Reflections on Mother's Day: Power, Legacy, and Leadership
- Linda Chido
- May 11
- 12 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
The Mother Archetype: A Universal Symbol and Sacred Role
The archetype of the Mother is one of the most ancient and revered across human cultures. In Jungian psychology, the Mother symbolizes nurturing, life-giving energy, and unconditional love embodied in countless forms: from Gaia, the Earth Mother, to Mary in Christian iconography, to the many goddesses of fertility, wisdom, and creation found in global mythologies. But this reverence goes deeper—it lives in the bones of our languages, our temples, and our origin myths.
Before there were altars or cathedrals, the womb was the first temple. Humanity once worshipped the source of life itself. In Sanskrit, garbhagriha translates to “womb chamber”, the innermost sanctuary of a Hindu temple. In Sumerian, matu referred to the womb, cave, and underworld, all entwined with the universal root for “mother”. The Greek word delphys means womb, and Delphi (the most sacred oracle site in ancient Greece) was named after it. That site was originally dedicated to the goddess: Gaea, Themis, Phoebe. Its first priestess, Delphyne, was a great earth serpent and daughter of Gaea. When Apollo took the shrine, he slayed her and claimed her oracle.
Religious iconography also echoes the womb. The almond-shaped mandorla often frames depictions of the divine feminine (like Mother Mary) signifying her role as the portal of creation. In Gnostic serpent traditions, the Mother Goddess was known as Amygdalus, a name tied to the almond tree (amygdale in Greek). In Old English, even the word cod once meant womb, before it was masculinized and redefined, becoming the root of codpiece, the flap sewn into men’s trousers to draw attention to a new center of power. But language doesn't forget.
Let's take hystera, Greek for womb, as another example. It gave us hysteria, a diagnosis claiming that a woman’s womb could cause madness. For centuries, this belief was used to justify exorcisms and invasive medical control over women. Even the term hysterectomy, the surgical removal of the uterus, carries that linguistic legacy. The sacred center of life was recast as a source of instability, danger, and shame. Something to be removed.
This erasure is not accidental. In ancient Hebrew, the name Is-Rael meant “the tribe of Sarah”. Words for kin, tribe, and lineage were rooted in mother, belly, and womb. Descent was traced through the mother’s line. Society was once held together by womb-lineage, by the sacred line of belonging born through Her. To remember this is to remember a different center of power.
As Caroline Myss writes, the Mother is not just a caretaker or a role—it is a sacred contract. A guardian of life, creative force, and divine order. She mothers not just people, but cultures, art, ecosystems, and ideas. She births not just children, but futures.
In my own life, I have mothered four children, my greatest teachers, who literally cracked me open and remade me. But they are not the only recipients of my mothering. I have mothered my art—each painting layered with story, devotion, and a kind of alchemical tenderness. I’ve mothered classrooms and students, especially those with disabilities, where the work is slow, sacred, and built on trust. I’ve mothered ideas into being and midwifed meaning, even when no one was watching.
Every one of those acts is part of the Mother Archetype at work. Not just a role but a lineage. A way of being rooted in the oldest knowing—that to create is holy, and to hold space for others is a form of prophecy.
The same energy that once shaped temples and mythologies flows through the choices I make every day. The way I paint. The way I teach. The way I show up. That wellspring of intuition, care, and fierce protection—once honored by oracles, in womb chambers and sacred caves—it lives in me now. It lives in all of us who choose to mother the world not just into something more whole, but into something more rooted.
Because the truth is—something precious has been lost.
Once, the womb was the axis of culture. The mother was revered as the keeper of life, of wisdom, of cycles, of mystery. But over the centuries, that richness was reduced. Like a pot of soup left too long on the stove, all that depth and flavor boiled away, leaving behind something burnt, bitter, and barely nourishing. The sacred feminine wasn’t just forgotten, it was dismantled. Silenced. Turned into shame. And in that forgetting, the world lost something essential. Not just to women—but to everyone.
When we devalue mothering, we sever our connection to source. We lose the thread of belonging, of reverence for life itself. We forget that wisdom can be soft. That power can be tender. That leadership can be cyclical, generative, embodied.
The Skills of Motherhood: A Masterclass in Leadership
Motherhood is often reduced to a single quality—nurturing. And yes, that’s part of it. Nurturing is essential. It’s the soft hold, the steady encouragement, the willingness to sit in discomfort so someone else can grow. But if that’s all we see, we’re missing the full picture.
When I was talking with a dear friend recently, she shared how her husband, well-meaning as he is, understands motherhood only through the lens of nurturing. My response came out before I could even edit it: That’s exactly why women make such powerful leaders—because we know how to nurture.
Motherhood is a masterclass in adaptability, problem-solving, and executive functioning under pressure. It requires:
Logistical genius: Coordinating multiple people's schedules, medical care, education, transportation, and dietary needs, often with no help and no budget.
Crisis management: Responding to illness, conflict, and unexpected events with a calm head and a fierce heart.
Emotional intelligence: Sensing what’s unspoken, holding space for grief and celebration alike, and helping others regulate and rebuild.
Strategic thinking: Making long-term plans while triaging the moment; building systems that sustain not just a household, but lives.
Stamina and resilience: Showing up every day, often under duress, and doing what needs to be done without applause or pause.
Time management: Squeezing art, ambition, community, and selfhood into the scraps of time left after caretaking.
And let’s not forget vision—because to mother is to see possibility in someone or something, to imagine a future that doesn’t exist yet, and to shape the conditions so it might.
Mothers lead from the front and the back. They hold the blueprint and build the damn house. They get called soft, but they are often the strongest person in the room. They make decisions daily that balance compassion with consequence and sustainability with sacrifice.
The skills developed through motherhood don’t stay in the nursery. They lead companies, guide communities, and transform culture—often quietly, but undeniably.
Of course, it’s important to say this, too: Not all mothers mother well. Not all protect wisely. Like any powerful role motherhood can be distorted. I’ve seen harm done in the name of “what’s best for the child". I’ve seen control masquerading as care. And I’ve wrestled with my own mistakes—the ways fear or exhaustion narrowed my view, the things I wish I’d done differently. Because power, even the quiet power of motherhood, must be examined. It must be guided by humility, not ego. By love, not fear.
To call motherhood sacred is not to romanticize it. It’s to hold it with reverence and responsibility. And to remember that just as it can shape and shelter life—it can also wound.
That’s why mothers should not only be honored but supported, educated, and called into community. Because the stakes are too high to go it alone. And the potential is too great not to grow into it fully.
Mothers as Leaders: The Quiet Blueprint of Power
There’s that long-standing belief that motherhood and leadership are somehow in conflict. That to lead, a woman must set aside the mothering parts of herself. But that couldn’t be any further from the truth. The best leaders I know lead with clarity, courage, vision, and heart. They embody mothering.
Traditional leadership models, especially in the West, have long upheld a narrow, masculinized ideal: a “good” leader is assertive, unemotional, competitive, and commanding. Strength is defined by dominance. Authority is determined by detachment. These are the traits historically coded as male and still, to this day, they dominate corporate boardrooms, political language, and cultural narratives around power. But let’s tell the truth: this model is outdated. And in many cases, it fails.
Mothering offers a different paradigm entirely. It shapes leadership not in spite of its challenges, but through them. Mothering teaches how to stay grounded while holding the long view. It demands discernment—what matters now, and what can wait. Mothering builds a kind of strength that isn't loud but enduring. And it teaches how to navigate the unknown with grace and grit.
Mothering leads with emotional intelligence, situational awareness, and systems-thinking that is rarely credited but always essential. Mothers make hard decisions daily, often without a roadmap. They manage crises without fanfare. They plan long-term while handling the present. They set boundaries and hold compassion in the same breath. And most importantly—mothers lead not for the next quarter or next election cycle, but for the next generation.
We’ve seen this kind of leadership in action:
Michelle Obama, mother of two, brought fierce intelligence and authenticity to her role as First Lady. She used her platform not for performance, but to shift culture—advocating for education, health, and the dignity of all people, while showing what it looks like to lead with both elegance and edge.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg navigated the early years of her legal career while mothering a toddler—when most law schools barely admitted women. Her lived experience fueled her lifelong work dismantling systems of gender discrimination, one case at a time. She didn’t leave her motherhood at the door; she brought it with her into every chamber, every decision.
Jacinda Ardern, former Prime Minister of New Zealand, gave birth while in office. She led through a pandemic, a terrorist attack, and a global climate reckoning—all with a toddler at her side. She modeled a new kind of leadership: transparent, empathetic, and deeply human.
Sojourner Truth, Dolores Huerta, Gloria Steinem, Audre Lorde, Malala Yousafzai, Marsha P. Johnson. Your own mother. Mine. The list is endless. And so is the legacy. But we also see strong women leaders every day in quieter ways too: teachers who mother their classrooms. Community leaders who hold space for the most vulnerable. Artists who gestate ideas, birth cultural change, and raise up entire movements. Mothers like you, like me, who organize, create, advocate, and love in ways that ripple far beyond our own households. Leadership shaped by mothering is often unseen, but it is never unfelt.
So let’s retire that old notion that mothering is a detour from greatness. For many of us, it’s the training ground. The fire we rise from.
The Current Political Climate: A Reckoning
Let’s not sugarcoat it. The current political climate is regressive, calculated, cruel, and deeply patriarchal. It’s a deliberate campaign, not just against women’s autonomy, but against the fact that women are free, sovereign beings.
The policies being pushed today: gutting reproductive rights, restricting healthcare access, sanitizing education, are not rooted in community wellbeing. These policies are rooted in control. In preserving a narrow, outdated worldview upheld by a powerful few and sold to the public as “wholesome values”. But what’s actually being defended isn’t family values. It’s fantasy.
The myth goes like this: a strong man leads, a good woman supports, obedient children follow, and everything stays tidy. It’s Leave It To Beaver dressed in policy. An idealized 1950s T.V. version of family that never truly existed. It certainly didn't exist for most women, people of color, LGBTQ+ families, or anyone living outside a white, middle-class, heteronormative framework. And it’s not just an insult, it’s an injury. One that bleeds across generations.
Because this isn’t about the values held by real families. Most people I know don’t buy into that idealized crap. They believe in partnership. In equity and inclusion. In care and kindness. In complexity and diversity. What we’re witnessing is the enforcement of a political narrative, a manufactured ideal of family used to consolidate power and silence dissent. This is not a moral crusade. It’s a power grab.
In that version of the story, the mother is burdened with the entire system and simultaneously erased from it. She is expected to sacrifice everything and ask for nothing. To work without wages. To care without support. To lead invisibly. And when she dares to ask for help, for recognition, for autonomy—she is cast as ungrateful, unstable, and dangerous.
But here’s the truth that terrifies the architects of this narrative: Women carry culture. We carry the future. We are the first teachers, the primary caregivers, the organizers, the storytellers, and the memory-keepers. Our influence is foundational. You can silence it temporarily, but you cannot erase it. What devastates me most about our current political and cultural environment is this: my daughters now have fewer rights than I did at their age.
Let that sink in.
We are watching hard-won freedoms unravel—freedoms fought for by brave women who marched, who were jailed, fired, burned, silenced, erased, beaten, killed. Freedoms paid for in blood, and tears. And yet, despite best efforts to erase, we are still here. Still mothering. Still creating. Still showing up. Still standing on the shoulders of every woman who made it possible for us to do so. And we are going to fight like hell for our children and their future—with our votes, our voices, our art, our solidarity, our refusal to shrink, and our insistence that we will not go quietly back to the margins.
Here’s the irony: No one, regardless of gender, gets to where they are without a mother. Whether she was nurturing, complicated, absent, cruel, or everything all at once—we are here because of her.
To deny women their full humanity is to bite the hand that raised you. To legislate against her is to spit in the face of origin itself. True family values would never demand silence in exchange for safety. They would honor the complexity of family, the diversity of love, and the real labor of care.
So yes, I said it. It needs to be called out.
Because if we truly valued mothers—we’d stop legislating myths, and start funding reality.
My Motherhood: The Legacy I Live
For me, motherhood has never been a side note. It’s not something I did “in between” my art, my work, my life. It is my life. It’s the through line, the practice, the crucible, and the offering.
I chose this life. I chose to be a stay-at-home mom. The children I have been given—each of them extraordinary, each with their own needs and challenges—made that choice both a blessing and a necessity. It has been all-encompassing. My motherhood has stretched across sleepless nights, surgeries, hospital stays, diagnoses, therapies, and the long, exhausting labor of daily life.
I’ve mothered through moments that cracked me open and dropped me to my knees—and kept going.
And I’ll be honest: I’m not perfect. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve lost my temper. I’ve had regrets. But that’s part of the deal. Motherhood teaches you humility. It softens your edges. It shows you what it means to keep showing up even when you’re running on empty. That’s where empathy is born—in the spaces where you fall short and choose to love anyway.
When my first daughter was born, it took about ten seconds for me to know: I was going to homeschool. Yes, art was a huge part of that decision. I wanted my children to grow up with art fully planted at the center of their lives, not at the margins—but more than that, I wanted to know them. Deeply. And I wanted them to know me. Not just the person who made meals or enforced bedtime, but the whole person. All of me.
The truth is, I didn’t always know what motherhood was. It wasn't even on my radar. One moment I'm not a mother, and the next—here’s your baby, good luck. It’s not a gentle unfolding. It’s a rupture. A spilling forth that carries you, ready or not, into a completely different way of being in the world.
It is a birthing—not just of your child, but of yourself. In essence, two lives are born at once: the baby, and the mother. And in my case, one time it was three lives—twins, plus a brand-new version of me I had never met before. There’s no preparation for that kind of transformation and there’s no going back.
Motherhood is a paradigm shift in the most extreme sense. It changes your body, your brain, and what you thought you could hold, survive, or give. It rewrites your priorities. You lose parts of yourself and discover others. No one tells you that you’ll miss the person you were before, even as you’re falling in love with the person you're becoming. You are, all at once, someone who holds life in their arms and has to figure out how to hold onto herself, too.
And yet, that tear is just wide enough to see the world differently. You notice more details, more layers. You start to see the long arc of things, because your days are no longer just your own. You develop a deeper empathy, because you’ve had to hold someone else’s pain. It humbles you. It enrages you. It fills you with wonder and exhaustion and awe.
Motherhood reorients you after a dizzying spin. It throws you into the unknown with no answers, only questions. Suddenly, your intuition and instinct become the only compass that works. Motherhood teaches:
To trust your gut.
To trust that you know without knowing why.
To listen deeper.
To let go faster.
To love unconditionally.
And from that place, everything you touch carries that imprint.
This is what I know for sure: Motherhood is real, messy, radiant, relentless, and sometimes painful and scary. Motherhood is very much an act of radical creation. And while my childbearing years may be behind me, my creative force is not.
Motherhood isn’t just a season of the body. It is a wisdom. A devotion. A way of seeing, shaping, and sustaining life.
It doesn’t end with menopause. It doesn’t vanish with age. And it sure as hell isn’t erased by the ignorance of anyone in political office.
Mothering is not defined by fertility—it’s defined by what we create, protect, and pass on.
And that power?
It’s not limited to women.
It’s not limited to parents.
It’s not limited at all.
It belongs to anyone willing to hold life with care, shape the world with love, and stand rooted in their creative force.
That is mothering.
And that is worthy of celebration. 🩷
LINDA CHIDO ART
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