A Paradox of Motherhood — Knowing All and Nothing
How Motherhood Increases Your Capacity to Love, to Nurture and, Eventually, to Sit With Mystery as You Recognise both Your Power and Its Limits
Like many of life’s great callings, motherhood is a complex role full of paradox and contradiction. Mothers are beings of incredible power, strength, grace and vitality — the ability to carry a child to term and bring it into this world is a feat of creational, physical and spiritual-emotional endurance. It is no wonder that the mother is one of humanity’s greatest icons and most revered figures. On the other hand, a mother’s power is both immense, and circumscribed by her human nature. Put very simply, we have the ability to bring life into being, but that does not mean that we understand all of life’s mystery and meaning. We are still human beings, and our ability to perceive truth is framed and shaped by the human condition. This may seem a philosophical, abstract way to look at mothering, but in application, this is one of life’s greatest challenges. It is also, once you understand and make peace with it, one of motherhood’s greatest gifts.
In my own initiation into motherhood, I found the juxtaposition of my incredible power over and simultaneous inability to control my baby to be jarring, unsettling and anxiety-inducing. Feeling powerless in the face of my baby’s suffering, the cause of which may have been obscure to me, took me back to my own childhood feelings of powerlessness in profoundly upsetting ways. I write extensively about my experience with postnatal anxiety in my memoir; it was a period of time that taught me a great deal, even as it ripped me apart.
What I did not fully appreciate was that the power / control paradox was actually just the tip of the iceberg. What this dichotomy hinted at was the greater paradox within the being of mother as goddess-figure (literally a creatrix) and a human suffering from an ability to understand the life she had just brought into being. For me, this contradiction comes most clearly into focus any time my children suffer, and particularly when they are ill. I have many skills that can help them heal and have learned firsthand that truly there is medicine more powerful than my attention, my love, my care, my prayers. They believe that I can fix anything for them, and they appeal to me for help in confidence that I can make it better. Many times, I can. But what I can never do is fully understand why they suffer, why the flower unfolds as it does, why their circumstances are so different from those of other children — even different from their own siblings. I cannot know all, because though bearing life into the world has given me a glimpse of what lies beyond, it has not totally lifted the veil. It anything, motherhood has caused me to realise that I know less than I thought I did; that human understanding is imperfect and, perhaps controversially, perfect understanding is not ours to have.
I think about this paradox not only in the context of motherhood, but in the context of this new age where we endeavour to create artificial intelligence (or “pseudo-intelligence”, as some call it). From Adam and Eve to the techno-innovators of the current age and all of humanity in between, to be human is to seek knowledge. And knowledge awaits our discovery. But perfect understanding? This, I believe, never. Whether we see the unfolding patterns of life as simply coincidences, intergenerational patterns (one paradigm I use in my writing), epigenetic coding, karmic or astrological cycles or algorithms to be programmed, most of us recognise that there is a repetitive nature to the themes of human existence. But who can say why these play out as they do, or what will come next?
In my own experience, it was easier to arrive at meaning before motherhood. There was something about having children and watching them suffer that made me realise that I will never have answers to life’s biggest questions, and actually that is ok. More than ok perhaps it is actually appropriate. The human experience is one of limits, of finality, of endings and beginnings. Endings are all around us, and eventually we all experience our own ending. To be part of the beginning - to guide a new life into this mysterious, obscure experience of life is a privilege, a gift, and most definitely a glimpse beyond the veil.
A glimpse is all we need. It has widened my perspective while humbling me in the face of my own limits — with grace, with love. Because what humanity lacks in perfect understanding, it can achieve in love. Perfect love perhaps also remains in the realm of the heavens alone, but motherhood brings me pretty close. What my understanding may not be able to fix, my love can. That is the immense power of the mother, the line of love that runs through its contradictions and becomes one of its greatest gifts.
I discuss these themes in greater detail in my memoir, No Prayer More Powerful, available wherever good books are sold.
