The Human Shift: How we Lost Balance — and How We Find Our Way Back - Part II — The Myth of the Perfect Mother

When the Feminine Sacred Fell, Women Were Asked to Hold What Was Never Meant to Be Human

There is a story woven into the bones of every family, a story we inherit long before language, long before memory, long before we take our first breath. It is the story of a role that was never meant to be carried by human hands.

It begins in the moment the feminine sacred vanished from the heavens.

She did not disappear.

She did not die.

She simply fell—into silence, into absence, into forgetting.

And when she fell, the world did not know what to do with the vacancy she left behind.

Someone had to hold the nurturance once offered by the divine.

Someone had to carry the tending, the compassion, the emotional weather, the quiet stitching-together of the human heart.

So the culture turned to women—especially to mothers—and placed the weight of the lost sacred upon their bodies.

Not in ritual.

Not in reverence.

But in expectation.

Suddenly a human woman was asked to be infinite.

Endlessly giving.

Endlessly soft.

Endlessly forgiving.

Endlessly patient.

Endlessly available.

Endlessly pure.

She became the last shrine of a forgotten goddess, a place where the feminine divine was remembered only in fragments and shadows.

This is why the mother-wound is so tender, so protected, so unspeakable.

To say, “My mother hurt me,” feels like sacrilege—not because our mothers were perfect, but because the feminine sacred was stolen from the sky and forced into them.

They did not choose this burden.

And we did not choose the ache it created.

But we all live inside it.

The Weight That Was Never Meant for Us

When a divine role is given to a human being, something breaks.

Women began to fracture beneath the weight of being everything.

They were asked to be the moral centre, the emotional container, the healing force, the giver of life, the keeper of peace, the absorber of pain.

No human can hold this without collapsing.

And so they did collapse—quietly, privately, behind closed doors, inside their own bodies.

They lost the right to have needs of their own.

They lost the right to be imperfect.

They lost the right to rage, to soften, to rest, to be complex, to be human.

When a woman could not embody the goddess the culture demanded, the world did not question the expectation.

It questioned her.

And instead of the pain travelling upward to the system that created it,

it travelled downward—into the children, into the lineage, into the invisible emotional architecture we still live inside.

The Silent Loyalty That Keeps Us From Speaking

Most of us will protect our mother’s image long after we have stopped protecting ourselves.

We will shield her from blame, even when the truth is burning inside us.

Why?

Because when the feminine divine vanished, the mother was made sacred in her place.

Even if she struggled.

Even if she broke.

Even if she harmed.

To name the wound feels like desecration—not of her, but of the lost goddess she was forced to impersonate.

And yet healing does not come from silence.

Healing comes from remembering what was once forgotten:

Our mothers were human women carrying a divine burden they did not ask for.

Their exhaustion was not their failure.

Their volatility was not their fault.

Their absence, their overwhelm, their collapse—these were symptoms of a role too large for a single body.

This is not about blame.

This is about truth.

And truth is the first doorway to compassion.

How This Wound Still Lives in Us

The myth of the perfect mother did not stay in the family.

It shaped everything.

It shaped workplaces where women quietly take on the emotional labour no one names.

It shaped leadership where men are praised for strength and women are punished for needing it.

It shaped partnerships where one person carries the relational weight while the other carries emotional distance.

It shaped parenting where mothers hold guilt and fathers hold absence.

It shaped adulthood where we judge our mothers and defend them in the same breath.

It shaped our inner worlds where we crave nurturing but fear dependence, where we long to be held but flinch at the thought of being a burden.

The mother-wound is not personal.

It is the emotional echo of the feminine divine being removed from the sky and trapped inside human roles.

And we have all inherited it.

A Human Mother Is Not a Fallen Goddess

To heal this wound is to return what was divine to the sky so that our mothers—and all of us—can come back to earth.

It is to say:

“You were never meant to be everything.

And I was never meant to expect it.”

It is to let our mothers be women—complex, imperfect, tired, hopeful, wounded, loving, limited, luminous women—rather than the final altar of a forgotten divinity.

It is to reclaim the feminine sacred not as a burden placed on human shoulders, but as a living energy that belongs to everyone.

And it is here, at this place of remembering, that the next truth emerges:

This wound did not fall on women alone.

When the feminine sacred disappeared from the heavens, it did not leave men untouched.

Men lost her too.

They lost the inner softness that once balanced their strength.

They lost emotional literacy, vulnerability, tenderness, and the right to feel without shame.

They lost the part of themselves that recognized care as courage and sensitivity as intelligence.

And when the feminine sacred was projected onto women and mothers, men were left with only half of themselves intact.

Women were told to be everything.

Men were told to need nothing.

Women inherited the burden of divinity.

Men inherited the burden of invulnerability.

Women were forced upward into impossible perfection.

Men were pushed downward into emotional exile.

Neither survived the fall unmarked.

In the next part of this series, we will step into the other half of this wound—

the fall of the human father—

and the way men were stripped of their emotional birthright,

cut off from the feminine within themselves,

and reshaped into archetypes that harm them as deeply as they harm the world.

For now, let this be the remembering:

• The mother-wound did not begin with our mothers.

• The father-wound did not begin with our fathers.

Both began in the moment the sacred split,

and the human family was left to carry

what the divine once held together.