mother.
The machine wants your softness. Your lineage requires your sovereignty. This is an homage to the Mother the world was never prepared to witness.
If I see one more watercolor painting of a woman holding a baby like a fragile piece of porcelain, I might actually level the gallery. Lol.
The tenderness is real. I know tenderness. I have held it in the crushing vacuum of 3 a.m. when the world had run out of oxygen and tenderness was the only thing left to breathe. I know what it is to love something so completely that the love becomes its own kind of kinetic violence.
But the watercolor is a lie of omission. It’s a structural defect.
It shows the softness without the teeth. The warmth without the ferocity. The cradle without the forge. It shows the version of motherhood that is “safe” enough to be sold as a sentiment—and in doing so, it erases the woman who actually held the roof up while the foundation was screaming. The one who had no village, no crew, and no hand in the pit. The one who swam the full distance with two children strapped to her back, arriving at the shore wrecked, shaking, and feral, only to be asked: “What’s for dinner?”
She didn’t find a ladder. She became the masonry.
I wrote about that swim once… the weight of the water, the invisible cost of arrival—in a piece called the things i carried alone. If you haven’t read it, start there. What follows is the part that comes after the shore. The part I couldn’t name until the Wolf finally took the mic.
Let’s begin by rigging the current landscape with e.xplosives.
Motherhood has been domesticated. Pastelled. It’s been packaged into a narrative of smiling endurance that serves everyone except the woman doing the heavy lifting. The culture took the most primal, apex-predator frequency available to the human species, the frequency of a woman who will level a city before she lets a shadow touch her children, and turned it into a brunch reservation.
They declawed the Lioness so she would be easier to govern.
They called it ‘nurturing’ to keep it quiet. They gave it a flower crown to hide the sweat. And in doing so, they committed a quiet kind of violence against every woman who has ever had to hold three worlds together with trembling hands and no backup.
I’m not here to perform gratitude for the chaos. I am here to name what the chaos actually produced: A Sovereign. I am here to provide the high-definition,4K witness to the woman who didn’t just survive the collapse, but used the rubble to build a fortress. You don’t give a woman like that flowers; you give her the keys to the kingdom and get out of her way.
The womb isn’t a cradle. It is a high-pressure forge.
It is the first act of the God-Mind—dreaming a human being into existence from nothing but darkness, cellular intent, and a woman’s willingness to negotiate with the void. Before the world saw the child, the Mother sat in the dark and decided their structural integrity. She brought a soul back from the deep and sealed it into a body that would carry her fingerprints like a permanent seal.
My children didn’t come from a place of peace. They were forged in the friction of a woman who refused to negotiate with her own hunger. Who walked through the fire of violent men and came out the other side still holding the blueprints. Who was thrown into the wolf den with two wounded cubs and had to learn the territory while her own blood was still wet on the floor.
There was no “protected” season. I was burning alive while trying to keep them warm. I was rising from the ashes while teaching them that the ashes were just a new kind of soil.
I am in awe of what survived that forge. Not just the children. Me. The woman who emerged from that fire is harder in the places that require steel and more open in the places where the scar tissue was burned away. She is a forensic laboratory of the soul. She doesn’t raise “Good Citizens.” She raises Vigilantes of the Truth.
There is a frequency that activates the moment you claim your lineage. Something older than language. Something that predates every cultural script meant to keep you small. It is the frequency of the Apex. The one who moves with a stillness that is not peace, but readiness.
The machine tried to turn the Lioness into a house cat. They called your anger a “problem.” They called your fury a “red flag.” They called your refusal to shrink a “failure of regulation.”
They were terrified of you. They still are. A Mother who knows her own gravity does not teach her children to be “nice.” She teaches them to be effective. She teaches them the smell of a lie before it’s even spoken. She is not a harbor; she is the deep water. The growl is always in the lullaby—underneath the warmth is the ancient, undomesticated truth that love without teeth is just a Hallmark card.
I didn’t build this frequency alone. I stand on the shoulders of women who had to swallow the howl for decades just to keep the lights on. Who buried the Wolf in their bones and passed it down, encoded in the blood, waiting for the generation that finally had the audacity to let it out.
I am that generation. I am the sound of the ancestral walls collapsing.
The Dark Mothers, Hecate at the crossroads,the Morrigan in the aftermath, Kali with her belt of egos—were never meant to be “spooky.” They were the documentation of what motherhood requires when the stakes are real. When you aren’t protecting your children from inconvenience, but from the actual predators of the world.
My mothers buried their rage so I could have a voice. They paid the blood-debt of silence so I could have the luxury of a scream. I am the first in my line to let it howl. A Sovereign Mother doesn’t save her children from the storm; she is the storm that teaches them how to fly.
To the mothers who swam the full distance with no crew. To the ones who arrived at the shore wrecked and were told to “keep it down”:
You were not weak. You were carrying the weight no one else was strong enough to touch. You built the boat while you were drowning. You rose from the ashes while they were watching so they would know it could be done. That is the most sovereign act available to a human being.
Your worth is not a currency your children spend. It is the relentless gravity that keeps their universe from flying apart. Wear the bruises. Own the hunger. Be the catastrophe they need to see.
To the mothers still in the water—kicking, paddling, holding the world above the surface with the tips of your fingers: The Lioness does not stop mid-swim to check her “self-care” app. She swims. She arrives. She shakes the water from her fur and she knows, without needing a single witness to confirm it, that she is the only reason the shore exists at all.
Put the crown back on. Stop apologizing for the growl. The machine wants your compliance; your lineage requires your sovereignty. Your children need the Wolf in your throat more than they need the fake smile on your face.
Mother’s Day is not for flowers. It is for this. For the full, ferocious, undomesticated truth of what it means to love something enough to swim a hundred miles in the dark and arrive ready for more.
For the mothers who became the ladder. For the mothers who protected the perimeter with a violence that made the stars blink. For every woman who arrived at the shore wrecked, shaking, and alive.
You are the Architect of the Bloodline. The Forge. The Storm. The Shore. The Mother the world was never prepared to witness.
And you are finally, completely, without apology, allowed to howl.
To the mother who needed to read this today… I see the distance you swam. Tell me in the comments: What part of your strength did they never see?
God in the head. Wolf in the throat. Heart wide open.
xx 🫦 🖤
Nikyla Maria
The Reliquary I am a reliquary built of leaking milk and iron, a sovereign state currently being colonized by small, loud dictators who smell of sun and sour cream. The machine told me I would be a "nurturer," but they forgot to mention I would first become a Bait Shop. I am the soft meat they use to fish for the future. I have sat in the dark at 3 AM watching a tiny, screaming God demand the very marrow from my bones while my other hand is elbow-deep in the tepid water of a clogged sink. The God-Mind unzipping the secrets of the void. The body still mopping the floor. I give them my body & soul; they give me back a sticky handprint on the bridge of my nose. I am the Architect of the Bloodline, but today my primary function is The Ladder. I am the rungs they climb to reach the things I've hidden on the top shelf of my own sanity. I carry the weight of their ghosts before they've even met them. I am the forensic laboratory where their trauma is pre-processed, filtering their inheritance through my own scar tissue until the blood runs clear enough for them to drink. It is a violent, holy trade. I am the wet, pulsing flesh where a ghost learned how to grow a skeleton. I was not delivered into motherhood. I was a demolition site where the universe decided to test its structural integrity. My skin stretched to hold a multitude then snapped back like a wounded rubber band, mapping the reckoning in silver lines that look like lightning hitting a cliff. I am a walking tower moment in a stained t-shirt and I have stopped apologizing for the altitude. I am a Lioness with grocery bags cutting into my wrists and murder in my bloodstream. The growl is always there. Low and ancient. A frequency beneath my ribs that says: I will burn this whole world down before I let it swallow my children. I have looked into the wolf-den and realized I am the only thing standing between my cubs and the men who smell like compromise. The world wants me soft. It wants me to be the harbor where the lies come to rest. But I am the salt-crusted shore. I am the grit in the gears. I am the Mother who teaches her children how to taste the rot in a "hun" and how to find the iron in the dirt. I stopped asking for a village and decided to become the Wilderness instead. My love is not a watercolor. It is a heavy-ink blueprint of a fortress. It is the friction of my skin against the world’s rot, reminding my children that even the dark can be a home if you know where the Architect hid the matches. My ribs are a cage for a hurricane. My lap is a sanctuary for the wrecked. My throat is a predatory instrument that has forgotten how to whisper. I am the Forge. I am wrecked. I am shaking. I am the only thing in this house the monsters are actually afraid of. I am the ladder. I am the ruin. I am the hunt. And I am just getting started.
They never saw when my meal was the leftovers off their plates.
I would also like to mention another amazing mom. Biggs Killer Whale mom's. Talk about apex predators. Their sons live with Mom until she passes away and the daughters will return to stay with Mom if the brothers pass away prematurely. A true matriarch in every sense of the word.
🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼🐺🖤🔱