Why I Wrote ‘The Maternal Element’
by Kate Nicholls
Four years ago, I had never heard of Maria Mendeleeva, Dmitry Mendeleev’s mother. Wanting to bring a class on the Periodic Table to life, I searched for stories about Mendeleev’s childhood and stumbled upon a short article about his mother written by the Australian chemist Alf Larcher. From across centuries, I felt a connection that resonated so deeply with me, I had to find out more about this courageous woman with a large family.
Reading a rare compilation of Mendeleev family letters was like reading my family’s WhatsApp thread: intimate, loving, repetitive, encouraging, funny, tender and deeply domestic. At times I laughed out loud – for, like me, Maria was not one to hold back her feelings – what she would have done with an emoji! I identified with her hair-tearing, maternal, financial and domestic anxieties, but when life threw her seemingly insurmountable challenges, she rolled up her sleeves and made a plan. She was a woman of action. She was a woman I wanted to get to know, and so I spent the next four years exploring her world and searching for answers to questions left in the gaps in her history. There are gaps in all our stories. They are what make getting to know ourselves and others so fascinating.
Maria Mendeleeva suspected her youngest son Dmitri might be a genius – she didn’t live to learn that she was right. When he constructed his version of the Periodic table, his genius was expressed in question marks. In a cosmic leap of shivering wonder, he knew unknown elements were waiting to be discovered – he knew what their atomic weight would be, and their position in the table. He simply reserved their place with a question mark. Gaps are powerful spaces rich in unanswered questions.
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Maria’s and my cultural, historical and geographic contexts were worlds apart, but we shared common ground. We each raised large families in challenging elemental environments – she in Siberia and I in the African wilderness. She was a self-educated, passionate life-long learner– so am I. She home-schooled her children– so did I. She was frustrated by socio-political gender oppression – so am I. She found solace in science and nature – so do I. She found friendship in her books – so do I. While raising her children, she hungered for intellectual challenges that would lift her out of the constraints of domestic life – so did I. She felt guilty about that – oh yes indeed, so did I. She made errors of judgement while raising her children and deeply regretted them – ditto squared! And most importantly, she and I loved our many children unconditionally and with a burning sense of purpose.
Events are the antagonists in her story: “Life is unparsimonious when meting out misfortune.” Maria and her husband Ivan learned that only too well. The challenges they encountered were moral, socio-political, physical, elemental and emotional. Their diverse response to grief briefly drove them apart, but the energy powering the Mendeleev story is connective and loving.
Raised by a devoted father and her fierce, proud Nanny, Maria found her voice, albeit clumsily, during her childhood. Her frustration that she was not allowed to attend school due to her sex resulted in her lifelong, rebellious hunger for learning. When Maria married Ivan, she was fearlessly optimistic and sixteen. He was twenty-five, a teacher and already a measured, thoughtful man. Maria was inspired by his radical, egalitarian approach to education, and it determined the trajectory of family life. Their marriage was a dynamic, evolving relationship rooted in shared values. Was it perfect? Of course not, and that’s what makes their journey so interesting. I grew to admire the men in Maria’s life as profoundly as I admired her.
Was Maria an activist? In today’s terms, no. Her life was her activism, and I was inspired by how she faced a litany of challenges so similar to the ones we face today: being a working parent, mental and physical illness, death, fires, penuary, and all the while maintaining an unstinting determination to be a proactive parent, partner and employer. Did she break? Yes. She had seventeen children, of whom eight survived. Coping with the deaths of babies and an older child traumatised her, and her recovery was rooted in her animal instinct. Though our circumstances were different, we share a similar emotional journey.
Today, many of us are facing the personal and domestic consequences caused by major shifts in the political environment. Two hundred years ago, the Mendeleev family were similarly impacted by a rapid rise in authoritarianism.
Maria Mendeleeva’s dramatic story mirrors our own in multiple ways, and telling her story has been an honour.
KATE NICHOLLS is an author, biologist, liberal arts homeschool teacher, feminist, mother of five, and grandmother of five. She hails from a theatrical family and enjoyed a successful acting career before choosing to study evolutionary biology. She was mentored by Richard Dawkins. She moved to Botswana to raise her children in a developing country and worked for Women Against Rape before moving into the wilderness to research lions in the Okavango Delta for over a decade. During this time, she homeschooled her four younger children in a tented camp, with no access to the internet. They wrote a book, The Lion Children, published by Orion in 2001, about their life among the lions. Her children graduated from ‘lion school’ to universities in the States and Europe. Kate’s passion for independent lifelong learning led her to establish an educational consultancy specialising in homeschooling and developing bespoke curricula. Her memoir Under the Camelthorn Tree was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 2019.
The Maternal Element is her first novel and is being published by Salt Publishing in 2026.
