Mother Lover

The name Mother Lover came to me years ago when I was still practicing in New York City and my own children were very young.

One day I found myself contemplating the phrase mother fucker and the weight it carries in our culture.

At the same time, my own experience of motherhood was revealing something to me. I was beginning to understand how essential the mother would become to the work I wanted, and perhaps was meant, to do in the world.

Almost immediately, I felt called toward an antidote.

Mother Lover.

A culture that loves mothers.

A culture that holds mothers with reverence, tenderness and care. One that understands that tending mothers is not separate from tending children, families or the future.

That idea became the seed of Mother Lover.

Centering the Mother

So much of our attention moves toward the child once a woman becomes a mother.

Of course it does. Children need us.

But something important happens when the mother disappears from the center of care.

I have come to believe that centering mothers is one of the ways we care for children and families most deeply.

A mother who is held has more capacity to hold.

A mother who has space to know herself can participate more consciously in the life of her family.

A mother whose health, creativity, pleasure, grief, anger, exhaustion and becoming are allowed to matter remains a whole person inside the enormous work of mothering.

Mother Lover begins there.

Motherhood as a Threshold

Motherhood is not only something we do.

It changes us.

Pregnancy, birth and the years of mothering that follow can reorganize our bodies, our relationships, our identities and our understanding of what matters.

There are losses alongside the love.

There is grief alongside becoming.

There can be exhaustion, rage, pleasure, loneliness, devotion, confusion and tremendous creativity.

Mother Lover makes room for the whole thing.

This is a space for each woman to encounter the mother she is in her own fullness.

Mothers Need Other Mothers

We were never meant to do all of this alone.

Mother Lover brings women together to practice something that has become increasingly rare: being in sustained relationship with other mothers outside of performance, comparison or advice giving.

We gather to listen, make, eat, walk, celebrate, grieve, tell stories, mark passages and pay attention to the world around us.

Over time, something is woven.

Not simply friendship, although friendship may come.

Culture.

A small culture in which mothers remember how to hold and be held by one another.

The Year

Mother Lover is a year-long, in-person gathering for mothers across ages and stages.

We meet once each month and move together through the Wheel of the Year, allowing the seasons, elements, celebrations, stories and rituals of the year to give shape to our time.

Some gatherings take place at AiAiA Studio in Kingston. Others bring us outside as weather and season allow.

We work with our hands. We share food. We spend time on the land. We make room for conversation and quiet. We notice what the season is asking of us and what is moving through our individual and collective lives.

The intention is not self-improvement.

It is relationship.

Relationship with ourselves, with other mothers, with the living world and with the generations we are helping to shape.

Who Mother Lover Is For

Mother Lover is for mothers of all ages and stages.

You may have a baby in your arms or children who have already left home.

You may feel deeply at home in motherhood or still be trying to understand what it has asked of you.

You do not need to share a particular parenting philosophy, birth story, family structure or relationship to medicine.

What matters is a willingness to arrive with curiosity, openness and care for yourself and the other women gathered around you.

You do not need to be an acupuncture patient or have worked with me previously.

The Next Mother Lover

The next Mother Lover fellowship begins January 2027.

We will gather one Sunday each month from 11am to 2pm for one year.

Our gatherings take place at AiAiA Studio in Kingston, New York and outdoors as weather and season permit.

Enrollment will open in October 2026.

If Mother Lover calls to you, add your name to the interest list. I will share more about the year together, the dates and enrollment as we get closer.