“The mother-child relationship is the center of the Universe”

“This economic system came from a 10,000 year old experiment of separating from the mother. They invented the word for nature in order to separate themselves: separate the human from nature – separate from the mother. Once you do that, you are then free to displace your matriarchs, you are then free to displace the center of your community – which is the mother and the child – and all relationships in human communities.”

-Tyson Yunkaporta

Rae and I have been talking about this idea, that this essential mother-child relationship might actually provide many metaphors and possibilities for understanding healthy human-earth relationships and communities and when I heard those words from Yunkaporta,  I was fascinated and went searching for more of his work.  He is an Aboriginal scholar at Deakin University in Melbourne and “focuses on applying indigenous modes of inquiry to resolve complex issues and global crises.” 

When I hold the mother-child relationship as the center of the Universe, images resonate everywhere. 

A mother sea otter floating around on her back, her baby cradled on her stomach, enduring cold temperatures and rough seas to help him stay warm.

A young tired looking mother, holding her toddler by the hand in the endless aisles of the store, repeating, “not now, not now,” with deep care but also almost as if in a trance as they pass by the rows of sugar and plastic, empty temptations of our culture. 

A mother tree, standing tall watchful in the forest, diverting her own nutrients to the young saplings near her, providing protection, shade, and grounded stability for them in the heightened vulnerability of their youth.

A mother wailing in the deepest kind of pain as she loses her child to violent acts committed by another Country, fighting a war that she has nothing to do with.

I wrote a dissertation in college, focused on attachment theory, following a young, at-risk mother and her infant as they lived in a therapeutic intervention setting. I spent hours listening to and transcribing interviews with that mother and as I typed her words and they filled the page, so too did they enter my own bloodstream. Hearing her story changed me and when I wrote the introduction to that paper, it mostly focused on my realization that the mother-child relationship was one of the most deep and profound aspects of human existence I had encountered. 

How could embracing the mother-child relationship as the center of the universe, help heal our cultures and our planet now?  In this imagining, of what a world that valued this essential bond and its importance above all else, I find it necessary to zoom out and widen the lens of Mother.

In some indigenous cultures, the care of infants and children is so communal, that children sometimes don’t even know who their biological mother is. In nature, it is not uncommon for a mother to raise infants that were not born of her. A mother can exist in many ways.

When I looked for the definition of Mother, the first one I found was:

Mother, transitive verb; to give birth to, to give rise to, to protect and care for like a mother.

The mother-child relationship isn’t just one of biological mothers caring for their offspring although that is one precious example. A mother could be giving birth to a child, or giving rise to a child, or protecting and caring for that child like a mother. A mothering energy might be caring for any more vulnerable part of existence. 

So what is the essence, the core of that relationship, that is lofty enough for some of the greatest thinkers of our time to say,

“The mother-child relationship is the center of the Universe.” 

What stands out to me, is that this kind of relationship often empowers humans and other creatures to show up with such deep care, that it’s almost as if they are consumed by a purpose far larger than them. The mother-child relationship in human, animal and even many plant populations is one that when nurtured, honored, and given support can make both entities into something much more whole and fulfilled than they ever would have been alone. It’s a passing on - a space to transfer an unconditional love and deep care to the small ones.  Our lives and stories are filled with so many examples of great love, but none seem to quite match the love of mothering. 

Maybe a mother-child relationship is a model, a fractal, a pattern we could follow as we cultivate our ways of being in this world. What if we attended to all other life with the deep care, wisdom, a balanced holding of our authority that we would if it were our own child being tended to?

A healthy, vibrant, life-sustaining culture would not only value the importance of the work of tending the young, but would create systems that supported it. We are so far from that in modern day America. 

There are so many ways our culture does not value the work of raising the next generation intentionally and creating a web that supports the tenders in that work. What might it look like if we were to start from the ground up, and build systems and communities that hold the nurturing of the young as their central tenet?

What would happen if our largest driver wasn’t economics but healthy people and a healthy planet, because of course, it’s all connected. We couldn’t build a world around mother-child relationships without acknowledging the earth as mother of us all.