The Geology of Motherhood

Standing over the kitchen sink, I'm scrubbing a pile of rocks and watching pond scum whirl down the drain.

If you’d asked me a decade ago, with a full term baby nestled in my belly, how many rocks my kids would bring into the house, I would not have told you a story about standing over a sink full of muddy rocks.

I would not have told stories about my kids filling their pockets with quartz, weighing down their backpacks with limestone, weighing down my backpack with granite, and hauling giant fossils to the car after a hike. 

I might have told you about the “pizza rock,” the seashell geode, and the fossilized brain coral (because, if I’m honest, I love a good geological find), but I would not have told you about our system for when the rocks come home (which is often).

I would not be unloading backpacks and pockets, carrying armfuls of rocks to the sink, and scrubbing them clean, nor would I be setting them on towels on the kitchen counter to dry. I would not be adding them to tidy piles at the bottom of the stairs so my kids could find homes for them on dusty shelves and castoff tupperware either.

But here we are: a house full of rocks and a pile sitting at the bottom of the stairs.

“Can you come and get your rocks, please?” I call up the stairs to my budding geologists.

Three little people drift downstairs and I settle a minor altercation over who collected which rock. They back up their claims with stories. Someone tells me about how they found this one where the four year old dropped her granola bar and someone else is certain it came from the place we stopped for a water break after we reached the pond. Someone tells me they found this one on the day they caught a fish, but not the fish they caught with the pink lure, and that one on the day we had pizza for dinner. We distribute the rocks, and they find space in overflowing collections.

Later that afternoon, the rocks are tucked away upstairs, the fight is settled, and I’m standing over the kitchen sink again, washing dishes now instead of rocks. My mind wanders to the hike where today’s pile originated, in a swath of wilderness a few hours north of the city.

***

Away from the sidewalks and buses and smog, we scramble over an eroded and worn ancient mountain range. Walking in the late summer sunlight, we empty water bottles, stop to scale boulders, and (of course) collect rocks. I feel myself anchored to the earth and tumbling through time with each step across this weathered rock, back to the day it was born.

At first, tapping into the modest geological knowledge I’ve been collecting since my own days of overflowing childhood rock collections, I guess the rock is igneous. Fashioned from cooling molten rock. Granite. A composite of minerals whose names I can’t remember. 

But that’s only the beginning of the story.

Next, buried deep in the earth, subjected to intense heat and pressure, the minerals separate and reorganize themselves into pink, white, and black bands. The rock is metamorphic. Transformed. Granite into gneiss.

After metamorphosis, tectonic plates shift, and the rock makes its debut above the surface. Its rugged peaks are even more beautiful than they were before.

Tumbling a little closer to the present, the jagged peaks are transformed again, this time into rolling hills. Glaciers scrape them bare and smooth, depositing soil in low-lying pockets that now hold ponds and trees, and leaving pale pink domes peeking out of the earth.

I run my fingers along the small ridges etched in the surface of one of these domes. Looking closer, I trace the direction of the retreating glaciers that carved them into the rock. I scan boulders in the distance that don’t seem to belong, the ones dropped as the glacier melted, when they were too heavy to be carried anymore. They’re strewn across the rocky, battered hills like Lego sprinkled on the kitchen floor.

Scattered across the surface, streaks of white snake through the rocky hills, breaking up their usual banded pattern, and sparkling in the afternoon sunlight. Someone wants to know if we’ve found diamonds. Someone identifies a vein of quartz. Someone tries to chip off a piece of the milky mineral for her collection and can’t; the quartz is even harder than the rock around it.

I tell my girls her story now, a tale of ancient rock cracking under intense pressure. A tale of dissolved minerals seeping into her cracks and hardening again, healing her. A tale of the earth’s grace and mercy. A crystalline scar.

The little people are more interested in how much space is left in the bulging side pockets of their backpacks than they are in this rock’s ancient stories, but with every rock they stuff into the stretchy mesh, they add her stories to their collections.

They think they’re only collecting rocks, but I know they’re also collecting stories.

And I am in awe of it all.

It’s kind of how I feel when I tiptoe into dark, silent bedrooms and peer over bed rails into the faces of sleeping children who are clearly not babies anymore.

I feel myself tumbling through time, back to the days when my motherhood was born. I feel the stories we’re enacting as we live together, learn together, endure pandemics together. I feel weathered and worn, scraped bare and scarred. I feel the things that were too heavy to carry but that I carried as long as I could anyway. I feel the swirling transformation and the cracks and the healing and sometimes even the beauty. I feel mercy and grace. I feel the crystalline scars, whiter than snow. I feel the stories my little people are collecting and adding to their own collections.

Sometimes I forget I’m only talking about rocks.

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This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Novel."