CAREGIVING AND MOTHERING.

On Responsibility. 

The privilege of caregiving illuminates the nature of responsibility—what it is, how it feels, its complexity, and nuance. The intimate act of caring for others invites consideration not only what responsibility entails, but also how it feels. .

Philosopher and writer Robert M. Ellis explores this terrain in an essay that distinguishes between two forms of responsibility. the responsibilities to which we are held, or to which we hold others— that often becomes blame—and the responsibility we feel he writes, “this lies at the heart of any moral development that we may actually experience as embodied human beings.”

His distinction emphasizes how the experience of responsibility can move from an external obligation towards an more internally cultivated moral awareness.

Within the hierarchal and authoritarian landscapes of care that we develop in in western societies, our sense of leadership can be been located externally-which may have subjected our ability to develop a sense of inner leadership and thus of an ability to accept an inner responsibility for ourselves- for our thoughts, behaviours and actions. Physician Gabor Mate writes “We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world.” He articulates the possibility of developing agency even within constraining social contexts.

When responsibility is defined primarily through external authority, we can experience it as pressure, a dynamic that can lead to collapse or withdrawal rather than to its alternative- to growth and expansion.

Conversely, when responsibility is recognised as an inner capability, it transforms from an obligation into an expression of awareness and acceptance.

Maria Montessori, the pioneering educator and physician, conceived of responsibility and freedom as existing along a shared continuum. In her educational philosophy, the child’s freedom is not the absence of responsibility but its natural companion. By extension, the more deeply one accepts responsibility for oneself, the greater one’s capacity for freedom may exist.

H Coutts

11.Nov.2025.

Kim Verdebo.