 Hello and welcome back. I hope you've had good lunches, some time to think and sort of process all the sort of thoughts, emotions, etc. that we've been feeling all morning. It was a brilliant morning, and it's going to be an equally brilliant afternoon. So I know we're still waiting for a few people, but I think we'll start now because we have a speaker, Cary Knee-Dockarty, who's going to be giving a talk called Fog and Milk in Glass, etc. Cary Knee-Dockarty is a mother and writer from the Northwest of Ireland, now living in Clare. She writes about nature, literature and place for the Guardian, the Irish Times, the BBC and other outlets. Her first book, Thin Places, was published by Canon Gate in 2021 and has been described as holding the reader in place between two contrasting genres, Nature Writing and Troubles Memoir. Her second book, Cacophony of Bone, is coming out in May 2023 with Canon Gate as well, and I'm really intrigued to hear your talk. Thanks very much for having me. It is so beautiful to be here with you this weekend. I am honoured and meeting with you has been a more important step in my own journey with motherhood than I can really explain. I am going to explore a little the fog and the milk and the glass of this wild, bruising, beautiful land. I will speak of fertility struggle, pregnancy, suicidal ideation, peyandy, grief, love and worry. You're welcome and loved here, no matter your story, but should you wish to leave for any reason, whatever, those things remain the same. You're welcome and you're loved and your experience matters so, so much. If I make this room, this dialogue unsafe, I am not only sorry, but I will do my utmost to unlearn any inbuilt prejudices I have internalised and do better. We all need so much doing better. How do we write of these foggy, ever-shifting, isolating times? These times that, despite it all, can still fill us with joy, with the hope that all will be well, how could it not be? We are living through innumerable crises affecting women disproportionately. To mother through such times is an act of something I am not sure anyone quite has the words for, but I am aching, I am desperate to hear them. What is a mother? It is a verb, surely. It is the doing, so much doing. Doing that research is only recently beginning to explain, can change the insides and outsides of a person forever. A kind of doing, a kind of caring, a kind of nurturing, a kind of protecting, a kind of holding that we are finally beginning to understand can be done by any of us, in many different circumstances, in a plethora of shapes, sizes and colours. But if mother is also a nine, it looks quite different to what I have been raised to hold it as. If mother is a nine, it is a seed, one I grow more confident we all hold within us with every day that passes by. If mother is a nine, it is a garden, one that every single one of us may tend to. Is it preposterous to suggest that open understanding dialogue around this world could change this world? Our society has a very particular relationship with its mothers and its babies. We are asked there still to live in darkened corners in myriad ways as mothers. And for those who do not have children either through choice or not, they too are still held away from view. Another darkened corner, always with the darkened corners. Why have we still not learned how to hold each other close? How to make room at the potting table for everyone? To listen to all the voices that make up this wild, varied, aching mother garden. How might we move forward from here? How might we learn to honour this ancient, many-layered, ever-ebbing and flowing thing within our society? I read recently that mother is one of the oldest words in existence, older even than the word mourner, mourner, and it affected me so deeply. A word so old, so integral to the fact of our human being, yet we still can't seem to allow the room to grow the way it is asking us to, the way we need. We are living through a very particular season right now, no matter what our individual story. We each are experiencing a kind of metamorphosis as a species that I am unsure we have any of us ever really known before. Writers, artists, activists, carers. So many voices are coming together in harmony to speak of the difficulties they are experiencing, how fraught their everyday reality has become. I have, like so many of us, a very delicate and heavy relationship with the word mother. I have been on both sides of that invisible border society puts up so readily for women, the one that keeps us apart. I spent a decade and a half trying to make peace with not being a mother, not through choice, to find myself in a global pandemic, suddenly and unsettlingly pregnant. I was so full of gratitude, but I was too so confused, so scared, so anxious, so alone. The years have passed in a haze of matter essence and all that that has held. I am finally coming through the fog of severe PND and have started to understand that this loneliness is something that we are all feeling to an increasing and terrifying level. Many of the women I speak with, mothers of a wide range, those who do not have children either through choice or not, those who have lost, something I am hearing over and over and echoey keen is how alone we all feel, how strong the desire for community, the need for connection, the ache for a safe space in which we all might meet. When I fell pregnant, all I wanted to do was come here to St Ives. It is a place I have been drawn to since the very beginning of this journey through the unknown landscape of which we are all thinking and talking this weekend. Long drawn to the work of Barbara Hepworth, to the light she and others were drawn to, to the blue, blue sea and all its soothing, listening, holding ways. I would come here alone to try to remember who I was, the who I was that I felt society could not make peace with. I found peace here, deep rooted and friends found it odd that I would speak of the comfort Hepworth's works of mothering delivered to me. Being in her garden, surrounded by her work, her sleeping space, her views, etc. Let me in on a part of her I felt whether correctly or not existed long before and would exist long after the act of her becoming a mother. I felt back then, and I still do now, that she was a mother, yes of course she was, but I was that mother too. I felt she opened up space inside me too, like her breath filled, light filled structures, I felt safe there. I felt welcome there, I felt useful and creative, and I felt like the mother I now understand I always was. I always will be, no matter what may have changed in my personal circumstance, art does that you see, doesn't it? It reminds us, it returns us, it challenges and unravels us. It allows us to see in ways that the world often tries to stop. In bringing me into her inner space, Hepworth cleared the space for me to properly and honestly see my own. I couldn't come here to St Ives, in fact I could not go anywhere past two kilometres of a small isolated cottage for most of the period of growing another person inside a body I'd been repeatedly told could not do such a thing. I was overwhelmed, the trauma of childhood poking out at every turn I took, and so I turned from afar to Hepworth again, and the thing that kept coming to me over and over was her place in the world outside. The way she inhabits the landscape, she is the landscape, and I turned in turn to the small stretch of land outside my isolated home. I asked myself over and over, what does it mean to tend a garden? To tend a garden is to remove, to take away so much more than we could ever imagine to make room for all that still will come. Growing is about order, it strikes me, about the intentional clearing of space by cutting things back. To tend a garden is to free ourselves from the things we long have known should have no place in our lives and in our days and in our gardens. I wish I'd known long before now that sowing is a way to grieve. As hands scatter seed into earth beneath feet, they are really sculpting loss. With careful repeated movements, the hands are moulding it into a thing like light on stone. Derek Jarman, Virginia Woolf, Alice Oswald, William Morris, Jamaica Kincaid, Barbara Hepworth. Everyone I am drawing, everyone I am drawn to is a gardener, although I think I only realised it in the first year of the pandemic. Back then I was beginning slowly to make peace with my then-childlessness. Picture this moment in the bright light of spring as I was learning for the first time in my life to sow seeds into the earth. My closest friend sends me words that feel like the only words I might ever need again for the rest of my days. Written on an envelope that holds her own words inside. Lovingly jotted down in between the giving of love, the wiping of tears, the boiling of blood oranges, the movement of small, tired limbs that make up her day. Love needs no planting, it is sown by seed. These envelope words are by Louise Erdreich from a book called The Blue Jays Dance. I Google it, having heard of it before, but not ever having encountered it to find it is a book about mothering. Of course it is. I promise myself that I will read it, no matter how hard it may be, that I will let go of the idea that there is constantly some gathering to which I have not been invited. I know so deep inside me that I can't separate it from my guts that this is not the way motherhood works. I know I belong there too, and to some extent we all do. Every single one of us belongs in that wild garden. As night begins to fall the daytime colours of the place begin to loosen around the edges and the colours of the night begin to spread out their long limbs. As the earth and the sky of this strange shifting place begin to name their unfamiliar hues, I give in to sleep and I find myself in a bright, walled garden full of colour and what might at first be mistaken for silence. It is late summer. Birds with quiet regularity are moving about the space here to there and back again. Everywhere nests, everywhere creatures, everywhere light. Trees sway softly in a breeze, only just there. I realise as I try to navigate the dreams boundaries that this garden is, to put it simply, my everything. This garden is the nests that came and stayed, the light that came and stayed. This garden is the garden right outside my door. This garden is the making of me. I just don't really know how to word it. The language around motherhood, babies, the whole foggy, limitless, unknown doesn't feel like it quite delivers. There is something not right, something lacking, something amiss. This is a thing I am still learning how to navigate, if I'm honest. The fact that things are rarely black and white, despite me having spent most of a lifetime growing up around that narrative. I wrote, I tried to write for many years about it all, about the way that sometimes I felt like I had to justify the way I felt or I didn't feel about motherhood. Not motherhood in general, only my own decisions. The language around it all left me lost, seasick. It's centred so fully around lack, around loss, around the not having. Black and white, black and white, black and white. The reality is though, that that is far from true in any lived experience. Now, still, I feel a little at sea. I am joyful, ecstatic beyond words and feel I am expected to say so. I am over the silvery grey moon, but these are not the only feelings that work inside me. There's far too much going on in there to compartmentalize. I am scared, so scared about being a mother. For this is a process that I am confident has not ended, has not ended by the six week checkup that didn't happen anyway. I don't know where to turn, in memory or in person, to find the way through. What is a mother? What do they look like? What does this word mean? It is surely a verb, is it not? How will I know the high and when, the where and why? Who will show me the what of it all? I don't know if it's something to do with the algorithm or if my phone has been listening to my conversations, but soon Instagram begins targeting me with posts about motherhood and traumatic memories. I am widening out my net. Maternal memory now has a tight grip on my mind and on my phone, and I cannot reel it back in. I begin to think about time and how it plays out in pregnancy and motherhood and not. I am only two years in, but already I have begun to understand that all I thought I knew of time was wrong. Suddenly I find myself doing it all so differently. The measuring of, the marking of, the holding of time. No, not all days are created equally. Not all weeks, not all months, all years. No, the hours do not add up the same way in all the days that each of us is given. No, the way it ticks and talks, ebbs and flows, flies and drags and all of that is simply not a given. It is simply not a regimented constant thing to be held up to the light taken as exemplary. I am not living in the everyday you see, none of us are. I am not living in the flow that I have long been filled into believing is real, normal. Will I experience time and memory, the elusive dance between the two differently at every stage from now on? Will we all? Will either of the two go back to feeling how they did before the world changed shape entirely? I read everything I can about the science behind all this, forgotten names, sense of nights stretching out, days losing any sense of individuality and so on and so on, but it still blows my mind and I am not equipped. I read that a mother's brain in the 40 days following delivery is nothing short of incredible, that the logical, rational thinking part of her brain, the prefrontal cortex goes offline, diverting her mental energy, et cetera, et cetera, the part of the brain responsible for emotions, empathy, nurturing. This is called synaptic pruning. These new brain processes through which the mother learns to love and care for her newborn baby, in effect these 40 days after birth are viewed as being the most important and impactful on a mother and baby's brains for both of their lifetimes. No pressure then, of course. What does all of this do to the way a mother finds herself in the world? Where are our rituals, our guiding lights, our way markers through this landscape? What does it mean to hope in such times as these? Morning traditions, the sea, boat building, the healing power of the ash tree, a woman in their full power from maidenhood to crownhood, with motherhood only one part of this circle, where has our ceremony gone? Where have all our rituals gone? Those that once held the power to steer us through the transitions and non-transitions, we are now left to navigate alone. What might it mean to focus on the sowing of seeds of hope in the face of such individual, isolated collective despair? How might we clear space in the middle of such harrowing loss to start anew from our centre? Despair keeps us harboured. I feel as if we are being called to the open sea, to action that will carry us far from what we deem as safe, and perhaps it is time to listen to that call. I still feel unsafe in motherhood, and the only way I can see that changing is through togetherness. On St Bridget's Day, I reached out to my followers on Instagram, a huge proportion of whom or mothers, asking for those who felt comfortable in sharing their experiences of mothering or not to contact me. I had begun to feel cold towards the kind of book I never imagined I might ever try to write, a book of, for and by mothers. I have already arranged dozens of interviews. My main wish is to share the whole story of mothering, many of whose chapters have long been hidden from view. Interwoven throughout the text will be individual stories, from those who have chosen not to mother, to those who have lost, those whose personal experience we might not often hear, those who have something to share about mothering that makes for vital listening for every single one of us. A small inexhaustible list of what has come up in these conversations. Fog, confusion, lack of choice, depression, isolation, macho essence, loss, loss of self, loss of others, loss of place, loss of direction, milk. How do we nourish our mothers? On being a mammal, unpaid labour, capitalism, body as map, sustenance, support, glass, what do we see when we look in the mirror? What do others see? Identity, dreams, relationships between species, human and non, shards, glimmers, reflections, shine, etc. Where do we go from here? Where has the village gone? How do we come back together? How do we get back to that place? All of us gather light. I have begun to view mothering as a revolutionary, mindful path. A path that I observe people of such varied individual stories walking with grace, humility, wisdom, grief and love. I have begun to understand mothering as a song that calls for so many voices, oh so many voices, oh these exquisite, achingly tender voices. I have begun to view mothering as an act of repair. Let me take you to another garden, another time, another part of this journey. Two women, an artist and a writer, a generation and an invisible country border apart. An Airbnb booking that started a healing journey unlike any I've ever known. I'd returned to work the day he turned two weeks. As an artist, the only source of income in our home, I had no choice. I tell myself this each time mother guilt rears its ugly artful head. It was me and the outside world was bright and new and fiercely unknown. His father took him in a pale gray carrier strapped to his body as loosely as he could while still holding him securely in place. I thought of all the other mammals I had ever known, those I'd seen in real life and other lives. I thought of what it means to carry another creature of the responsibility that comes with attaching a small, wholly dependent body to your own and going about your day as though there were nothing untoward at all about this. For there isn't, of course, we are told this is entirely the natural order of things as a mammal. When I left my young son and his dad heading up the lane towards a derelict house, I logged on to my Zoom call. The person he was providing technical support asked us if we were sitting where we would take the call from and we all answered yes. Then she asked me if I had any other windows open and I told her that no. Unfortunately given the size of our small home there was only the one window in this room. The four other people on the call erupted in fits of laughter. It took me too long to understand why and even when I did some of the other details had turned hazy. When I think back on the call itself all I remember is the worry that my milk might be leaving white circles on my navy dress. When my son came back I cried and I cried and I cried and I knew I was not safe in my own body and that I needed something very specific to drag me back. I knew we could not go to St Ives so I started to search for somewhere similar in any way comparable and I found it, I found her a grey stone house flanked by cardoon and borage alike and look all around the sea, the sea, the sea. And just above it the quiet unassuming sky and all its vastness. Look, here our pale not quite pistachio green windowsills and doors faded by wind and time and salt alike. Poppies, pinker than I had ever thought could exist in this life. A bright dandelion yellow bench with calendula that almost exactly matches and seed potatoes waiting to be sown. And here our sunsets so beautiful they would make you weep with it all with every last bit of it until you understand that there is so much more than peachy strips of light across a wild Atlantic sky to give a new mother ample reason to find herself for the umpteenth time that day, bawling her eyes out. Here is a stone sculpture looking out over the wild Atlantic Ocean a circle cut through, a space made for healing. Here is the garden of another artist, another woman another woman who has known deep loss the Irish artist Finola Graham. Here she is working, making and remaking and allowing me to rent her small space to supplement her income as an Irish female artist. And here is my first postpartum time away my first attempt to find my way back up from the place that I have been buried. And here is Fogg. How old is Fogg? Where was it born? And what about silence? Fogg is, as weather phenomenons go, a fairly new kid on the block. Claims have been made that the Fogg of our imagination was born at the same time as the books of Charles Dickens. Sure, there had been a thick, sooty change in the air for a decade or two beforehand, but critics reckon the thing we call Fogg only reached maturity in the 1840s. It was born the Fogg we know in London. It killed the people of that place by their thousands. I remember reading years ago that more people die by suicide on full moon nights than any other night of the month. It makes sense to me that this truth would apply to in times of unrelenting Fogg. But what about silence? Can the same be said of times when there simply is no space for the sound to get through? When the world feels drenched to its core in a thick, graying white silence, when we've forgotten how to make any of the noises that remind us who we are, her postnatal depression, their postnatal depression, your postnatal depression are not mine. I look and I listen and I try to marry them all up, but I can't. Your loss, my loss, your grief, my grief, all we can do is listen. I'm not ready yet to write down parts of this story, let alone make it into a short bullet point list, but I'll give myself one sentence, just. There was Fogg all day, every day, not gone long enough to say I trust that it's actually gone for good. I had hoped at this stage to try and explain the Fogg a little more, why it mattered so much, the role I felt it kept, the role I felt it played in keeping me here, but the truth is that Fogg, by its very nature, just doesn't allow that. This artist, this woman, this mother, this gardener, this swimmer, this gatherer of seaweed on a craggy coastline, this woman in her full mothering power, asks me to tell her about it all. She asks me to take my insights and make them visible, place them in this shared landscape and puncture them, let the light and our breath enter in, and suddenly the world changes in ways I will never fully understand. And so all I seem able to say is that I became a mother, but it wasn't all milk and honey. Somehow it was mostly all glass and Fogg, in a world so shaped by white male colonial violence and the breakdown of communities it has caused, so keen on dividing and separating and keeping us apart, to lean into the arms of the women around us feels the ultimate act of revolution, a means to change the world. We are more interwoven than we are led to believe, finally and delicately, the seeds of many varied individual beautiful flowers in one garden. Irene Solat in her exquisite book, when I sing, mountains, dance, writes, the flesh of one is the flesh of us all, the memories of one are the memories of us all, the darkness like an embrace, protective, welcoming, the earth like a blanket, like a mother, black, damp. We are all mothers here. We have always been, we will always be, no matter what our story looks like on the outside. We are welcome here in this garden, in this muck and in this beauty, in this loss and in this love. We are all mothers here. Thank you so much, Kerry. This is a fantastic talk. And I think one of the things that really struck me about your talk is also being a little bit different to all the things we've heard so far, is really thinking about the spectrum of motherhood and what it means to be, to not to be after being. It's not necessarily all the things that you're given to believe that it can be. And I was wondering if you might speak to us a little bit more about the book that you mentioned and what kind of, you know, how do you encompass so many voices? And is it also to the past? Is it historical? Is it ethnographic? Yeah, so that's a really good question. And initially I felt like maybe I needed to give this kind of, so the book is in process of being written and it's, like I mentioned, it's aiming to just generally make space for voices that we maybe don't often hear. And like for a long time when I was thinking about writing, I was thinking, oh gosh, I don't know enough. I need to go into all of this huge research and place the book in this like line of really incredibly important, ever-growing documentation. And then I realized that actually that's not the kind of book that I feel is not available at the moment. I feel like that potentially is a different book. And there's something about, like someone mentioned earlier, that the language around this really delicate topic is still being formed. Like we don't necessarily know inside us even what way we feel more comfortable with people talking to us. Like I certainly don't know fully what my own view is, like what triggers me changes from day to day. And that's as someone who's dealt with like childhood abuse, estrangement as well as a journey into mothering that didn't look necessarily like the people around me. And so I suppose that this book is, I don't feel that this book is going to have any kind of real historical context. And I feel like the important thing for me right now is like where we're at right now. And we kind of have a sense of like why we've ended up here. And that's written about quite freely. Like the consumer based capitalist society that created this sort of concept of what the family looked like and the move away from community based living. We kind of know it. If we don't know it, we sort of know where to go to find it. But I feel like the stories of what people have experienced are the thing that I certainly didn't feel like I was experiencing enough. And the last sort of really in the last 20 years. So, no. Yeah. And I think also thinking personally and reflecting what you've just said, I think the part of the spectrum is also not being mothered like as somebody who is estranged hasn't been mothered or also by choice, by choice of somebody else. You look towards sort of aspects of other mothers for people who sort of mother you in ways that maybe to them isn't mothering, but to you as a big deal. And so I think it was quite as curious when you were talking about different kinds of mothering. How do you sort of think of different kinds of mothering without trivializing the act of giving birth, act of being a kind of mother by nature? That's a really interesting, deep reflection. And I'm not sure and I'm still learning. So I'm still really open to where I myself will be led by the people that I'm encountering. And I think something that I'm finding and I'm pretty sure some of the other artists, some of the actual real life artists have talked about this is just like sometimes you don't know where you can't see at that time where the work is situated and people can see it really clearly. And I suppose it's something that like there was a post that went up by a female writer on Mother's Day. And I don't follow the writer, but a friend of mine who suffered loss of her son just a few weeks after birth sent it to me and said like what's your response to this post? The post was about basically it was I don't want to you can check yourself but I don't want to paraphrase but it was something along the lines of this is Mother's Day and we've been silenced for a long time as mothers and I see all these trigger warning posts but actually we should just be able to say right we're mothers and this is it's hard and we just get this one day of the year so why shouldn't we get to have it? And the responses the comment section were just like I find it really harrowing in a way that I hadn't really been expecting a social media post to be able to hold that level of power over me. And it's just that sort of typical like as a mother like you know as a father of daughters you know this sort of dialogue around because it really it really got me thinking about the fact that like it's scarcity ideology and so I come from Ireland as you can probably hear and there is still within the Irish landscape a huge like Irish social landscape a huge element of like the toxicity that can surround like victim mentality it's part of intergenerational trauma that's really being looked into hugely in Ireland and about Ireland and yeah the post sort of I'm blithering but the post sort of really left me thinking about how that potentially this topic of motherhood and otherhood holds the most ability to separate us out but actually at this because of that at the same time holds the most power to actually bring us together and I'd never I'd never viewed it that way before until that post just that sense of like here was hundreds of comments of people the most of the comments were mothers being like thank you for saying this like I've been struggling with this and whatever and then you had the occasional little comment being like I've actually found this post like the most triggering of all like you know that the honest little voice that the rare seed in that whole kind of dialogue and I suppose I'm not sure if I've made this clear enough but what I think what I'm trying to say is that we just because we don't have the words or language for something doesn't mean that we just put our head on the ground like there's something really important about for me about like being open to being just so wrong just just sitting with that wrongness and just like not entering into like well you know like which is so normal not normal common or instinctual and like I felt like for a while like scared about writing about elements of mothering and not mothering and and like what if I get it wrong and actually that doesn't really serve anybody you know because this event is just like amazing for like conversations that just take us out of that like call us out to sea because I think you know a ship in a harbor that's saying of like yeah but ships aren't really meant to be in harbours like supposed to be out doing the work on the open sea and I feel like this feels like being at work on the open sea. This actually takes me really well into my next question that was going to be about Instagram and algorithms because I'm really curious as you've talked already here about this post so there's posts and kind of comments so there's kind of that that element to it. There's a little bit of what Sarah said in an introduction to Hetty's talk yesterday about you know sort of making that kind of political space or almost a space of activism but there's also the algorithm deciding for you what you should see whether it should be sort of fertility tests ads for fertility tests or whether it should be ads for you know happy family. It's very sort of we've been talking in the last panel about triggers and sort of language and how you sort of speak about these things and also how does how do algorithms speak to you I think is a really and can artificial intelligence you know in that sense be sensitive should it should we even be asking these questions yeah I'm really curious. I think we should totally be asking these questions because I feel like that's this really well I know like for me personally that was a really important part of me grappling with where I was at with on this journey and I shared with you at the very beginning Mel about how that I feel convinced that it was like what I was the more time I was spending on Instagram when I wasn't able to have baby the more I had like I realized that I built my own little kind of my own little glass house of all these like perfect families with like perfect mothers they were all creative they were all in and around my age they were all into the same things as me and I just watched one by one as they just had babies and as their feed just became you know beautifully created like kind of Steiner type like Waldorf he wouldn't toys and like sorry I like I miss out I was I'm a train Steiner teacher there's not like I'm criticizing but like a very particular unlike they all went on holidays to particular places and it was that very very particular and visual life like that's what I was giving myself day in day out and I noticed when I went to places where like I didn't say if I didn't have signal in parts of Ireland if I went away with work it deaf not being on Instagram for a prolonged time period definitely did affect how I interacted with my like grief and my sense of identity and so I know it's different now Instagram works in a different way anyway and you often don't see people that you follow but I do think like I don't have a clue about algorithms but what I do know is that there is definitely a conversation that needs to happen around the visual world and it's enter I don't want to say interference it's like enter whatever interconnection with our like lived actual lived reality and I loved what Melanie said about how like being the experience of making the video and then like the thought of watching it afterwards is just that sense of yeah like a sense of othering from your own self I suppose as well today. Yeah exactly and I was reflecting back to Melanie's talk as well in terms of thinking about standing I think you said something about standing with company and grieving in company etc and like what that company means when it's in a virtual platform and it's curated it's a curated visual platform versus actually being at the sea with people and they're both communities and they can both be really helpful in different ways but there is a stark difference I think.