anne in the next few days. And next year, mark your calendars I will be holding, at last, after three decades of imagining, Mothers Without Borders, a weekend of exploration of what it means to Become the Mothers the Earth Needs right now.

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Perdita Finn is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World, Mothers of Magic: Summoning the Wisdom of Our Ancestors, and with her husband Clark Strand The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. She teaches popular workshops on connecting and collaborating with both the dead and the animate everything. She lives with her family in the moss-filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains.