Mothering
"God is truly our mother as truly as he is our father." - Julian of Norwich
December 15th, 2025
📍Salida, Colorado, USA
Greetings from the wilderness!
During the last two sacred medicine ceremonies I’ve participated in, one theme keeps circling back to the surface—mothering.
In the first ceremony, I held space for a close friend who is battling breast cancer while coming to terms with the long-term impact of her mother’s death when she was only thirteen. And then, just last week, I met another woman—now in her late sixties—who lost her mother to suicide and is only now realizing how deep that wound runs, how masterfully she had kept it wrapped in silence.
The theme wasn’t subtle. It was screaming.
And as someone whose mother is still alive, walking alongside her through ovarian cancer forced me to turn the flashlight on my own mother-wounds—ones I’ve avoided, minimized, sidestepped, explained away, or simply refused to feel.
This past year has shown me just how much abandonment pain I’ve been carrying quietly. And interestingly, it wasn’t therapy that cracked it open. It was the water. The Janzu training—my formation into a Janzu Mother—brought a kind of clarity I didn’t see coming.
So when this weekend’s sacred medicine ceremony pulled the abandonment mother-wound back to the surface yet again… I wasn’t surprised. But I was finally ready to see it through a much wider lens.
My college graduation
For my epiphany to make sense, we need to go back to the beginning of my mother’s cancer journey—with her full permission to share.
I was with her the day she was told she likely had cancer. We walked into the ER expecting a simple diagnosis for what seemed like a bladder infection. We walked out hours later with a preliminary diagnosis of the unthinkable.
I remember sitting there with her in the shock of it. The before-and-after moment. The moment when the ground tilts and you know life is about to look different forever. My mother—who was rarely sick—had cancer.
We cried together, and I felt myself shift instantly into the mother-role. At that moment, she didn’t need her daughter’s fear piling onto her own, she needed a mother—the tenderhearted kind that sits with you and cries when you are hurting, rocking you gently through the unimaginable. The kind of mothering that tells you it’s all going to be okay (not as placation, but in true belief). The kind of mothering that meets you in your pain and suffering and doesn’t run or hide because of her own fears. She needed the strength of a mother’s love.
It wasn’t performative. It wasn’t pretending to be fine. It wasn’t bypassing the grief. It was simply mothering—the kind of presence that says “I’m not leaving. We’ll face this together.”
Here’s the interesting part: I don’t have kids. My closest version of motherhood until that moment was being a dog-mom and an auntie. But something in me rose up from the depths. It was the wild, ancient wisdom that lives in women’s bodies whether we have children or not.
Janzu “mothering” my mother
I was able to see my mom’s humanity, to feel her pain, and to not look away. To stand in the middle of her storm with her. Just like Jesus. He wasn’t a mother either. But flip through the New Testament stories and you’ll see—He loved with a distinctly maternal strength. He comforted. He gathered. He held people in their storms without flinching. He didn’t tell them to get over it; He sat in it with them. He was a shelter.
Some theologians call this the “mother-heart of God,” and I swear She’s been chasing me down since I launched as a digital nomad in 2024. I’m beginning to understand that mothering isn’t about birthing children, it’s about birthing presence. It’s about showing up when life cracks open and everything feels raw and holy all at once.
I know I’m not the only one bumping into the mother-wound right now. All of us are carrying stories and grief in our wombs (even those of us who no longer have wombs). We’re carrying mothers we lost, mothers we needed, mothers we miss, mothers we became too early, and mothers we never got to be.
But we’re also carrying the possibility of healing—slow, sacred, embodied healing. And for me, the water has been one of the most unexpected teachers—A womb for healing. A place where I can be held while also holding others.
Janzu “mothering” my identical twin sister
The vision I was given in last weekend’s ceremony was unmistakably tender: my adult self (my True Self) holding my younger self in the water. Just as I do at the end of every Janzu session, my arms wrapped around little Jennifer—hugging her, soothing her, letting my body speak the words she needed to hear: You’re safe. You’re loved. I’m not going anywhere.
In that embrace, little Jennifer (my wounded inner child) relaxed. She softened. She trusted. She was feeling what she ached for—she felt seen, presence instead of withdrawal, comfort instead of fear, love she never had to earn. And I knew immediately: this was God. Not correcting me, not pushing me, not demanding some spiritual performance—but mothering me.
As the tears came, so did the truth: even grown women need mothering.
With Love, unconditionally—
Jennifer
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