Dismantling the Hierarchy of Motherhood

Something happened to me when I became a mother.

It wasn’t just that I started listening to my intuition — it was that my intuition became impossible to ignore. It moved through my whole body.

It was no longer a quiet whisper.

It was a knowing I could feel in my bones.

I had my babies at 37 and 39. Before them, I had spent years learning how to trust my body.

My early life was flooded with insecurity, eating disorders, and a low-grade self-hatred that never quite lifted. In my early thirties, after an encounter in London that left me shaken, I began the long walk home to myself.

By the time I became a mother, my relationship with my body had completely changed.

I had learned to respect her, listen to her, and trust her.

So when my body carried and brought two babies into the world, it only deepened that trust.

I couldn’t imagine relating to her any other way.

And yet what I see again and again in the mothers I work with tells a different story.

Through Embodied Mama, I guide women through the identity shifts of motherhood—the grief, the body changes, the death-to-life surrender that becoming a mother requires.

And one longing shows up again and again.

Mothers want to trust themselves.

They have grown life. They have felt their bodies split open and reassemble. They know in their bones they are flooded with wisdom.

And yet the endless outside noise about how to mother can be debilitating.

The problem is not that mothers lack wisdom.

The problem is that we live inside a culture that rewards hierarchy—where someone is always positioned as doing it better.

But there is not one way to mother.

And yet social media amplifies the loudest, most polarizing voices. The more aggressive the opinion, the more engagement it receives.

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We are living in a time when strangers feel entitled to instruct you on how to raise your child. Everyone has an opinion on how to sleep train, feed, vaccinate, socialize, structure, discipline.

Motherhood has quietly become an outsourced fact-checking plan instead of an internally resourced journey.

The number of times I’ve been told I “should” — in DMs or in person—from people who are not in my village, not in my home, not in my nervous system, is staggering.

When did we decide our opinion should override another mother’s lived experience?

When did we start believing that wisdom exists in a hierarchy—where someone is always doing it “better,” “cleaner,” “more attached,” “more regulated,” “more informed”?

Do I believe there are practices that support children’s well-being? Yes.

We know more than ever about nervous systems and brain development. Science offers helpful guidance and best practices.

But guidance is not the same as moral superiority.

Best practices were never meant to become weapons or a ranking system that shames mothers who are doing the best they can inside the circumstances they hold.

In my own village, my closest mother friends parent very differently than I do, and it is beautiful to be surrounded by different rhythms, structures, and philosophies of motherhood.

My love and commitment to them is not conversion. It is empowerment.

Even—and especially—when their choices don’t mirror mine.

Because what mothers need is not more hierarchy. They need sovereignty.

They need to remember that they are not apprentices in someone else’s parenting philosophy.

They are the authority in their own home.

We can share research. We can share stories. We can share what worked for us.

But if it is not rooted in respect for another mother’s autonomy, it is not empowerment—it is ego.

And I refuse to participate in a culture that shames women in their most vulnerable becoming.

Motherhood is already a death and rebirth. It already asks everything of us. It does not need a ranking system layered on top.

It needs women who look at each other and say:

I trust you to know your child.

Because empowered mothers don’t need hierarchy.

They need to remember that the wisdom is already inside of them.