Part 1 of 2
Something I have been sitting with for a while is what it means to “heal the mother line.” During this eclipse season, some insight began to crystallize that I feel called to put into words now.
When I contemplate this phrase, two meanings arise:
Healing the lineage of our matriarchal ancestry—our mother, her mother, her mother’s mother, and so on, up the chain of women who brought us into being.
Healing our connection to, or our direct line to, our Divine Mother.
For a long time, I thought of these as two separate paths. The more I have contemplated them, however, the more I see how deeply intertwined they are. Healing one seems to open a doorway into the other.
In this first essay, I want to follow the first thread: the human mother line. What was passed down to us through the women who came before us, what we carry that may not have begun with us, and what it means to meet that inheritance with awareness, compassion, and love.
Because healing the mother line is not only about understanding where we came from. It is also about becoming conscious of what we choose to carry forward.
And as I remembered my connection with the Divine Mother, I began to see my Mama—and the mothers who came before her—with new eyes. That is the thread I will follow in the second essay.
As I took my first breath in the body, my Mama was transformed from maiden to Mother. Young, caring and vigilant, my Mama took care of me, fed me, cleaned me, clothed me, watching me grow and thrive. As a young girl, I was allowed to “free-range” and also given great responsibility as my Mama brought my two sisters earth side.
As I grew older, I learned more of my Mama’s experience (and that of her siblings) of their Mom. My Papaw and Lynn (my Mama’s parents) met in the Navy in the early 1950s, married and started having babies. Mama was the first daughter after two sons and before the remaining three children, making six in total.
As their first grandbaby, I learned that my grandmother wanted me to call her by her name, Lynn. Of course, a woman who never really wanted to be a mother certainly didn’t want to be reminded she was a grandmother.
As a mom, Lynn was cold and distant. When I think of how this would feel to a child - the lack of warmth and affection, lack of compassion and care - I want to travel back to when my Mama was a little girl and wrap her in my arms to offer her the love she deserved.
She was not deserving because of her behavior, for being quiet and staying out of the way, or for helping out with her siblings or cleaning up, but for being. She deserved love because she existed. We all deserve this love.
I met Lynn’s Mother (my great-grandmother) but I don’t really know what kind of mother she was. I do know that Lynn grew up impoverished in the Great Depression in rural Alabama. Lynn and three sisters - and times were tough.
There are so many pieces of this lineage that I will never know. Stories that were never shared, experiences long forgotten, wounds that may have been carried silently from one generation to the next. And yet, even without knowing every detail, I can feel the imprint of what was passed down.
My relationship with my Mama is one of the most complex relationships in my life. With the wisdom of time and awareness, I can see how she parented me the best way she knew how to, offering me and my sisters more love and affection than she ever received. I can also understand why, at times, she has felt cold and distant, closing herself off when she experienced vulnerability or when we expressed emotion that made her uncomfortable.
My Mama is also my biggest champion, and has bravely followed me around the world even when it scared her to do so. Last Autumn, she joined me in France before we journeyed together to India. That trip brought up a lot for us both, individually and in our relationship. The beginning was rocky and uncomfortable. We had some really honest and hard conversations. We both had to willingly open our hearts and sit in our discomfort.
Over the course of the three weeks we spent together, I watched her open and flourish, growing in her courage and curiosity. Not looking at the world as a dangerous place, but as a potential playground for beauty and connection.
Watching her transformation helped me understand something about my own healing. Healing did not mean changing my Mama or receiving from her everything I may have once wished she could give me. It meant changing my expectations of her and learning to accept and love her as she is. I began to see my Mama not only as my mother, but as a daughter herself - a woman shaped by the love she received (and the love she didn’t).
Where does healing our mother line begin? It begins within each of us. I had to heal my own wounds and release my expectations of how my Mama would respond or relate to me. I had to remain open to her, with healthy boundaries, and not shut down if she closed off to me. I had to give her the freedom to be herself.
Healing my mother wound was supported by my connection with the Divine Mother. As my direct relationship with our Divine Mother grew, I opened to the possibility of healing my mother wound within my maternal lineage. This created the possibility of healing the relationship between my Mama and me, and the possibility of healing her relationship with her mother, and her mother’s relationship with her mother, and so on, up the chain of mothers that have brought us into being.
And this is where the two meanings of “healing the mother line” begin to merge for me.
Growing up, I was innately at home outside - in the woods, climbing trees, dancing with the ferns, frolicking in brooks, talking to the moss - you get the picture. The Earth was my Mother; she held and nourished me. I noticed the changing of the seasons, the cycles of time, and the way everything in nature had its own rhythm. I learned to tend a garden alongside my parents, planting seeds, tending to what was growing, harvesting what was ready, and allowing the earth to rest.
Even then, before I had words like “cycles,” “seasons,” or “Divine Feminine,” I understood that there was a time for planting and a time for harvesting, a time for growth and a time for rest. The Earth did not rush herself, and I knew this as the natural way of things.
At the same time, I was raised in a patriarchal, doomsday-apocalyptic Christian church, or more truthfully, a cult.
This church’s doctrine was mainly based on principles extracted from the Old Testament, which placed men in a position of superiority to women. In Genesis, God first created the man, Adam, from the dust of the earth. Then (in Genesis 2:22) we are told, “And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.” This hierarchy continued in the stories of God revealing himself to Abraham, the father of the Hebrew people, and speaking directly to Moses to give him the Ten Commandments.
Does this mean that the women of that time couldn’t receive messages from God, or lacked the ability to directly connect with the Divine? Absolutely not. Even in early Christianity, women held leadership roles and were valued for their natural gifts of intuition and creation.
But as the Roman church took control of the narrative in the early 4th century, patriarchal structures became increasingly woven into religious institutions and teachings.
And yet, beneath what I was being taught in church, another knowing remained: I knew the Earth as Mother. I knew God was not just a vengeful father but also a Loving Mother. I have a vivid memory of crying to my Mama after a particularly fear-based sermon in which we were told that anyone who was not in our church would “burn in the lake of fire.” Through my tears, I remember saying, “But God is Love, Mama.”
I knew something about the sacredness of creation, of nature, of my own body, long before I had language for any of it.
She was a Mother I could feel, could touch, even when I had been taught to look for an Almighty God “somewhere up there”. I found her in the trees, in the water, in the moss beneath my body, in the garden I tended with my parents, in the turning of the seasons, and in the quiet rhythms of the natural world.
I didn't have the words for the Divine Feminine then. I simply knew that I felt held by a sacred presence. It would take many years, and a journey far beyond the world I grew up in, for me to begin remembering this connection consciously.