The Case of the Missing Matriarch

Mothers’ Day. It’s packaged as a Hallmark holiday promoting grand floral gestures toward beloved moms. But it’s also a holiday that is fraught for many, that ignores the complicated mix of roles that mothers play, and that sugar-coats the many ways that on the other 364 days of the year our institutions and assumptions disempower women and devalue motherhood.

Despite my (obviously) strong feelings on this matter, I am personally looking forward to Mothers’ Day this year (whose apostrophe I intentionally re-assign for reasons that will become clear later on in this post)–but I can’t look away from the hypocrisies that, once the bouquets are displayed and the brunches are over–we all might want to look into a bit more deeply.

As most of us know by now, the problems with the version of the holiday we celebrate in the US date back to its origin story: Julia Ward Howe, a suffragist and abolitionist in the 1800s, (who was also one of my mother’s heroines) promoted Mothers Day as a call to action in the name of World Peace; and Anna Jarvis, who successfully had the day made into a national holiday in 1914, spent decades trying to have it removed from the calendar after seeing how Mothers’ Day evolved into an overly commercialized and materialistic celebration. Without getting lost in an endless rant about the contradictions and complications of this holiday, I want to offer a broader perspective.

A poetic dreamer’s perspective on Mothers’ Day

As a poet and a dreamer, I look at the world with double vision: through the lenses of the personal–and the collective. So, when a writer* in one of my recent Dreaming on the Page workshops used the phrase “The missing matriarch” in a piece she is writing, my imagination lit up with possibilities. The other women in the class immediately latched onto the phrase, too. The personal resonance it had for the writer was amplified by each woman according to her own story and how she has lived out the motherhood archetype in her own life–whether as a motherless daughter, a mother who had lost a daughter or son, or as a woman who is mother to no child–whether by choice or circumstance.

This Mothers’ Day I think of the mothers my friends and I are mourning, the mothers who are mourning the loss of their children, the mothers who can’t protect, care for, or nurture their children because of systemic injustices and discriminatory legislation. This collective demeaning and dismissal of the sacred bond between mother and child–and between a community or a culture and all of the people, animals, and lands in its care–makes me think that we need to consider how we might restore the power and dignity of the archetypal matriarch to create balance and equity in our lives.

Putting Our Foremothers Back in the Story

I’m also thinking about mother-loss in the big picture: Namely all of the stories of strong women who have been written out of history and our imaginations over the ages.

Here’s the good news–I’m far from alone in noticing–and taking steps to rectify this problem. In recent years there have been some inspiring books by woman authors who use the gifts of imagination and research to restore matriarchs to our collective awareness.

Here are just a handful of books I’ve read and loved that put matriarchs back into the story*:

• Magdelene, poems by Marie Howe
• Circe, by Madeline Miller
• The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker
• The Book of Longings, by Sue Monk Kidd

Whether you are the mother of children, the mother of ideas, a nurturer of animals or of communities–I’m wishing you a meaningful Mother’s Day. And whether this is a day of celebration or remembrance, of gathering with others or missing someone you love, I hope you will honor yourself wth gifts of radical self-care in whatever form best serves you. And perhaps settle in with a cup of something delicious and read one of the books I’ve suggested above … or better yet–begin writing one of your own!

Restoring Our Matriarchs One Poem at a Time

*I hope one day to add a book of my own to this list. Lately, I’ve been writing poetry about the biblical matriarch Sarah who appears in the book of Genesis primarily as Abraham’s wife and Isaac’s mother. But as I research–and dream into–her story, I’m discovering the possibilities of Sarah as priestess, as princess, as fierce defender of her matrilineal line, as independent thinker and creative problem-solver–as well as a complex character who made heart-wrenching choices during her lifetime and who was–like every one of us–far from perfect. I’m sharing my book-in-process online as The Life of H: Sarah, Reimagined.

Read The Life of H

Copyright 2022 Tzivia Gover, all rights reserved

* With grateful acknowledgment to Dolly R, a member of the Dreaming on the Page community, whose poem-in-progress, “The Missing Matriarch” inspired this post.

More Mother-Daughter Dreaming

Honor the Mother in Your Life … or In Your Self … With a Good Book

Books by Tzivia