Sacred Mothering.

Mothering gets a tough rap, even in the pagan community. There is a trend at the moment for the consciously childless to attack the very notion or idea of mothering. They often twist their arguments so they too have this title, without of course, mothering. Mothering is beneath them, unwanted, revolting even, the cause of all the suffering of the world. How dare people bring a child into this over populated world? How dare they find it spiritual and rewarding? How dare they tell us smugly, "you don't understand."?
The issues they speak of, of course are complicated and have many causes. Statistically when poverty is less the children per woman tends lower significantly. If we want to tackle the over population problem globally then we need to address poverty not look women accusingly screaming "If you can't feed 'em, don't breed 'em". 
I was a young mother, at 22. I had been to university and was working and living with TK running a pub. We were very much in love and wrapped up in ourselves to notice the storm on the horizon. TK got fired and in one sentence we were jobless, homeless, and rather messed up. We went from friends spare room, to friends spare room, when we settled in a shared house in Crewe. We were still planning our wedding, tiny as it was. Neither of us was working and for the first time I saw TK illness, the demon D surface. At this point I found out I was pregnant.
"Friends" I had thought I could count on evaporated. My family did the same. Many people, mostly women told me two things. I should "Make TK snap out of it!" and I should "Get rid of it."
While I didn't agree I didn't feel I could argue. I couldn't find the words to say. I didn't yell at them or even cry. I am not anti abortion but I had seen what it did to my friends in Uni. It destroyed good relationships. It left women hurting in ways I couldn't explain. I also felt this child, within my body was made in love. With the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, how could I destroy that? I didn't have terribly high expectations of mothering, my own mother had sadly seen to that. We got hitched, quietly and with little fuss. Finally in 8 months that seemed like forever we had a tiny house and TK got a job. My own mother turned up with a washing machine then vanished again. I didn't have a great birth experience either. I had an emergency cesarean section under general anesthetic and was in agony for months after the surgery. Still I was in awe. Something happened. Something happened within me. Something powerful and primitive and strange. I felt like I had been living in a house all of my life only to discover another whole huge space that had been there the whole time. I was a mother. The responsibility I felt could have crushed the old me, but this whole me, was different. Stronger, meaner even, calmer, full of knowing. I was me, but I had new depth.
I could have, in theory got a better job than TK, yet he allowed me to explore this mothering space, and my child, our beautiful baby. She was bald as a cue ball and with deep inquiring eyes. She was full of person well before she was born. This was no "blank slate". This was an old soul watching me, wanting me, expecting me to do it right. I didn't want not to be near her. Though she gave me little choice. As did anyone else. That first year I barely saw another living soul. At the time it made me more than a little crazy but in hindsight the bounding we forged is still with us.
I was offered some working doing readings for a couple of weeks. It never crossed my mind to palm her off or have someone else sit for her. She just came with me, as always. It must have seemed very strange looking back but it seemed the most natural thing in the world for me.
We didn't have a lot of money and while TK's folks helped out in bits her and there my family just didn't. At this time TK got a better job and we though that we wouldn't want mini witch to be an only child. We figured if we started end of August I might conceive by Christmas. Two weeks later....I was pregnant with daughter number two. We moved again, but it might surprise you even now someone felt they had the right to tell me to abort this child too. Everything for the first time in a long time was perfect. When our second daughter was born, perfect and healthy, our family was complete. Now two children under two is no easy thing but I loved it, every single second of it. I made my own play-dough, sang song, changed nappies, invented the tidy-up game, it was heaven. I was still teaching Craft. My magick was not dormant or "used up" with domesticness. The reverse was true. I was able to tap into this mothering power and it was amazing. I remember breastfeeding in a forest surround by green bracken. My students and I got rather lost that day.
One of the things I found annoying was how people thought they had the right to look through me. They decided as a "breeder" I was a non person. They decided that what I did was worthless. That raising my own children was at best distasteful at worst "a waste". People didn't feel they need to be respectful of my choices or view as a whole person, I was "only a mother." As though this was not a good, holy, wholesome thing to do. Often I was treated somewhere between village idiot and leper. I had lost the right to an opinion because I had been "domesticated". I was no more important that cattle.
The term "yummy-mummy" had yet to be coined and it was neither fashionable or cool to be a parent.
The one morning I woke up, was changing mini witch and brushing my teeth. TK screamed from downstairs.
Our youngest child was dead.
There are no words.
For the sake of this blog for me, mothering became even more important. Mini witch, the "it" I should have "got rid of", became the reason to get up, to breathe, to eat. She saved my life. Those wise eyes, kind words, a little Goddess in her own right, she held my hand and asked me to read to her. To sing. And so I lived. I healed, very very slowly. Mothering has a link with biology but it is so much more than that. Mothering is the care for and raising of children. It is holy, full of meaning and emotion. It is spiritual. It is opening your whole being to the well being of someone else. It is to dwell in a place between, out of time and yet within it. All you do will echo (and don't do) down the ages. The songs you sing. The way they learn to cook. How you wash their delicate skin will live on in how they wash their children.
When I sing of the Great Mother and her arms around me, I know a little of how she feels. The unconditional love that flows, despite the pointless, silly, and mean things we do and say. No matter the tantrums or tears. When we are wrapped in her arms none of those things matter. She sees us as we are and loves us anyway. My own mothers love was always distant and unconnected. Through mothering I found this connection within myself and with the Divine. I see the holy Maiden, dancing in rain. I feel the holy Mother in every beat of my heart, and I feel the Crone's gaze with every word I write in my note books and Books of Shadows.