Mother’s Day: Honouring the Whole Journey

Mother’s Day is often wrapped in flowers, handmade cards, breakfast trays and carefully curated words of gratitude. For some, it is a day of being deeply seen and of having their labour, love and constancy acknowledged by family who recognise all that they do.

For others, it is far more complex.

It can be a day that highlights absence rather than appreciation. A day that amplifies the weight of single parenting. A day that brings into sharp focus unsupportive relationships, estrangement, loss, infertility, grief, or the mother wound. It can stir longing for the mother you needed, the village you hoped for, or the version of yourself that existed before the seismic shift of motherhood.

Mother’s Day holds multitudes.

The Initiation of Motherhood

Becoming a mother is not a single event. The term matrescence recognises this journey as a profound transition: the physical, psychological, relational and spiritual transformation that unfolds as we move through the stages of motherhood, from preconception, through conception and pregnancy, and into the early years of parenthood, but our journey does not stop there!

Motherhood is a lifelong journey of initiation, an ongoing crossing of threshold after threshold. It continues through sleepless nights and school gates, through identity shifts and career changes, through renegotiated partnerships and evolving friendships.

Through every aspect of life, the constant pulse of motherhood is ever-present. It moves and changes us on a deeply profound level, irrespective of how the individual journey looks or unfolds. Even when we are not actively mothering, we are still mothers. It does not cease when a child becomes an adult. It does not cease when we lose a child. The journey continues throughout our entire life, and even after death, we are still a mother!

And yet, in a culture that often individualises parenting and fragments community, many women navigate this initiation without being witnessed. Without recognition. Without ritual. Without sustained acknowledgement of the enormity of what they are holding.

When a Mother's Day Celebration Feels Complicated

On Mother’s Day, the cultural narrative tends to centre on celebration, but not every mother feels celebrated.

Some are doing this work without a partner. Some are in partnerships where their labour is invisible. Others are estranged from or grieving the loss of their own mothers or grieving the loss or estrangement of their own children.

Still others are longing to become mothers. Or to mothering in ways that do not fit conventional boxes, stepmothers, adoptive mothers, foster mothers, grandmothers raising grandchildren. Some are holding the role but do not identify with the title.

To honour Mother’s Day truthfully, we must widen the frame. We must acknowledge both the joy and the ache, the gratitude and the grief, the full diversity of what it can look and feel like to be a mother.

Because both can coexist.

Creating Space to Be Seen

This year, in collaboration with Mamma Village, we are holding a Mother’s Day gathering designed not around a commercial celebration, but around collective witnessing and the honouring of all mothers.

The intention is simple: to create a space where mothers can arrive as they are — whether resourced or depleted, celebrated or unseen — and be held in community.

The event will include:

• A welcoming space with herbal teas, cacao, mocktails and nourishing treats.

• An opening circle where we can honour the mother line, sing together, and collectively set intentions.

• A creative space for children to craft, play and engage with storytelling.

• A blessing ceremony for mothers, including short offerings of reflexology and massage.

• A healing sound bath for mothers.

• A collective closing to honour and ground the space.

There will be no performance required. No expectation to feel a certain way. No pressure to present a polished version of motherhood.

Instead, there will be space.

Space to be witnessed, to be honoured and to remember that you are not meant to mother alone.

Reclaiming the Meaning

Mother’s Day can be reclaimed as something deeper than a card and a bouquet.

It can be an opportunity to pause and recognise the scale of this initiation, the daily tending, the invisible labour, the emotional bandwidth that motherhood demands.

It can also be a moment to offer ourselves compassion for the ways we are still becoming.

If this day feels tender for you, you are not alone in that. If this day feels celebratory, you are welcome in that too. If it feels like both, that is welcome as well.

Wherever you find yourself on the spectrum this year, know that there is space for you.

We would be honoured to hold that space together.

The Event takes place on Sunday, 15th March 2025, at the Sacred Birth Centre in Glastonbury from 11 am to 2 pm. No need to book.