What Motherhood Looks Like in Exile

In every episode of my podcast, Not Really Strangers, I ask each guest the same question: what does home mean to you? The answers vary, but they tend to circle the same ideas. Home is safety. Home is belonging. Home is the ability to care for the people you love.

I have come to understand that question more deeply through the mothers and the children that I have met around the world.

As we mark Mother’s Day, it is worth taking the time to think of those mothers who have been forced to flee from their homes due to circumstances beyond their control. Some have only seconds to decide what to take with them and what to leave behind, knowing that what they left behind may not be there when they return, if ever they return. 

Right now, 117 million people worldwide have been forced to flee from their homes due to conflict, violence and persecution. Eighty percent of all refugees are women and children. Behind those numbers are mothers making constant calculations about how to protect their children and how to create stability in circumstances that resist it.

Motherhood is universal in its instincts: the need to keep a child safe, to give them a future, to create a sense of home wherever you are. What changes is the context in which those instincts must be carried out.

In Mexico, I met Erika, a mother from Venezuela who had fled with her two teenage children. She arrived having left behind everything she knew, carrying with her a clear sense of what she needed to rebuild. Through an integration program led by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, she found work, housing, and schooling for her children.

When I met her, she was employed at a car manufacturing plant. She had secured an apartment, and her children were back in school, settling into a rhythm that once again resembled ordinary life. Her decision to leave was driven by the need to protect her children. Her ability to rebuild was shaped by access to work, education, and stability. With those elements in place, the future felt possible again.

In Poland, I met Alona, a Ukrainian refugee who fled from her home in Kharkiv with her son in 2022, one month after the war began. Once they had managed to reach safety in Lublin, Poland, she had to navigate finding medical care in a new country for her son, who is autistic. 

She found help and belonging at the Eleon Foundation, a UNHCR partner founded by Ukrainian refugees that offers mental health and psychosocial support for children with disabilities. One form of care children receive is hippotherapy, or horse therapy. Parents say riding sessions help their children feel calmer, more confident, even joyful. One mother, Oksana, put it simply: “When my child is happy, I am happy.” In that moment, the universality of motherhood felt unmistakable.

Thousands of miles away from Poland, I met another mother in Jordan named Alia, a Syrian mother who has been living in the Zaatari refugee camp, home to nearly 50,000 Syrian refugees. In December 2024, an era of fragile new hope emerged in Syria with the end of the brutal 13-year civil war that displaced millions of people. Since then, more than one million refugees have returned, and millions more who were displaced within the country have gone back to their hometowns. The question now for many of the families that I met while visiting the Zaatari refugee camp last year is whether it is time for them to do the same.

Alia’s answer is influenced by her son’s health. He has only one functioning kidney and requires regular medical care. In Jordan, she can access a 24-hour clinic in the refugee camp and referrals to public hospitals when needed. In Syria, many hospitals and basic services remain damaged or overstretched. While Alia wants to reunite with her family and return home to Syria, she is staying in Jordan so her son can continue to receive the medical care that he needs.

It is a choice rooted in the same instinct that defines motherhood everywhere. She is weighing risk and possibility through the lens of what will keep her child safe and healthy. The hope of returning home is real, but so is the responsibility to ensure that home can sustain her child’s needs.

Across these stories, one pattern is clear: when support exists, families are able to rebuild some sense of stability, even far from home. When it disappears, that fragile balance begins to slip.

In refugee camps and host communities alike, funding cuts are already narrowing those lifelines, making it harder for families to meet even their most basic needs. For mothers like Alia, the question is not only whether it is safe to return home, but whether the care her son depends on will still be available if she stays. These are not abstract challenges. They are immediate, and they are shaped by decisions being made right now.

On this Mother’s Day, it is worth recognizing that motherhood alone cannot create safety or stability. For displaced mothers, “home” is no longer just a place left behind, but something they are forced to rebuild piece by piece, often under impossible circumstances. Whether they succeed depends not only on their strength or resilience, but on whether the systems supporting them continue to exist.