Michelangelo and my kids will haunt me
Friday, 27 Nov 2009
More news
by Bronwyn Lay As Copenhagen looms on the horizon like a giant apocalyptic festival I
can’t get Michelangelo and my kids out of my mind. When I read about
climate change, about the experiences of those in the developing world
who disproportionately face more than their fair share of its effects,
the image of ‘The Pieta’, the mother holding her dead son, keeps
appearing over the words. Michelangelo’s masterpiece was more than a
genius crafting flesh from cold stone.
I have given birth four times and each time was taken to the gates
of hell to bring beauty into the world. Motherhood is no hallmark card.
Everyday the skin of your inner self: of your precious identity, dreams
and ideas are shaved away by a sharp knife until you face the world a
naked, red, wobbling mess of flesh. Motherhood can take everything from
you, but the strange thing: biological, primal, and magical, is that
you would give your life to hold those babes to your chest and in the
end, in the midst of the chaos of weetbix, cut knees, and sleepless
nights, there are moments of pure wonder where the embeddness of the
child to the mother extends to the whole darn universe. Ironically,
despite these small things depending on you, most days, nothing really
depends on you. For the power of the mother to control her environment,
the safety of her children, depletes as soon as the child is born,
diluted by the dangerous and inspiring ‘us’ outside the womb.
The mother’s worst fear is to hold a dead child in her arms but all
those who have loved know the same fear. The woman in ‘The Pieta’
didn’t know that times would change. She didn’t know that resurrection
was possible; for in the fleshy world, all she saw was that everything
she lived for lay in a dead heap over her live body. Her future was
murdered. Taken from her by forces beyond her control. That’s how I
feel about climate change.
As far as we know we’ve only got one planet. It feels like its
survival depends on us, yet at the same time we feel powerless to stop
the carnage. This existential state is not limited to motherhood. The
sense that the self is under threat because all that we love is being
annihilated by forces beyond our control is common as muck. It is part
of growing up, it is part of being human and that is why ‘The Pieta’
speaks to more than the literal mothers. The mother is not the earth.
The mother is not the stoic breeder blessed with a special care gene.
That the mother contributes to relationships and, all too often, is in
charge of the ‘caring’, does not exclude anyone else from doing so. My
experience of motherhood has confirmed many aspects of the metaphor,
but it is not exclusively to breeders. Every male and female, atheist
and believer, parents and non-breeders, tree, horse, and in between, is
The Pieta. All creation is metaphorically lying across our lap. Is it
dead yet? Read the full story: Eureka Street