MOTHERING AND CAREGIVING.

Time. 

“ Mother is a verb not a noun”- Unknown.

Caregiving, shifs our priorities and washes away all that is unnecessary, revealing a new appreciation for a the precious resources of our time, attention and energy.

Time and the way we measure it- is concept explored by Yuval Noah who in his book Sapiens articulates how the current way we utilize time was not in existence until the industrial revolution, created as a means to ensure workers arrived on time to a factory. It became a measure of productivity and subsequently of money and of worth. Time became an invention of industrialism.

Mothering; through the privilege of witnessing of the worthiness and wholeness of new life, joltingly reminds us on a physical level, that we are human beings, not human doings. One of the greatest joys of caregiving and simultaneous frustrations is how to reconcile the two disparate realities, that as we become carers our time to do the things we want to or feel obligated to do diminishes and our load increases, whilst holding this against the sensation of being.

As caregivers, as humans, we negate two realities- the one that living in our modern world requires of us a pragmatic ability to meet our responsibilities- to organise our time and attention so that we maybe able to uphold the logistical commitments asked of us, juxtaposed against the temporal and cyclical nature of time.

The dichotomy that mothering reveals is the fleetingness and urgency of time, how it soothes our brains and bodies when it is organised- yet if we are incessantly focused on doing, do we miss the great gift of time in the first place? If we focus solely on quantity of our time, do we miss its quality?

17. Nov.2025.

By: Helen Coutts.

References and Further Reading.

Drucker, P.F. (1967) The Effective Executive. Harper & Row Publishers, New York.

Harari, Y. N. (2015). Sapiens. Harper.

Kim Verdebo.