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