Reimagining Mothering
Mothering through dementia—and the unseen acts of heroinism that sustain us.
We often assume mothering is tied to biology or a particular life stage. But what if it’s also about how we show up for others—and for the future—with care and creativity?
A week ago was Mother’s Day, and like it does for many, it brought me a mix of emotions.
My mother has dementia. I’m her sole caregiver. It’s a role that carries both privilege and pain. To show up daily for someone who once showed up for me feels like the kind of reciprocity I wish the world had more of.
But there’s grief, too. The one who mothered me now needs mothering in ways I never imagined.
I call my mum every day, though sometimes she can’t quite manage to hang up the phone on its base properly. She often doesn’t know what time it is, what meal she’s just eaten, or that she’s not at school teaching, that she’s in a care home now. But she still knows it’s me. She still tells me she loves me. I don’t know how long that will last, but I hold on to it.
This tender reversal has made me think more deeply about what it means to mother—especially as someone who never had children of my own.
I’m also aware of the ways I longed to see my mother live her life differently. She was a dedicated and perfectionist French teacher. She was a dutiful wife of a (very old school) Croatian husband. She was also a heart-centred Catholic committed to social justice work. My mother was often overextended. In taking care of so many others, she sometimes abandoned herself in the process. That kind of self-sacrifice was expected of women in her generation—and still is, in so many ways.
Dementia brings to mind the stress of a brain that can’t stay on its tracks.
A runaway train whose engine is burning out, veering off-course, no longer following a familiar route.
When my mother had her fall—hitting her head on the pavement and sustaining a brain injury—my mind felt like it was slipping its rails, too.
At the very same time, I was navigating the early stages of perimenopause and my marriage was ending. My epic fertility journey had failed. My husband’s startup had collapsed, and a deep depression took hold of him—the weight of both of those “failures” (one of which was societally ascribed to me, of course, as the woman) pressed into our relationship. Then came the pandemic.
All of it collided.
My brain was trying to do something natural—rewire itself in the hormonal shifts of the menopause transition—but it was happening against a backdrop of rupture. While I was being asked to rise and leave everything (on the West Coast) to tend to my mother’s breaking world in the East, mine was quietly breaking too.
Dementia really is a form of derailment— the mind loses its sense of direction, and I often hear in my mum’s voice just how exhausting it feels to live inside that disorientation.
Still, my mother remembers love. And that feels like something worth anchoring to.
Through all this, I’ve come to reimagine mothering not as something we do only for children, but as something we offer to the world when we nurture, tend, witness, and hold.
What if mothering isn’t just about raising children, but about raising consciousness? About nurturing possibility? About making space for others to heal and grow?
Octavia Butler, for instance, who had no biological children, gave birth to entire worlds. She created herself into the future and mothered generations through imagination, truth-telling, and radical vision.
“I wrote myself into the world,” she once said.
In The Pink Zones, we talk about mothering as something that can evolve into eldering—a form of creative, grounded, and wise care. Not about obligation, but about tending to what matters. It might look like caregiving. Or activism. Or mentoring. Or storytelling. It might be quiet. It might be fierce. But it always carries life-giving energy.
You don’t have to be a biological mother to be a life-giver.
You just have to care deeply and stay rooted while you help others rise. Sometimes from bad falls.
I know Mother’s Day can be tender for many. It brings up grief, longing, and even estrangement—for our mothers, or for the motherhood paths we didn’t walk.
But I’ve learned that there are so many ways we mother, even when no one names it. We do it through our care, our presence, our love.
So much of mothering goes unseen. I realize that’s stating the obvious—and it’s part of why Mother’s Day can feel so absurd: 1 day out of 365 to recognize what is, for many, a lifetime of relentless devotion. The care, the tending, the holding-it-all-together often happens in the quiet—without applause, without acknowledgment.
I want to acknowledge something else. The people who mother my mum in her care home are extraordinary. They are “PSWs”, personal support workers—both men and women —who show up with tenderness and consistency. They look out for her. They hug her. They speak to her with dignity.
After months of uncertainty, grief, and what felt like an impossible search, she got into this incredible facility, called “The Village of Aspen Lake”. It was a small miracle after being on a long waitlist, in the liminal space of trying to piece care together and figure out what I could afford with her pension.
I know many people with a parent or loved one living with dementia understand this struggle—the stress of navigating systems, the exhaustion of filling in the gaps, the emotional toll of waiting while the need for care becomes more urgent. To have found a private room in this thoughtful community-centred care home, where she is truly cared for, feels like grace.
I’m grateful beyond measure. I know what good fortune this is—after years of navigating loss, being stretched thin, though I hesitate to say it as it sounds so “victimy”, often feeling forsaken.
All kinds of care work—so often categorized as “women’s work”—is essential, sustaining, and too often taken for granted. But that doesn’t make it any less powerful. It is quiet heroinism, love in action.
To all who are mothering in their own way—through presence, through creation, through “care”—I see you.
I want to do my best to honour the daily, unseen acts that shape futures, even when no one is watching.
Soooo good Heidi. I love The Pink Zones, your work, and the ideas you bring to the front of culture to discuss and re-think. 💜
Thanks for sharing this. I'm going through a similar thing with my mother. This resonates.