Our birth into motherhood is predicated on how we define motherhood.

Before we become a mother, we most likely have learned and adopted ideas about what it means to be a mother. How we develop as a mother is sensory, it’s experiential, and it interplays with so many different influential factors.

It seems difficult to even think about the experience of mothering without thinking about how we define mother. I’ve heard an array of answers from “it’s the person who does everything for the family” to “a protective and loving figure in the child’s life.” I remember hearing author and therapist Kelly McDaniel present on her concept of Mother Hunger, and she began her presentation with asking the question of “how do you define mother?” Despite already having birthed a child at the point, and having been in a mothering role for a big portion of my life, I recognized within myself that I actually did not know how to define mother. I had spent numerous personal therapy sessions talking about me mothering others, but had we actually defined “what is mothering?”Take a search yourself, and definitions may look like this ‘a woman in relation to her child or children,’ or ‘bring up (a child) with care and affection’. These do not actually offer much direction or idea of what it actually takes, means, or feels like to be a mother.Take it a bit further and search to define ‘motherhood’, you’ll get: the state of being a mother. How about ‘mothering’: the activity of bringing up a child as a mother. Is it just me, or does it feel like you begin going in circles? We’re mothering like a mother, and a mother is a woman bringing up a child with relation to her. We lack a universal and concrete definition for mother, that really captures the complexity of motherhood.

In her work examining attachment between mother and daughters, Kelly McDaniel offered a working definition for mother. She found that mothering requires three essential elements: nurturance, protection, and guidance. The first two—nurturance and protection—are the most primitive needs that a mother can provide to her child. Nurturance being the responsive care that a mother can provide to her child, offering emotional and physical nourishment. Protection, is the role of the mother to prevent suffering or harm to the child, giving that child a sense of security. The third element, Guidance, comes later in life and is the ability for the mother to guide by example to help the child learn how to resolve their own problems or difficulties. This working definition captures elements of care that are vital for secure attachment in mothering, and rejects the idea that mothering is simple and innate, rather it is work, intentional, and multi-dimensional.

In the early days of writing about motherhood I was talking to a friend, mother, and overall boss babe about the concept for a book I was working on and the intentions to collect interviews. She said to me “I’d like to know about when they first felt like a mom.” I stopped in my tracks. Yes, of course, what an important question to ask. Starting my interviews with the question “when did you first feel like a mother” was one of the most powerful questions in my interviews, single handedly shining light on how mother is a concept and experience. The answers to this question helped me to learn about the role of mothering, how we collect ideas from our culture, are fed stories from families and friends, and absorb ideas from social media to define how to and what makes a mother.

Perhaps without having an explicit definition of mother and mothering, the women I interviewed often had a felt sense that mothering includes these three elements defined by Kelly McDaniel, but not the framework to capture it. When did you first feel like a mother? I ask Aleshia* a mother for 6 years, and without a pause she looks at me “well, I think I was a mother long before I had Lils. I was taking care of my mom from a young age. She really relied on me for emotional support, and my whole childhood, even now was about me taking care of her and us. This was why this question was such an important one to ask. She highlighted that the experience of mothering is actually not dependent on being a parent to a child, it’s actually an existence or way of being. She had to provide nurturance and guidance to her mother throughout childhood, and based on that, she had already been placed in the mothering role. Sometimes our first experiences of being a mother is in fact with being a caretaker of others, parents or siblings. While perhaps not the role intended for you, it may have been imposed on you by situation or circumstance. For some women who find themselves having been a parent for much of their lifetime, their idea of mothering is influenced by having had these experiences, having been relied on by others, providing nurturance, protection and guidance to others. For others who were not placed in caretaker roles early on, the first time they felt like a mom ranged from the first kick in their womb, holding their child’s hand, birth, their child asking them for advice, having to protect their child, or even still grappling with the concept of being a mother. In applying the working definition of mother to the experience of women identifying when they first felt like a mother, it is often in the experience or process of providing nurturance, protection or guidance, whether it was mothering their child or others.

I encourage you to think for yourself…when did you first feel like a mother?