On the Nature of Freedom: A Reflection on Motherhood and the Self

Freedom is often imagined as an absence—of obligation, of restraint, of weight. It is painted as wide open space, the ability to move unencumbered, to be beholden to no one but oneself. This is the freedom we are taught to desire: the kind that exists in solitude, in limitless possibility, in the self unbound.

But what if freedom is not found in what is absent, but in what is present?

What if freedom is not the removal of ties, but the conscious choosing of them?

Motherhood forces this reckoning with freedom in a way few experiences do. Because in one breath, it both strips away and expands everything you thought you knew about yourself. It binds you to another life, to needs beyond your own, to a form of responsibility that is so total it can feel like disappearance. And yet, in that very surrender, it reveals something else—something deeper, something truer.

Perhaps real freedom is not the ability to walk away, but the ability to stay without losing yourself.

It is easy to mistake obligation for entrapment. Modern motherhood, stripped of its communal roots, can feel like just that—a slow unraveling of autonomy, a demand that takes but does not give, a role that consumes rather than liberates. And in this, the idea of freedom as escape becomes intoxicating. The thought that we could step away, reclaim ourselves, exist outside of need—this feels like the answer.

But is it?

Or is true freedom the ability to be fully present in a life that asks much of you without losing your own name within it?

To be bound to something by choice, to love without erasure, to remain fully oneself while also existing within something greater—this is the paradox of freedom. It is not a rejection of responsibility, but a reclamation of self within it.

And so, the question is not whether motherhood takes freedom away. The question is whether we have created a world where mothers are allowed to be free within it.

Because freedom is not a life untouched by obligation—it is the ability to exist within connection, within love, within duty, and still be whole.

And that is what we must reclaim.