my mother's hand, and summer's
In October 2022, my mother was diagnosed with stage four glioblastoma. The doctors gave her six months. She was sixty. She was healthy. She grew her own organic food. She had been doing the healthy "work" for twenty years. This wasn't supposed to happen to her.
Her diagnosis sent me down a long road. I went looking for what cancer really is, and where it really comes from. I came to believe it is not only environment and food. It is also what we hold on to. The grief we never speak. The stress we never put down. The years of unfelt things, gathering quietly in the body, until the body can no longer carry them.
The deeper I went, the more I came to believe something else. We are far more powerful than we are ever taught to be. Yet we are taught, constantly, to hand that power away. To the search engine. To the expert who allegedly knows more than our own intuition.
Then I became a mother.
And I began to see the same pattern I had seen in cancer. The same slow erosion of a woman's power. We are told not to pick up the baby when they cry. Not to rely on feeding them to sleep. Not to trust the intuition in our own heart that tells us to stay close.
Motherhood broke my heart wide open. There was a love in me I had never felt in my life. But an open heart does not feel only love. It feels everything. All the grief I had been holding. All the pain around me. And now I was surrounded by it.
Against every odd, my mother lived three years. Most people with her diagnosis live six months. She got to meet her grandchild, the one wish she had. And just when we thought she had beaten the diagnosis, she left this world, right before my daughter's first birthday.
I loved my daughter with my whole body while I watched my own mother leave the world. The deepest love and the deepest grief, in the same season, in the same heart.
I started to feel the intensity of motherhood. The loneliness. The depletion. The felt thing we all feel but cannot express into words.
And then I found a group of mothers online, who were raising their babies from the heart. Holding them. Following their instincts. Refusing to be told what to do with their own children. But it lived online. And online is lonely.
So I began to imagine a place. A real one. Somewhere we could gather the way mothers gathered for most of history. In community. The way where the wisdom of grandmothers and the openness of new mothers meet in the same room. Where you do not have to explain yourself. Where you finally put down the thing you have been carrying.
I named it for my mother and my daughter. Summers, my mother's maiden name. Summer, my daughter. Mothers, plural. Every woman who walks through the door.
This is for them. For all of us.