Mothers are the original firekeepers

making something from nothing

I was camping once with a group of friends outside a waterfall in Morocco. It was dusk and we decided to get a fire started. Even though several of the women in our group had grown up camping, girl scout badges and all, a few of the men insisted they be the ones to start the fire.

“It’s a guy thing,” I remember them saying.

We all watched, bemused, as they proceeded to throw sticks in a random pancake assortment on the ground and try to light them.

Needless to say, the fire didn’t last long. We all inhaled a few buckets of smoke before our kindling was gone and we decided to just call it a night.

Reflecting on all the messaging I received growing up, I notice how often firekeeping gets typecast as a “guy thing,” and it honestly amuses me. Because all we have to do is gaze back to see that mothers are the original firekeepers.

Up until very recently, it was our mothers, the maternal heart of the household, who would have been keeping the hearth alive.

It would have been our mothers who started the cookfire first thing in the morning from last night’s carefully banked coals. Our mothers who went to gather kindling with the baby on their back. Our mothers who set the stewpot over the embers to make sure we all had warmth in our bellies.

And it was our mothers, then, who would have taught us how to do all these things. How to become firekeepers ourselves.

Now we can just open the lid of a lighter and flame dances to life. But before butane and matches, there was women with flints and fire boards. Women carefully carrying coals over nomadic miles, in clay, or horns or the curve of a skull. Women preserving forest fires in tinder mushrooms, making sure this spark that was life, that was survival, that was food, protection and warmth, stayed alight.

For millennia women carried the creative fire that defined our species, that spark of ingenuity and possibility that literally kept us alive.

To this day, mothers, are still the firekeepers of our culture. Except now it looks a little different.

Me nine months pregnant on Christmas 2021

Now mothers are on the ones planning schedules, picking out clothes, organizing trips, opening the doors on warm days to air the house, wiping noses and bringing roses in from the garden. We are the ones making sure the creative heart of our home stays alive.

I think about all of this as I prepare to teach my new class Relighting the Fire: A Class on Creative Resurrection For Mothers this upcoming Thursday.

I think about just how much creativity it takes to raise a child, maintain a household, make sure all the tiny tendrils of life keep going.

About how, even if we no longer cook over fire or tend a hearth, we still use our fire making ability to warm others, feed their bellies, make sure they are safe at night.

How we give so much that sometimes it feels as if there isn’t a single spark left for our own creative nourishment.

How we work so hard, burnout becomes a perpetual state of being.

And yet, there’s a reason why there are votives to Mother Mary in alcoves around the world that never go out. There’s a pilot light within us all, an eternal flame that will not, cannot, ever be extinguished.

I remember worrying before I became a mother that I’d lose my creative spark, my sexual vitality, my fire for life.

Now, I look back at that fear and laugh. Because creativity, sexuality, vitality ARE life force itself. And as people who make something out of nothing daily—including the creation of a literal flesh and blood human from nothing but the spark of two tiny bits of tinder coming together— the idea of any of these die when you became a mother is now absolutely laughable to me.

Becoming a mother isn’t the end of your fire. It’s just the beginning of you understanding your capacity as a firekeeper.

I’m getting so excited for this upcoming live class this Thursday. If something inside of you is burning to reconnect with the passion and possibility of your own creative flame—come gather with this amazing group of mamas.

Can’t join live? Aka. It’s just after the baby’s nap-time, or you have to wait in the carpool line, or wonder-of-all-wonders, you actually have an appointment to get a haircut that day? No worries, I’ll send you the replay and it’ll be yours to keep and revisit forever.

Because as a mother, you are a natural firekeeper.

You know how to relight the spark when it goes out. And there’s a bonfire blaze of new possibility, creativity and hope waiting for you in this life.