The Unmothered Mother:When Lack Lives in Your Body

Nobody sat you down and told you what to expect when your body started changing.

Nobody named what
was happening at menarche, nobody held you through the strange grief of it, nobody said this is sacred,
this is yours, you are allowed to take up space in this. You learned to deal with it. Quietly. Alone. The way
you’ve learned to deal with most things.

That’s not a wound you invented. That lack is real and it didn’t stay in your childhood. It followed you
into your pelvis, into your nervous system, into the way you mother now. The way you mother yourself or any children.  Into the way you don’t stop
when you’re tired, don’t ask when you need, don’t let yourself be held even when you’re falling apart. The
unmothered girl grew into a woman who mothers everyone but herself. And I want to talk about that. Always. And maybe because I was that woman. 

Because the body keeps the account. We know this. You’re reading this and know this. Everything that was never given to you: this tending, acknowledgement, this
permission to do as you need lives somewhere in your body. And more often than not, it lives in the pelvic bowl.

WHAT “UNMOTHERED” ACTUALLY MEANS (IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK)

When I use the word unmothered, I’m not necessarily talking about a mother who was cruel or absent in
obvious ways. The lack is quieter than that. It’s the mother who was present but not there often she couldn’t give what she’d never been given herself. The lineage of women who were never held
never learned how to hold.

You might have had a mother who loved you fiercely and still never taught you about your cycle. Who
changed the subject when anything got too embodied, too emotional, too much. Who showed you, without
meaning to, that a woman’s job is to carry on versus be carried.
This is the kind of undermothered I am speaking to.

For example, when a woman was shown a stiff upper lip, it shows up in the body as a kind of vigilance. A constant readiness. A pelvis that
holds on rather than letting go. A woman who cannot rest because somewhere, deep in her nervous system,
rest was never safe.

YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM HAS SEASONS.

Your body is cyclical. Not broken, not difficult, not too much but cyclical. There is a season for expansion
and a season for contraction. A time when your body wants to be seen and a time when it wants to
hibernate. Your hormones orchestrate this. Your nervous system follows.
But if nobody ever introduced you to your own seasons, you probably learned to override them. To push
through the inner autumn when everything in you wanted to slow down and begin to nest. To perform the energy of spring
when you were in a winter. To be consistent and available and fine while in a body that was screaming at you to simply pause, if only for a moment. 

This is one of the things I come back to again and again: cyclical living isn’t a wellness trend. It’s a
remembering. It’s learning, finally, to listen to the rhythm that’s been running underneath you your whole
life and the one that was never given a name. It’s the one our ancestors lived with. 

“Your nervous system was designed for seasons. The work isn’t fixing what’s
wrong with you—it’s learning to move with what was always there.”

MENARCHE: THE INITIATION THAT NEVER HAPPENED

Your first bleed was a threshold. A doorway into a different kind of embodiment. In other times, in other
cultures, that was named and marked. There was ceremony. There was a woman who placed her hands on
your shoulders and said: you belong to yourself now.

Most of us walked through that doorway alone, with a pad from a toxic brand given out in our sex education class with a mumbled explanation
about eggs or something. Some of us were told our bleed was an inconvenience. Some of us learned to be ashamed of it before
we’d even had time to understand it.

That missed initiation matters. Not because we need to romanticise the past, but because something in you
was looking for a witness: for someone to meet you at that threshold and say I see you, I’ve got you, this
is sacred. When that didn’t happen, the message your body received was: this isn’t worth witnessing. You
aren’t worth tending.
Re-mothering yourself, in part, means going back to that doorway. Not to grieve it forever, but to finally
walk through it with someone there. To receive the witnessing that was owed to you.

WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE TO RE-MOTHER YOURSELF

Re-mothering isn’t about sitting in a bath with candles (though if that’s what you need tonight, do it). It’s
about learning to check in. Learning to ask the question: what do I actually need right now? And then
staying long enough to hear the answer.

It looks like noticing when you’ve been in output mode for too long and giving yourself permission to
receive. It looks like tracking your cycle not as a productivity hack but as an act of listening.

It looks like
sitting with your pelvis and actually placing your hands there if it feels safe to do so and asking what it’s holding.

One thing to try this week:

Find a moment—it doesn’t need to be long, five minutes will do and sit with your hands resting on
your lower belly. No agenda. No trying to fix anything. Just feel the weight of your hands. Notice any
sensation, tension, numbness. Notice what comes up when you simply turn towards yourself rather than
away. This is the beginning. Not the whole thing, just the beginning. The practice of returning,slowly,
consistently to yourself.

THE PELVIS HOLDS WHAT YOU WERE NEVER GIVEN

Here’s what I know to be true: if the pelvis doesn’t feel safe, nothing else will. And one of the reasons the
pelvis doesn’t feel safe for so many women is that it was never tended. Never named. Never
included in the conversation about who you are and what you’re allowed to feel.

The unmothered mother often comes to me through the door marked pelvic floor problems or postnatal
recovery or I don’t feel like myself. But underneath those words is always something older.

A woman who
was never fully initiated into her own body. Who never had someone hold her through the hard bits. Who
learned to manage rather than feel.

If that’s you, if you’re reading this and something in your chest went quiet in recognition then
this is the work. And you don’t have to do it alone.

If you’re in the postnatal season, the Postpartum Pelvic Floor Journey
 is where we begin with gentleness, with the body you actually have right now, with the understanding that this time is its own kind of threshold. And if
you’re further along, the Gold Standard in Pelvic Floor Healing
goes deeper into the stories, the
nervous system, the whole embodied landscape of who you are.

When you start to mother yourself like really mother yourself, the way you needed to be mothered,
something shifts in how you show up for the people around you. You stop giving from empty.

You stop
running on fumes and calling it love. You start to know, in your body and not just your head, that tending
to yourself is part of how you tend to them.

The unmothered mother becomes the woman who broke the cycle. Not because she had it all figured out,
but because she was willing to turn towards herself even when it was hard, even when she’d been taught that her needs were inconvenient.

Not the martyrdom. The woman who came home to herself, and then brought any
children with her.