The Many Ways We Mother: What Tina Knowles Knows That We're Still Learning

I was twenty-four when my mother passed away. She was not only my mom, but my best friend—and I was devastated. Lost. How would I navigate this world without her?

One day, my “play” aunt called to check on me. I started complaining (whining really) about how unmoored I felt. She listened, then said, “Baby, you’re going to figure this out. But first, you need to stop waiting for permission.”

She wasn’t my mother. She wasn’t even blood. Just found family who knew and loved my mom. But that one conversation changed me.

Reading Tina Knowles’ Matriarch reminded me of my auntie, my stepmom, and the countless other women who have mothered me along the way. Because that’s the truth her book gets at—something we’ve always known in our communities but rarely name: motherhood isn’t only about who you birth. It’s about who you choose to nurture into being.

When Auntie Becomes Mama

You know that woman. The one who shows up to every graduation, every show, every milestone—even with her own family and a million things on her plate. She’s the one slipping you gas money or sending birthday cards well into your thirties.

In Matriarch, Knowles talks about being that woman for so many young people who crossed her path. Not just Beyoncé and Solange, but their friends, other artists, kids who just needed someone to see their potential when they couldn’t see it themselves.

I’ve seen it too. My friend “Maya” remembers her neighbor, Mrs. Rodriguez, who always seemed to know when their family was struggling. “She never made it weird,” Maya said. “She’d just have extra food, or ask me to ‘help’ with a project that paid exactly what we needed for the light bill.”

That’s mothering. Quiet, steady, and revolutionary in its own way.

The Stepmom Who Mothered Me Through Cancer

Years after losing my mom, I faced my own battle—breast cancer. Diagnosed in the middle of COVID, I remember feeling overwhelmed, buried in treatment options and fear. Thousands of miles away, I called my stepmom. She listened, she prayed with me, and then with the calmest grace walked me through each choice.

She didn’t just help me pick a treatment plan. She mothered me through the entire process. Even across the distance, her voice anchored me. That’s the kind of mothering that saves you, body and soul.

The Creative Mama

There’s another kind of mothering too—the kind that uses beauty as medicine.I think about my neighbors’ grandmother, who could turn a simple JCPenney dress into something that made you feel like royalty. Lace here, a seam tucked there, and suddenly you walked taller.

Knowles writes about this—how she used fashion to help her daughters see themselves as worthy of glamour, attention, space. But it wasn’t about the clothes. It was the message stitched into them: You are worthy. You are beautiful. Take up space.

Every Black woman who’s ever braided hair while whispering, “You’re beautiful”—that’s creative mothering.

The Professional Mama

I saw it just last month. A colleague took a new Black intern under her wing. The girl was brilliant but terrified, drowning in unspoken codes. My friend taught her how to speak up without being labeled “aggressive,” shared her network, pulled her into rooms she might never have entered.

“Nobody did that for me,” she told me. “I’m not letting her go through it alone.”

That’s Matriarch. Knowles understood her success meant nothing if she didn’t pull others up too.

The Quiet Revolution

What moves me most is that the book isn’t trying to be radical. It just names what Black women have always done.

Because the world tries to flatten us into stereotypes: welfare queen, single mother, strong Black woman. Demonized or deified, but never fully seen.

Knowles shows us otherwise. A woman who could build an empire while packing lunches. Who could strategize and still braid hair for picture day. Who taught her daughters they could be both soft and strong, gracious and fierce.

My aunt used to say, “Every woman we lift lifts the whole community.” That’s the spirit of Matriarch.

Full Circle

I recently attended a funeral for a friend’s mother. The church was filled to the brim—not just with her biological children, but with people she had claimed, mentored, fed, encouraged, lifted. That’s a legacy. That’s what Tina Knowles is talking about.

I don’t have children of my own, but I’m still learning to be that kind of woman—to mother through stories, through mentorship, through the way I show up. I write for young women so they know they belong, not just at the table, but at the head of one they built themselves.

Because that’s what we do. That’s who we’ve always been. We mother movements. We nurture dreams. We raise revolutionaries—one conversation, one meal, one act of believing at a time.

Reading Matriarch reminded me that we mother in countless ways—through wisdom, creativity, guidance, and love. How have you experienced or offered that kind of mothering in your own life?