Guest Blog from Courtney McKenny
Mothering is often described as an intimate act: comforting a crying child, preparing meals, tending wounds, teaching courage, offering love that persists even when the world feels uncertain. But mothering is also something larger. It is a practice of nurturing possibility. It is the sacred work of helping life flourish.
The UUWF invites us to widen our understanding of what mothering can mean. Mothering is not limited to biology, gender, or family structure. Many people mother without ever giving birth. Many communities survive because someone chose to mother them with patience, steadiness, and care. Many movements for justice endure because generations of people have mothered the vision of collective liberation into being. Mothering is the act of refusing abandonment.
When we bring a meal to someone in grief, we mother.
When we mentor a young leader, we mother.
When we create spaces where people feel safe enough to tell the truth, we mother.
When we organize for justice so future generations may inherit a more loving world, we mother.
This expansive understanding of mothering feels especially urgent now. So many people are exhausted by isolation, division, and systems that treat human beings as disposable. We are witnessing attacks on bodily autonomy, rising violence against marginalized communities, deep loneliness, environmental destruction, and growing inequity. In times like these, mothering becomes both tenderness and resistance.
To mother a community is to cultivate belonging in a world that profits from disconnection. It is to notice who has been left out and pull up another chair. It is to create congregations where children are cherished, elders are honored, and every person is reminded that their life has inherent worth and dignity. It is to practice interdependence, not as a lofty ideal, but as daily spiritual discipline.
The same is true for movements for collective liberation. Justice movements do not survive on urgency alone. They require nourishment. They need songs, meals, childcare, rest, laughter, storytelling, spiritual grounding, and relationships sturdy enough to hold disappointment and hope at the same time. They need people willing to tend not only the strategy, but also the spirits of those engaged in the work.
Historically, much of this labor has been carried quietly and invisibly, often by women+ whose acts of care were dismissed as secondary to “real” leadership. But movements collapse without this kind of mothering. Liberation requires people who know how to sustain life. Mothering the movement means believing that how we treat one another is part of the liberation we seek.
As Unitarian Universalists, we are uniquely called into this expansive ministry of care. Our faith teaches that every person is worthy of love and dignity. We affirm interdependence. We believe that justice and compassion belong together. And we understand that transformation rarely happens through domination; it happens through relationship.
Mothering, then, is not weakness. It is courageous spiritual labor. It asks us to remain openhearted in cynical times. It asks us to nurture possibility before outcomes are guaranteed. It asks us to invest in people and communities slowly, faithfully, and collectively.
This Mother’s Day season, perhaps we can honor not only mothers in the traditional sense, but all who embody the spirit of mothering. The aunties. The mentors. The caregivers.The organizers. The elders. The teachers. The friends who stayed. The people who helped us remember our own belovedness.
The work of mothering reminds us that another world is possible, but only if we are willing to tend it together. Love is not merely something we feel. It is something we practice, again and again, through acts of care that help life continue.
The UUWF supports and nurtures those who mother, by offering programming, concrete tools, resources, and spaces that equip women+ and their allies to do effective, powerful justice activism. UUWF brings a different lens–one that prioritizes activism that is sustainable.
Help us support sustainable activism for the long term–give today!
Courtney McKenny is a Treasurer for the Unitarian Universalist Women’s Federation. Courtney is a lifelong UU. She currently serves the UU Church of Birmingham & Tuscaloosa, Alabama as their Director of Lifespan Faith Development. She has been a religious educator for over 18 years. She is the mom of three young adults – James, Katherine and Finn. Courtney is also a dog lover and is currently the dog mom of Waffles and Otto.
Mothering the Movement