The Motherless Mother: What it means to build a home for someone else when the one you came from is gone.

When you become a mother, everything shifts.

Your body, your sense of time, your identity - all of it rearranges. You become a home for someone else, a place of safety and belonging. And yet, even as you create that home, you realize how much you still need one yourself.

Motherhood has a way of blurring the edges of who you once were. The woman before - her habits, her ambitions, her ease - begins to fade, not all at once, but slowly. Some mornings, you catch her in the mirror. Other days, she feels like someone you used to know. For many women, there’s someone who can remind them. Someone who says, “You’re still you.” Someone who sees beyond the mess and exhaustion and reminds them of where they came from. Someone who holds you up when you feel like collapsing under the weight of it all. 

But for those of us who have lost our mothers?

That person is gone.

And motherhood without a mother is a kind of ache that lives beneath everything.

It’s not just missing her presence - it’s missing the reflection she once offered. She was the one who could tether you back to yourself when you were unraveling. Without her, you’re forced to learn to do that work alone during the most transformative time in a woman’s lifetime. You become the comfort and the reminder, the nurturer and the nurtured, the home and the wanderer. The found and the lost. 

There are nights when the house is quiet and the baby finally sleeps, and the grief returns - not sharp, but steady. It hums beneath the surface, familiar and patient, reminding you that love and loss are never far apart. It comes in waves of remembering - the way she said your name, the way her arms knew what to do without asking. You want to call her, not for advice, but to be seen again as someone’s daughter. Because even when you’re the one doing the holding, you still need to be held.

Being a motherless mother can feel like living in two worlds - one where you are the giver of life, and another where you’re still seeking the person who gave you yours. You are constantly building and repairing at the same time - creating stability for your child while trying to rebuild your own. But slowly, something shifts…

You learn to mother yourself in the ways she no longer can. You learn to see yourself through her eyes - with compassion and love. You learn to build a home inside your own body - not to replace her, but to carry her forward. And you start to understand that love doesn’t disappear when she’s gone, it just changes form.

It becomes the way you soothe your child in the dark. The way you whisper, “I’ve got you.” The way you hold space for both grief and gratitude in the same breath…

And maybe that’s what motherhood really is - not one thing, but a lifetime of returning. Of piecing yourself back together, and learning to call it home.

— Ashley Basiri