Hello.
I grew up an atheist, and in my language we don’t have “he/she” pronouns, everything is “it”. Even though I’ve been studying Christianity for many years, until today it’s very odd to me that there is God the Father, but there is no God the Mother.
Well, the Bible is crystal clear in its rendering of God in the masculine. Jesus, for example, prayed to his "Father in Heaven" referring to Him many times as "Father," but never as "Mother." Jesus himself, God incarnate, took on the form of a man, not a woman, and his conduct comported generally with that of a man.
God the Father, the Bible indicates, is genderless, a Spirit, whom no one has seen. Insofar as gender is related to physical attributes (sexual organs, chromosomes, facial hair, muscle mass, hip size, brain size, etc.), speaking of God as male or female makes little sense.
If we have a single dad with a child, we know at least at some point a mother was involved. It’s quite strange that spiritually, femininity is excluded.
Why? Only when you expect God should conform to our human experience, to our human frame of reference, is there a problem. But God isn't in our category of being; He occupies a category all His own. To extrapolate, then, from what is the case for us as human beings to what must, or should be, the case for God is to make a serious category error in reasoning. I would make the same mistake if I tried to conform an artist to a painting he made of, say, a vase of flowers, thinking that he should be like the painting, made of oil paints, perhaps, or in essence like a flower, or vase, our bounded by four right angles, etc.
We know that in life, without the feminine component there’s no continuation of life, there’s no care and no nurturing. When my drunk athletic dad was angry and severely whooping us kids with his belt, our mom would sometimes jump and cover us with her body and maybe saving our lives, who knows. It was intense.
But this is to do exactly what I described above: Extrapolate from your own human frame of reference to God. He isn't anything like the abusive man you describe. In fact, He is far more unlike us than He is like us. We share some basic characteristics with Him as creatures made in His image, but there is so much more that God is, He is so far beyond what He has revealed of Himself, that we always inevitably diminish and/or contort who and what He really is when we think of Him in terms of ourselves.
My mother was the savage one. She was...terrifying, sometimes. One moment, she would be sweet, sensitive and generous, the next, a shrieking, purple-faced horror, slapping us about in a rage. What, then, of trying to make a case for God's femininity from the basis of our personal experience of womanly conduct? We do far better to see God in the special revelation of Himself He's given us in His word.
The love of a mother is how I understand what true love is.
Then you cannot know true love, only the lesser, human love of your mother. God is True Love and He shares little in common with your Mom - or any of us. The protective, self-sacrificing care of your Mom
does demonstrate something of the nature of God's love, to be sure, but as noble and wonderful as your Mom's love was/is, God's is
infinitely wiser, holier, just and true. Look, then, to His love, the highest, greatest love, for an understanding of "true love," not to the inferior, contingent, sin-corrupted love that we produce.
1 John 4:9-10
9 By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him.
10 In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
1 John 4:15-19
15 Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God.
16 We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.
17 By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world.
18 There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love.
19 We love, because He first loved us.
Titus 3:3-7
3 For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another.
4 But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared,
5 He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit,
6 whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior,
7 so that being justified by His grace we would be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.
1 Corinthians 13:4-7
4 Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant,
5 does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered,
6 does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth;
7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.