DECONSTRUCT (verb): to take something apart so we can see how it came to be, question what we’ve been taught to accept as natural or inevitable, and decide for ourselves what we want to carry forward.
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Deconstructing Motherhood is a 10-month independent study into the social and historical construction of motherhood and mothering, what we’ve inherited, and what else might be possible.
September 2026 – June 2027 Facilitated by Toi Smith
Early Enrollment: $450 in full or 4 monthly payments of $112.50 Standard Enrollment: $600 in full or 4 monthly payments of $150
Includes monthly readings and study materials, audio lectures, private podcast, Your Mothering Blueprint, and three live gatherings throughout our ten months together.
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We are living through a time of shedding what no longer serves.
Systems are breaking and institutions are crumbling. What once felt immovable is shifting before our eyes. We’re watching a reorientation of society, of what we value, of how we live, and of who we understand ourselves to be responsible for. And in the midst of all this, we are still mothering.
We’re raising children inside these unravelings. Inside a changing climate, an economy that makes it increasingly difficult for families to survive, racial violence that continues to shape whose lives are protected, and a state that so often fails to provide the care people need. We’re mothering through a world that is shifting beneath our feet, which means how we understand and practice mothering right now isn’t just personal… it’s deeply political and foundational.
And yet, even as so much around us is changing, many of us are still mothering from ideas about women, children, family, and care that were formed inside a very different paradigm. One that taught women to measure the goodness of our mothering by how much of ourselves we were willing to abdicate, how much we could carry without asking for help, and how easily we could disappear into the needs of everyone around us. We inherited so much of this as if it were simply the natural order of things, rather than something shaped by the world we live in.
Part of what makes these ideas so difficult to challenge is that women are socialized to believe that mothering is only instinct. That because we are women, we should simply know how to do it. But mothering is also something we learn. We absorb ideas about what a “good mother” looks like, what she should be willing to give, what kind of relationship she should have with her children, and how much of herself she is expected to surrender along the way.
And if we learned these things, then we can question them.
We can look at what we inherited and ask whether it still belongs to us. We can trace where our ideas about motherhood came from, notice what they have asked of us, and begin imagining what mothering might become if we stopped treating what we inherited as inevitable.
Because we aren’t just mothering children. We are mothering motherhood itself, trying to reimagine it while we are still living inside of it.
Deconstructing Motherhood is an invitation to do that work intentionally. To slow down and study the system we’ve been dropped into. To understand how motherhood became what it is and begin separating what we’ve inherited from what we actually believe.
But the deconstruction has to take us somewhere.
It has to make room for us to ask what else might be possible. What mothering could feel like if love didn’t require our disappearance. What our relationships with children could become if we questioned some of what we were taught about being the adult. What care could look like if mothers were never expected to hold all of it alone.
This is definitely not about becoming a perfect mother, because that does not exist. It’s about becoming more intentional about the mother you want to be. At its heart, this study begins with a simple belief: another version of motherhood is possible. One that doesn’t require us to disappear in order for our children to flourish. One that we get to help create.
<aside> ***“Let’s look at mothering as a creative practice defined not by the state, but by our evolving collective relationship to each other, our moments together, and a possible future.”
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