Mothering Myself Through the Unknown
Mother’s Day brings more than celebration—it brings a quiet reckoning. A soft (or not-so-soft) stirring beneath the surface. For some, it’s a day of sweet joy. For others, it’s grief, longing, reflection. For me, it’s all of it.
This year, I find myself not just honoring mothers—but learning to mother myself.
We talk a lot about the early phases of womanhood: the maiden, the new mother, the wild initiations of birth. But what no one talks about is what comes after. The uncharted season between motherhood and Cronehood. What I call the third puberty.
This phase hit me like a wave. Brain fog. Joint pain. Insomnia. Rage I couldn’t name. And the deep feeling of shedding a skin I didn’t yet know I had outgrown. It wasn’t graceful. It wasn’t linear. And no one had prepared me.
Doctors had little to offer. Society offered even less. So I turned to the only places that had ever truly held me: herbs, ritual, and memory.
🌿 Remembering the Lineage
I remembered my grandmother—sending me down rainforest roads in Puerto Rico with thermoses of medicinal teas she had prepared for the neighbors. I remembered my father’s stories about my grandfather mixing herbal remedies in the kitchen to care for his wife and their eleven children. And I remembered my mother teaching me to snip spearmint from the backyard and boil it into tea when I had a stomachache—a ritual so dear to me that I still do it today, whether from the garden bed I once tended at the botanical garden or from a fresh bunch found at the farmer’s market.
Later, through a chance encounter on Ancestry, I met a cousin who told me: “We come from a long line of healers. People used to travel to see our family in Guayama—the City of the Witches.”
It clicked. The ache in my body. The silence from the world. The call back to my roots.
I wasn’t just aging. I was being initiated.
🤲 Becoming My Own Mother
So I began again. I wrapped myself in ritual. I poured tea. I sat in silence. I let grief move through me like ocean waves.
I stopped asking, “What’s wrong with me?” and started asking, “What do I need today?”
Some days the answer was movement. Some days it was stillness. Often, it was nourishment—in the form of herbal infusions, breath, and permission to rest.
I mothered myself.
🫖 A Ritual to Begin With
One of the first and most powerful ways I began holding myself was through the act of making tea slowly. That ritual became the opening to everything else. The herbal steam rising from a mason jar became my prayer. The steeping, my surrender.
If you’d like to read the full story—and learn how to make your own nourishing infusion—start here:
👉 Why I Started Making Tea Slowly
📓 A Prompt for You
“How am I being called to mother myself right now?”
“What do I wish someone would do for me... and can I offer that to myself today?”
Take five minutes. Light a candle. Write it out. Speak it aloud.
💌 Want a Ritual to Begin With?
Download the 10-Minute Ritual Reset Guide—a free, gentle practice to reconnect you to your body, breath, and inner rhythm.
[Download the Free Guide →]
In reverence to all our becoming,
Catherine Dawn
