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Layers – Musings on Motherhood, the Pandemic and the Earth’s Anatomy

Writer's picture: Ariel MoyAriel Moy

Updated: Aug 2, 2021

As I sit here attempting to give form to my musings and questions around mothering, I compete for warmth with my son who, yet again, is home schooling. We’re in our fifth lockdown here in Melbourne and it’s a cold winter so our domestic real estate situated around the heater is at a premium. There’s always a heart or core of a house, the living room is ours and right now, it’s crowded.


Inadvertently, we’re both learning about the layers of the Earth. The inner and outer cores, the mantle and the crust populated with all of us running around, making messes and miracles on the outside. The mantle particularly fascinates me, a slow hot layer of chemical elements including iron and silicon shoehorned between the crust and the core. Why am I drawn to this? Because sometimes I feel like this thickest part of the Earth; existing in an intensely pressured but still malleable space, in this scorching terrestrial toffee I see as mothering.

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Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

On the surface our daily negotiations around what to make for dinner, the matters of homework and health and friendships, the TV, the navigation of traffic and appointments and work, clothes washing and giving yourself a second to think about whatever’s going on, has its impact. This busyness is what the world sees of you and in turn, quite often, how you see yourself reflected in their eyes.


The mantle, Earth’s chunkiest layer, rests between this thin outer crust and the inner cores. As mothers, the heart of our love can be a brilliant solid fact but the certainty and goodness of it rarely accessed. How we appear and often feel in our everyday lives can be a flustered, agitated, questioning, cluttered and distracted crust of being. But when I look at my mothering, when I dig down into what it feels like to be in relationship with my son, there’s a thickness to this middle part of my identity. Attending to this steady flow of being has come in handy during the stressors of the lockdown and general anxieties of motherhood.


With the world in flux as the pandemic repeatedly unfurls around the globe, I find it too easy to become obsessed with the daily numbers, personal stories be they banal, glorious or tragic, and the latest memes. Our Earth is insanely chaotic right now. Yet these sometimes small but pervasive distractions are similar to those that can happen with mothering. From the decision to become a mother onward, no matter how much or little time you have to worry about your children, you will fret frequently. Mothers carry the weight of their past relationships with their children, the present problems and joys, and potential future fears all at once. These worries, like pandemic fears, unfold again and again across our experiencing.


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Photo by Taylor Brandon on Unsplash

The global tides of hope and distress telegraphed by the media and absorbed into our homes can be likened to the micro, daily rise and fall of emotions mothers carry for and about their children. In some ways, the world is experiencing what mothers have experienced for millennia – the not knowing and uncertainty, the feeling less than in the face of something so big, a sense of being scattered too thin and not being up to the task, and the continued resolve to do the best we can.


This likening of mothering to our responses to the pandemic might make it sound like an endeavour so difficult you’d be within your rights to wonder why anyone would bother with it. For me, I bother because these anxious feelings not only come and go, they’re layered over that bigger part of me – the one that is more than the daily fluctuations of loving another.


If we were only made up of the ever-changing worries, frustrations, laughs and ‘sads’ of being a mother, we’d fragment into puffs of exhaustion pretty quickly and just blow away. But we’re not and we don’t. Underneath it all we’re engaged in a vital, intense, relatively steady and ongoing relationship with our children, even when that relationship no longer means daily contact. This is because the act and experience of mothering is not fleeting or finite, it is layered, it dynamically interacts with our identity as it reshapes who we are. Surrounding our core being, it doesn’t define us completely, but it certainly has a huge impact on our sense of self.


What I feel and think, sense and do in the small quiet minutes or seconds I have to myself, are rooted in the deeper reality that I am a mother. There are some things, they might be relational, they might be vocational, they don’t have to be motherhood, that just don’t shift much; they’re integral to who we are. They’re the big things in our lives – love, work, art, sport, thriving or surviving that envelop our core and serve as the foundation for the everyday crustiness of being.

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Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

That thick mantle of maternity is the part of me that remembers, that holds onto our relationship, that shifts and adapts but slowly, over aeons. Maybe it’s the part of me that’s gradually catching up to where my son is and what the world is offering today; the part less easily swayed by COVID -19 statistics and the demands of Zoom meetings. The part of me that is focused on the languid undercurrents of us.


I need these subterranean flows because it can get tumultuous on the surface, exposed to the elements, shifting with the many cultural currents and concerns erupting into consciousness. I can’t really access the core of my being, the centre of my Earth, except maybe in drawing or dreams or fleeting moments of connection, but I can sense, image and think about the thick mantle that holds my richest and most formative experiences. For me, one of those flows is mothering.


Surfacing now from my deep dive into the planet’s layers, coronavirus chaos and maternity, I notice that my son is on break and has segued smoothly from the computer screen to the TV screen. We’re both now learning about relational dynamics – absurdity, humour, vulnerabilities and acceptance in the American sitcom Modern Family. We see some of ourselves mirrored in the character’s confessional asides and familial interactions. I wonder at just how tempting it is to focus on the outer, daily mayhem, all the colour and movement and noise, it’s entertaining and distracting and in a way, easy. It’s a lot harder to attend to the hot, molasses undercurrents of who you are, day in and out, in relationship with those beings or tasks you love.


This post is written by Dr Ariel Moy. She is passionate about developing mother/child relationships, she has a private practice as a creative arts therapist, is a Professional member of ANZACATA and is an academic teacher at The MIECAT Institute in Melbourne, Australia.


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