The Force of Mom | Jan’s Blog

There’s a certain kind of energy in the world that doesn’t always get named properly. We call it “mom,” but that word can feel both too small and too loaded at the same time. So, stay with me here.

Because “mom” isn’t just a role. It’s a force.

We all know the traditional version-the one wrapped in school lunches, bedtime routines, and a kind of love that somehow runs on empty without ever quite running out. But if you look a little closer, you start to see mom energy everywhere. In stepmoms, aunts and grandmothers who quietly stepped up when life took a hard turn. In friends who became family overnight because someone needed them. In the people who care for animals with a tenderness that rivals any nursery. Dog moms, cat moms, foster moms… the list keeps going, and the stories behind them aren’t always neat or easy, but the people themselves? Remarkable.

What they share isn’t DNA. It’s devotion.

Motherhood is not flawless, glowing halo that anyone can wear. Anyone who’s lived it knows better. There’s no handbook. No neat checklist. Just a series of moments where you’re asked to show up. Often when you’re exhausted or confused. Sometimes when you’re frustrated.

And yet, you stay!

We all come into this “mom” space carrying our own stories, our own bruises, our own imperfect ways of loving. And yes, we get judged. Quietly, loudly, sometimes unfairly, sometimes justly. But most moms I know are doing something far simpler and far more profound than perfection- they’re trying. Really trying. With their whole hearts.

I think about this a lot in my own life. I have the rare perspective of both being adopted and later meeting my birth mother. Thirty-two years apart, and yet there we were, so alike in ways that had nothing to do with being raised together. It was a reminder that DNA has its place, absolutely. It shapes us in ways we don’t understand.

But it’s not the whole story.

Because I’ve also lived the other side of it, the chosen side. The day-to-day acts of caring, showing up, loving through the chaos. With my own kids, with the animals that somehow take up just as much room in my heart, with the layered relationships that don’t fit neatly into categories. I wouldn’t untangle any of it even if I could.

It’s messy. It’s beautiful. It’s mine.

So maybe that’s what being a mom really is, at its core. Not perfection. Not biology alone. But a steady, stubborn willingness to give of yourself. To nurture. To protect. To love, imperfectly, persistently, and often without applause.

And when you start to notice that energy out in the world in all its different forms, it does something quietly powerful. It reminds you that care is contagious. That small acts of showing up ripple outward. That the force of “mom,” however it shows up, is one of the most generous things we have