Visiting the mother trees

All I really wanted for Mother's Day

Mother’s Day is now, to me, like another birthday. A day where, as a mother, I’m allowed to do whatever I please. Whatever is calling to me. Whatever feels most nourishing.

The moment I woke up this Mother’s Day I knew exactly what I wanted.

It wasn’t breakfast in bed (though who doesn’t love that?) or flowers (which are always lovely)… I wanted to go be with the mother trees.

Mother trees, a term coined by ecologist Suzanne Simard, are the biggest, oldest trees in the forest. They are the ones that hold a whole landscape together, sending nutrients and care to the smaller trees around them as they wrap the entire hillside up in their arms.
 
All of Appalachia was logged (and logged and logged again) in the last hundred years—but a few of these old growth mother trees survive…if you know where to look.
 
Left to mark the borders between old property lines, hundred-year-old oaks, tulip poplars and white pines can be found, standing tall and wise above the tree-line.

When there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do during the pandemic I decided to start visiting, and mapping each mother tree. Rather than mark the boundaries of our land with bright survey tape, this felt much more honoring. Because these trees aren’t just markers— they are mothers.

I stumbled across the first mother by accident. Out hiking the land, I saw a tree, a big one, sticking out above the canopy. So I veered off path, crawling through a rhododendron hell and balancing on a thin animal trail. Then, I was beneath her—a giant, old oak with a trunk twice as wide as my shoulders.

I settled into a nook by her roots and let her rock me. 
 
In a time of chaos, of endings, of uncertainty. In a world of clear cuts and felled trees and a thousand years of top soil washed away, here she stood. 
 
It felt like such a profound gift.
 

We mothers hold so much. Sometimes it feels like we’re the only trees left in a culture, a society where all the support has been clearcut from underneath us. We are trying to do what we can to rebuild, meanwhile our branches are the havens. Our roots stabilize the soil. Our crowns shade the water in the earth.

But we weren’t meant to hold it all ourselves, can’t even.

So that’s why on Mother’s Day all I wanted to do was go to the Earth and be held.

Because that’s what it feels like to sit with one of these mother trees.

It feels like letting go of the responsibilities you’ve been carrying.

Like being safe enough to put it all down.

Like letting yourself, for a minute, on a glorious stretch of a mother day, not be the only mother around. But to simply be a mother among mothers for a time.

A young mother, really, in the grand scheme of things.

A young mother who was never supposed do it alone, but was meant to be held by the matriarchs around her. By all the mothers of this planet who know what it is to endure, to root down, to love with your entire being.

So this is what I did today. I laid underneath one of these mother trees and allowed myself to be little for a while. To be unsure, to have a tantrum, to be grateful, to ask for help, to cry.

I allowed myself to be a mother in the arms of a mother, in the arms of the greater mother of the earth, and it felt like coming home.

Because it’s this—the nesting dolls of mothers, the heartwood within the wood within the forest—that makes it all seem doable.

Even when we feel alone, a single sentinel on the hill of what was, the mother tree of the Earth reminds us—we are always, always held.