Motherhood is the rawest form of love. It’s a revolution—one that cracks open our hearts and awakens the lioness within. It urges us to stand up, take a stance, and give a damn. It tears away the veil between life-giving and our deepest vulnerability, breaking our hearts open again and again.

It offers mother and child a sacred, if stumbling, container where both help each other grow up. Children become our teachers. Motherhood demands opinions. If it doesn’t make us deeply, passionately, unapologetically opinionated, then we are not paying attention.

Because when you bring life into this world—or bear witness to another being doing so—you are initiated into the deepest questions of humanity:

• What is life worth?
• Who deserves to keep their young?
• What is love if not the right to protect, nourish, and be with your child?

How have we built systems so large and brutal that they eclipse the simplest, oldest truths?

Nowhere is this brutal and tender truth more visible than in the bond between a mother cow and her calf. And yet, how often do we turn away—numbing ourselves to the suffering, staying ‘un-opinionated’ as the war on the feminine divine plays out in agricultural systems every single day?

True motherhood—whether human, bovine, or beyond—forces these questions into the daylight. It cracks us open, letting the light in. It challenges us to stop nodding politely to traditions that betray the mother-child bond and instead start feeling what these systems hide: the theft of babies, the erasure of motherhood across species.

It calls us to question industries that thrive on separation—for milk, meat, fur, entertainment, or convenience. My dear friend, wildlife biologist Dr. Anja Heister, reminds us that in spring, mother bears emerge from hibernation, hungry and devoted to feeding their young. Vulnerable in their caregiving, they often fall prey to hunters looking to fill state quotas. How can we allow this?

Motherhood demands we unearth the soft, inconvenient parts of ourselves—the parts that ache when a mother’s cry goes unanswered, when her baby is taken.

To be opinionated is not to be angry without cause. It is to be disciplined on the path of protection.
It is to form judgments because something deep within us knows injustice has occurred.
It is to let love sharpen into clarity.

Because if the bond between a cow and her calf is not sacred—what is?
If we can look away from that primal devastation and still claim to know love, we’ve lost something essential.

This Day Is Not Just About Mourning. It Is About Remaking the World.

Mother’s Day is a time to celebrate.
International Calf and Cow Mother’s Day is a time to honor both the seen and the unseen—the countless bovine mothers whose cries echo through fields, factory farms, and transport trucks, mourning the calves taken from them within hours of birth.

We honor mothers, don’t we? That fierce, primal love no system—however industrialized—can erase. We honor the grief too vast for sanitized words to contain.

This day is a call to tenderness. A call to care, to be opinionated enough to stand for all mothers and their babies. A call to reimagine agriculture, food, and community around respect for all motherhood—not just human motherhood.

It’s a call to end systems that treat babies as commodities and mothers as machines.
Imagine a world where:

• Every calf nurses freely.
• Every cow raises her young under open skies.
• Motherhood is honored—not stolen.

Imagine a world where no mother—human or non-human—has her child taken in the name of profit or convenience.

We must be opinionated enough to imagine it.
Bold enough to demand it.
Because Love—True Love—Questions Everything.

On this day, we remember: the very heart of life is the bond between mother and child.
When that bond is broken for commerce, for taste, for indifference—we are all broken too.

Motherhood. Grandmotherhood. Humanhood—gives us sacred permission to question everything.
Let us not waste that sacred fury, this intuitive knowing. Let us use it to build a world where all mothers, of every species, are given the right to be with their young, to live, and to love—and be loved—in return.

Join us on May 14th, 2025

The Million Vegan Grandmothers will be meeting twice on Wednesday, May 14th, 2025. At 8am Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) in the morning, we will be speaking with Renee King-Sonnen of Rowdy Girl Sanctuary and at 5:30pm PDT in the evening, we will be brainstorming on the International Calf and Cow Mother’s Day, 2026.

Please join us in the Convergence Zoom room on Wednesday, May 14th, 2025.

See you there.

With Much Compassion,
Tami Hay for MVG
Million Vegan Grandmothers