Mothering and Being Mothered Takes Time with Perdita Finn
Our ancestors didn’t have money and grocery stores and medicines … they had their ancestors. We do too. I’m so excited to talk with Perdita Finn, the author of Mothers of Magic, about tapping into all the mothers on the other side.
Perdita wrote about what it meant to be a mother before patriarchy, what has happened to our idea of being a mother within civilization — and what it might look like to imagine the mother beyond it.
Mothering and how you’ve been mothered takes up more space than many of us even realize in its different iterations, so this conversation feels powerful.
We talk about:
- Human history as wanderers and what changed when we began settling
- The erasure of the grandmother and the war on young women
- Why one mother is not enough (you’re not supposed to be)
- The deep roots of why women’s friendships feel fraught
- Feeling held by love on both sides of the veil
- Fretting and handing over your worries
DOABLE CHANGES
At the end of every episode, we share three doable changes, so you can take what you’ve heard and put it into action. Change comes from action.
Sometimes action gets a bad rap. You can be kind to yourself. You can practice being AND doing, but for change to happen you have to take steps. The way we take care of ourselves is making the steps doable and focusing on one thing at a time. We take time to integrate the change and then move on to the next one. Pick a Doable Change that resonates with you the most to start from.
Here are three Doable changes that we chose from this conversation.
- CREATE A FRETTING PRACTICE. It’s okay to feel your worries and not silence them. Try naming your worries and handing each over to an ancestor. How does it feel when you do this every morning for a week?
- CALL ON GRANDMOTHER ANCESTORS. We were not meant to mother alone. We hear that sometimes but do you believe it? One mother is not enough. What happens when you call upon your mother, grandmothers, generations before to help you in your own mothering or in your need to be mothered?
- SEEK WISDOM FROM LIVING GRANDMOTHERS. Who do you know who embodies grandmother energy. Take them to tea. Ask them lots of questions. Bring what you are sitting with and get an elder’s perspective.
ABOUT PERDITA
Perdita Finn — writer, woodwife, witch — is the author of Mothers of Magic.
