The Frame Is Breaking

On Mother's Day, motherless sites, and the matriarchy patriarchy keeps asking to fix what it built

Trigger warning:

A note before you read. This piece is written on Mother’s Day morning, and it sits with the holiday seriously. It touches on mother loss, estrangement, the cultural projection of motherhood onto women and machines, and the recent takedown of the Motherless website following a CNN investigation into systematic abuse. I do not describe the content of that site beyond what is necessary to make the argument, and I do not link to it. If today is hard for you, please take care of yourself first. If the CNN investigation is what you need, the survivor-led #EndEyeCheck campaign is at endeyecheck.org.

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It is Mother’s Day morning. I am writing this instead of calling my mother, because I do not call my mother. The day arrives anyway, with its flowers and its brunches and its careful Instagram captions, and I sit down to work.

I did not expect to end up here. I spent most of my career in a world where the frame was clear enough, even when I disagreed with it. My mother was a CEO and a single mother, operating inside a WASP register that allowed women power but only if it was held at a distance, exercised without warmth being named, performed without reciprocity being expected. Authority through competence, not through relationship. I knew how to hold that role.

Then I left that world, and within months, I was being read as a mother figure. Nurturing. Community-centric. The one who holds things together. I had not asked for this. I had intentionally not performed it. It showed up because I appeared to be a safe person in a world where many are not safe. People simply began treating me as though I were the woman who would carry the emotional weight of the room, and after a while, I noticed I was carrying it.

I want to say something carefully: I do hold a kind of power in this role. I hold dignity. The work I do is real, and I am recognized for it. That said, the frame that gets laid on the work is not the frame I would have chosen, and on Mother’s Day, the gap between the two becomes hard to ignore.

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The woman who founded Mother’s Day spent the rest of her life trying to destroy it. Anna Jarvis created the holiday in 1908 as an act of grief for her own mother, and by the 1920s, she was being arrested for protesting at floral industry conventions. She died in a sanatorium, broke, having sold her house to fund lawsuits against the commercialization of the day she had made. The holiday she invented was already, within a decade, doing something she had not asked it to do. The frame had moved without her.

This is what I see. The sentimental version of motherhood, the one the day now celebrates, is not a description of what mothers actually are or do. It is a function the culture needs performed, dressed up as a feeling the culture wants to have. The mother in this frame is valued for what she produces: children, soothing, social reproduction, and the maintenance of appearances. Her interiority is not the point. Her authority is not the point. What she holds together is the point. Her value to society is the point.

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In the weeks leading up to this Mother’s Day, the cultural conversation has been doing something revealing. Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called godfather of artificial intelligence, has been calling for AI systems to develop maternal instincts. His framing is that once machines are smarter than humans, keeping them submissive will not work. Instead, we must make sure they care about us the way mothers care about babies. The only model we have, he says, of a more intelligent being controlled by a less intelligent one is a mother being controlled by her baby.

The discourse that has grown around Hinton’s proposal is instructive. Some writers have pointed out that maternal instinct itself is a contested concept, that research shows no evidence of innate maternal behaviour across all women. Others have noted that this is an old move dressed as futurism. When a patriarchal society builds dangerous systems, the imagined solution is to bolt a woman on. The people making these arguments are largely not the ones who would be doing the work of maternal oversight. They are asking for the function of mothering, performed at scale, by someone else, on systems they have built.

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This is what happens across history, across domains. First, reject what women actually are: the authority, the networks, the ways of knowing, the structures of care that expect care in return. Destroy the matriarchal systems, exile the priestesses, burn the midwives, move birth from the home to the hospital, replace the village with the nuclear family. Then, when the systems you built begin to fail, when the dangers become too great, when the costs become too obvious, ask for the gifts that came with what you tried to destroy.

You cannot reject the matriarchy and then ask the matriarchy to fix what patriarchy built. You cannot spend centuries severing women’s authority from women’s bodies and then ask for maternal oversight of artificial intelligence. You cannot instrumentalize motherhood into a function the culture needs performed and then wonder why the culture produces sites called Motherless. The projection and the violence are the same pattern. The sentimental version and the criminal version serve the same system.

To be clear, artificial intelligence is not only the conception of men. Women have been central to its development from the beginning. But the discourse that asks AI to develop maternal instincts follows an ancient template. Build the threat, then assign the women to manage it. Create the problem, then ask for the nurture to solve it.

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Meanwhile, this week brought news that Dutch authorities have taken down Motherless.com, a site that hosted systematic abuse material and drew roughly 62 million monthly visits. The investigation that led to the takedown revealed an ecosystem of staggering scale: tens of thousands of videos, Telegram groups for trading techniques, a marketplace for tools and substances. The site’s name was not incidental. It was the confession. What does a motherless world produce? This. Systems that monetize the violation of women, often inside their homes, often by the men who share their lives.

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The archaeological record keeps producing women that the dominant frame cannot accommodate. A Viking warrior grave in Birka, excavated in the 1870s and assumed for over a century to belong to a man, turned out on DNA analysis in 2017 to belong to a woman. Scythian kurgan burials across the steppe have produced female warriors in numbers high enough that the Greek Amazon stories now look less like myth and more like Greek narrative processing of women they actually encountered. The bones were always there. The category just could not hold them.

These are my ancestors. My family is partly Norse on my mother’s side, and I grew up hearing stories of the Grant clan's strength and bravery from my father, later learning they were probably Vikings, too. It is likely where the red undertone in my hair comes from. I am not a warrior, but I am descended from some of them, and I draw strength from that lineage.

I think about this often. Not because I want to claim a frame that does not fit, but because the structure reveals something important. The interpretive frame protects itself by rewriting the evidence. A woman in a warrior's grave gets reclassified as a man by default. A woman holding authority in her community gets reclassified as a mother figure. The function the culture needs performed gets laid on the body it finds, and the body itself becomes hard to see.

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There are other models. Indigenous leadership traditions across North America historically organized authority and kinship around women without reducing women to what they produce. As research on matriarchal governance notes, these systems were “rooted in the deeper concept that women are direct reflections of the climate, land, and waters,” with decision-making that was communal and power that was relational, based in kinship rather than centralized hierarchy. A French missionary writing in the 18th century observed that in Indigenous societies, women “really maintain the tribe, the nobility of blood, the genealogical tree, the order of generations and conservation of families. In them resides all the real authority: the lands, the field, and all their harvest belong to them; they are the soul of councils, the arbiters of peace and war.” These systems were systematically dismantled through colonization, but they demonstrate that the instrumentalization of women is not inevitable. Authority organized around women can exist without reducing women to a function.

I came to understand something of this through sustained relationships in Treaty 7 territory, though these are not my stories to tell and these are not my systems to claim. What I can say is that the matriarch role in this sense is embodied rather than performed, reciprocal rather than extractive, available to women without children, recognized as authority rather than smuggled in as influence. This is the frame I have grown into, and it is the one that stays.

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Mother’s Day is a holiday that tells you who you are expected to be instead of asking who you actually are. It is prescription rather than recognition. The flowers and brunches and careful Instagram captions are not neutral. They are a frame, and the frame requires a particular kind of mother and a particular kind of relationship, and it has nothing to say to the women for whom that frame is absent or broken.

The day is hard for a lot of women, including me. There is a community whose mothers have died, whose mothers are unreachable, whose mothers are alive but not available. There are women navigating this day without children, women whose children are estranged, women whose experience of motherhood looks nothing like what the holiday celebrates. The holiday’s frame leaves no room for any of them. I am one of those women, in my own way. The day arrives anyway.

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At the end of the Barbie movie, there is a speech about the impossible expectations placed on women. You have to be a boss, but not mean. A leader, but not bossy. You have to be grateful, but not pleased, to be getting so little. You have to be aspirational, but not entitled or self-serving. You have to be perfect, but never act like you know it. The speech goes on, cataloguing the contradictions, and it lands with recognition because it names something most women live inside without having words for it.

The maternal frame is part of this impossible bar. You must be nurturing, but not smothering. Available, but not needy. Strong enough to hold everyone’s pain, soft enough not to threaten anyone’s comfort. You must fix what is broken, soothe what is angry, tend what is wounded, all while making it look effortless, all while never asking for the same care in return. And now, apparently, you must mother artificial intelligence too, because the people who built systems that might destroy humanity have decided that maternal oversight is the solution to the problem they created.

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I am not a parent, though I would like to be. I know who I am. I will not accept anyone trying to tell me who that is. The frame the day insists on, the role people read me into, the maternal instincts they want programmed into machines: none of that is my definition to accept or reject. The authority I hold is the authority to say no to projections that do not serve me, and yes to the work that does.

I do not know what to do with Mother’s Day, but I know what I will not do with it. I will not call my mother. I will not perform the frame the holiday insists on. I will sit with the women in my life who hold the matriarch role in the embodied and reciprocal sense, and I will recognize them as such. I will notice the gap between what the day demands and what authority and care actually look like when they are not being instrumentalized.

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The holiday Anna Jarvis founded was an act of grief and an act of refusal. It was not a celebration. The version we have now would not be recognizable to her. I think she would understand the impulse to write this on the morning the day arrives. I think she would understand the refusal underneath it.

The women in the graves had authority. The women in the matriarchal societies hold authority. The women navigating this day without their mothers, or with their mothers but not safely, are exercising a kind of authority too: the authority to name what is true rather than perform what is expected. The authority to say no to a frame that does not hold their lives.

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There is something happening in the cultural conversation right now, something that sits underneath the AI discourse and the criminal investigations and the holiday itself. The word “mother” is being asked to do too much work across too many different conversations, and the strain is showing. Perhaps that is where the change begins. When the projections become so contradictory, so impossible, so obviously instrumental, that they finally collapse under their own weight.

I think about the Dutch authorities taking down that site, and the survivors whose voices made it happen, and the journalists who spent months looking at material most of us cannot bear to know exists. I think about the women who shared their stories, who refused to let the conversation die, who insisted that roughly 62 million monthly visits were not normal and should not be tolerated. That is the embodied, reciprocal authority I mean. The authority that says no when no is what is needed. The authority that clears what cannot hold.

The frame is breaking. The projections are becoming too visible, too contradictory, too costly to maintain. What we build in the space that opens up is the work that comes next.

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A note on sources and positionality: This essay draws on Indigenous matriarchal governance traditions I have learned about through sustained relationships in Treaty 7 territory. These are not my traditions to claim, nor my stories to tell. What I have is respect for where the frame I trust comes from, and a commitment to pointing readers toward the people who carry it more fully than I can. For deeper engagement, I point you to Robin Wall Kimmerer, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and the writers, communities, and Knowledge Keepers whose work this rests on.

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Next Step: A Way to Practice This in Your Life

Taking action is one way to embody what you’ve just read. One of these is enough. None is also a valid choice.

Name the frame you have been waiting for permission to refuse.

Write down one frame that has been laid on you that you did not choose. Name specifically whose comfort the frame is serving, and whose authority you have been waiting on to set it down. Then ask whether that person has the authority to grant the permission you are waiting for, or whether the permission was always yours.

Write a letter to a mother figure who was never named as one.

Write a letter to someone who held a matriarch role in your life without ever being recognized as such, or to a woman in the archaeological record whose authority was rewritten after her death, or to Anna Jarvis on the morning the holiday she founded was already turning into something she would spend her life trying to undo. Do not edit. Do not send. Notice what the act of addressing them recovers that the frame had buried.

Return to your own lineage for what the dominant frame could not hold.

Spend time with the women in your line who held authority the surrounding culture could not accommodate. Family stories, photographs, names, fragments. Notice which of them got reclassified, softened, made smaller in the telling, the way the warrior in Birka was reclassified as a man for over a century. Notice what you are descended from that the frame around you has not been able to see.

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PS: If you want to support this work: restack it, share it, or drop a quick comment. It helps more than you’d think, and it keeps me writing and helping other changemakers. (This one’s public—feel free to send it on.)

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Further Reading & Context

I share books and sources here because I think the legacies people work from matter, and because good writing deserves a longer conversation than one essay can hold. Some of these informed this piece directly. Others are invitations to go deeper into the territory it opens. You can browse my full reading list, organized by theme to see the broader intellectual foundation this newsletter draws from.

Some links below are Amazon.ca affiliate links. I also include Chapters Indigo, Kobo, and WorldCat so you can support a Canadian bookseller or find it at your library instead. I earn a small commission if you buy through affiliate links at no extra cost to you.

Brown, Adrienne Maree, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017). Brown writes from inside Black feminist and movement traditions about how change actually moves: through relationship, through small repeated acts, through bodies in trust with one another. A practical extension of the essay’s interest in the embodied, reciprocal authority that does the clearing work when something cannot hold. Amazon.ca | Chapters Indigo | Kobo | WorldCat

Haraway, Donna, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016). Haraway’s “make kin, not babies” is a direct counter-frame to the AI-as-mother proposal the essay engages with. She argues for relational, multi-species responsibility that does not collapse into reproductive instrumentalization, which is exactly the substitution Hinton’s discourse performs. Amazon.ca | Chapters Indigo | Kobo | WorldCat

hooks, bell, All About Love: New Visions (2000). hooks treats love as a discipline, an ethic, and a structure of accountability rather than a feeling. Read alongside the essay’s claim that care which expects care in return is the kind that holds. Amazon.ca | Chapters Indigo | Kobo | WorldCat

Kimmerer, Robin Wall, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013). Kimmerer braids Indigenous knowledge, botany, and lived practice into an account of authority that is reciprocal, embodied, and located in relationship to land. A useful companion to the essay’s distinction between matriarchal authority and the instrumentalized version of motherhood that the holiday performs. Amazon.ca | Chapters Indigo | Kobo | WorldCat

Le Guin, Ursula K., The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986). Le Guin’s reframe of who counts as the protagonist of human history, the gatherer with her bag, not the hunter with his spear, sits beside the essay’s interest in the women the dominant frame could not accommodate. A short book that quietly reorganizes a great deal. Amazon.ca | Chapters Indigo | Kobo | WorldCat

Lorde, Audre, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (1984). The structural argument underneath this essay. Lorde is precise about what it costs to ask the people a system has marginalized to repair the system on its own terms, and about why difference held in relationship is the only ground from which anything actually changes. Amazon.ca | Chapters Indigo | Kobo | WorldCat

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999). Smith is essential on the politics of who gets to interpret whom, and on the long history of Western frameworks rewriting the evidence to fit their categories. A direct companion to the warrior-grave thread, and to the question of what it means for a frame to protect itself by reclassifying what it cannot hold. Amazon.ca | Chapters Indigo | Kobo | WorldCat