Carol Black

18. Broody

They call it the story of the goose who laid the golden eggs, but it’s not the goose’s story: it’s the story of the man who kills her. A story, they say, of greed. The man, rapacious in his desire for more and ever more, is not content with the single golden egg she lays each day; he takes his knife and slices her open, to get at the whole gold motherlode inside her. But to his grief the only treasure he reveals is a warm beating heart, warm blood flooding into the soil. 

And thus is his lesson learned –– and hers, unthought of.

The tragedy of the goose, of course, felt from inside her body, her mind, begins with the fact that the eggs are gold. Instead of warm tremulous goslings nestling close to her heart, sweet goslings paddling merrily behind her on the water, she produces each day an inert lump of metal. Each day I feel her hoping, searching her new egg for signs of life; each day fresh grief to find it dead and cold. She feels nothing when the man takes the thing away. She feels nothing when he approaches with the knife.

In truth her tragedy begins earlier, when she is born into a dank barn to produce her eggs, her body, for his use. It begins with her mother, her grandmother, her great-grandmothers for generations born behind dark walls with cracks of light leaking through, fenced inside barnyards rank with dung to scrabble for thrown grain in the dust or muck. It begins with eggs stolen and wings clipped. It begins in a green sea of marsh grass aglow with soft morning fog, it begins with gliding on cold cloud-pearled waters, it begins with diving for small silvered fish and nameless morsels in black silt pungent with life. It begins with flight. It begins with powerful wings made to traverse entire continents by air, river to river, lake to lake, carving the sky in dark lines of wild sisters and brothers following their mother home –– before whatever demon dredged and filled the seamarsh, what monster built the dark walls, what ogre stole the eggs and clipped the tender wings.

Brooding

1. Persistent morbid meditation on a problem

2. Sitting on eggs so as to hatch them by the warmth of the body

3. Settled; rooted; fixed in the heart: a figurative use derived from the steadfastness with which a bird sits on her eggs.

When a bird is determined to hatch her eggs, they call her broody. A broody hen is a fierce thing, a darkness, she hunkers down on her eggs and plucks out her own feathers to bring her heart-heat closer to them. If you try to take her eggs away she will peck your fucking eyes out if she can.  

In wild birds, Wikipedia tells us, broodiness is a natural thing; in many species both males and females brood their young. The urge is triggered by prolactin, the same hormone that triggers lactation in humans. Commercial poultry breeders, of course, have their own views of this:

5 Tips to “Break” Your Hen of Broodiness

1. First, remove her eggs as soon as possible after she lays them. You may want to protect your eyes and arms with goggles and heavy gloves when you do this.

2. Cage your hen away from her nest box or other natural nesting sites.

3. If necessary, use a cage with a wire bottom and no soft surfaces anywhere for her to settle on.

4. If all this doesn’t “break” her, try slipping a few ice cubes under your hen to cool her underside and make the nest uncomfortable. 

5. As an alternative to ice cubes, dunk the hen’s underparts in cold water.

NOTE: Some experts feel that options 4 and 5 are inhumane.

The week after my baby died, my new job started. The truth is, I hadn’t told them I was pregnant when I applied for the job, out of fear of discrimination; I was only four months along when I interviewed. So when I reported for work, nobody knew I had just had a baby, and of course nobody knew she had died. In a haze I toured the English department building, saw the classrooms I was assigned to, and met the other new adjuncts and some of the permanent faculty.

After hiding my pregnancy, a part of me wanted to un-hide it, but another part didn’t know how to. It seemed easier to say nothing. 

I was still unmaking all the preparations I had made for the birth. After pumping to increase milk production, I had to pump to decrease milk production, at first just enough to ease the engorgement, then a little bit less, then less, then less, then none. After arranging for daycare, I had to un-arrange the daycare. To get our deposit back, I had to tell them the reason why we wanted it back, and then wait while they decided if they would accept the reason. They said they would refund our check if I would bring a copy of the death certificate. So I had to stand at the daycare center, watching all the other mothers and babies arrive, while the administrator reviewed Eva’s death certificate and the daycare workers peeled babies, wailing, frantic, desperately clutching, off their mothers’ bodies. One cried so hard she threw up. Others didn’t seem to care.

At my six week postpartum checkup I sat in the waiting room as pregnant women came and went. I had not seen or heard from my obstetrician since the day in the delivery room. The golden boy had gone completely AWOL, dropped off the face of the earth, as soon as it was clear that I had marred his perfect record. He’s afraid of a lawsuit, my chattering brain said, stating the obvious. The silent brain just stared at the huge and gaping vacuum at the core of this man.

I flipped through a magazine called Working Motherhood, past articles about sleep training and postpartum yoga and diets to lose your pregnancy weight, and stopped at a photo of a woman in a business suit, sobbing. “THE GRIEF OF GOING BACK TO WORK,” the article was called. It explained that the scientific reason a new mother feels distress when she returns to work is that her body thinks the baby is dead. The complex hormonal cascade of birth — prolactin, oxytocin, corticotrophin-releasing hormone –– is evolutionarily geared to keep you near your little one; it makes you crave the touch of her skin, her warmth, her sweet weight, her smell, it makes you bear-fierce and ready guard her with your life. When you fuck with those hormones they will fuck with you, the article said, in so many words. You may be frantic, eaten up with agitation and unease, you may be swathed in clouds of confusion, or you may tumble headlong into that dragon-filled abyss we quaintly call “postpartum depression.” 

But instead of raising the obvious question –– What the fuck are we doing, and why? –– the article provided a handy list of “TEN TIPS TO HELP YOU COPE WITH GRIEF.” One involved a professional blow-dry and a manicure.

I stared at it for a little while, then put the magazine back on the rack.

I had always intended to be a working mother. I was raised for it; it was never a question. My own mother had been denied the opportunity to have a career, to put her considerable intellectual powers to use; of course I would seize the opportunities available to me. I would not get stuck, trapped, lost, discarded, the way she did. 

But as I moved through my new institutional setting, where nobody knew me well enough to know what had happened, the center began to slip. In our world you may spend all day working with people who don’t really know you; drop your children off and leave them with people who don’t know you; get doctored and nursed through your greatest life crises by people who don’t know you. The threads of contact with anybody who knows you seemed to be growing thinner, thinner, thinner, gone. I finally told my department head and a couple of co-adjuncts about Eva’s birth and death. They seemed sympathetic, if a little nonplussed. I guess I assumed they would tell the others, that word would get around, that people would be kind, and the disconnected, disembodied feeling would abate. 

But it turned out no one had much to say about it. It was hard to tell who was trying to be respectful, who hadn’t heard, who didn’t care. There can be an awkwardness, an embarrassment, a hush that arises in an organizational setting. The system has to keep running; a dead baby has no place in this. The body of the grieving mother, all fluids, tears, and blood, all stretched skin and softness, has no place in this. Under capitalism, after all, a woman, like a goose, or a man, is valued for what she can produce: not for herself, and certainly not for her children. I say this not in self-pity, but to be clear –– because nobody had made it clear to me –– under capitalism, even a “successful” woman is livestock. The system intends to milk her like a cow, and the first thing a milked cow must give up is her calf. 

If you look on YouTube you can find videos of mother cows running after the trucks that take their calves away. A man hoists the day-old baby, all knobby knees and fuzz, and dumps it in the truck like a thing already dead. He slams the tailgate shut. The truck begins to move. The mother moves with it, keeping close, picking up speed, trotting faster, lowing to her little one, her body touching the truck as she runs. 

“Humane” farms, they say, are coming up with “new, creative” modes of mother-calf separation, or “TEN TIPS TO HELP YOUR COW COPE WITH GRIEF.” One is called “fenceline weaning.” The mother cow and her calf are placed on opposite sides of a slatted metal fence. They cannot nurse, but they can touch noses, call to each other, breathe each other’s warm scent. Observers note they do still engage in the "anguished bellowing" typical of abrupt separation but state that “it’s over sooner than with conventional weaning.”

Another method involves a plastic nose flap that prevents the calf from reaching the teat to suckle. Some devices include small spikes that prick at the udder and lead the mother to push her baby away.

Keeping cow and calf happily together is quite possible, of course, but under capitalism this is rarely considered since it involves a 20% reduction in saleable product. Those advocating for it, of course, must not speak of the sorrow of cows but try to sell us on the economic benefits: “This reduction in yield can be seen as an investment in the health of the future herd, as the calves are healthier…” They grow faster, get fewer infections, have lower levels of stress and diarrhea, and, of course, have “reduced abnormal behavior” like “head butting, vocalising, and uncontrolled urinating.”

A question: how did we arrive at this moment in history, when a woman must choose between self and child? 

Did we agree to this? Was it made clear?  

The wild goose tends her sweet goslings and yet traverses entire continents by air.  

How did our wings get so clipped, our power so shorn? 

To understand some things you must go back, and back, and back. 

My deeper nightmare is Rumpelstiltskin. Gnarled shadow of my childhood fears, he comes to offer me a deal. I’ll have the power to create gold –– if I give him my child. Well, what’s so wrong with that, you ask? I had always planned to work after my baby was born; I had signed a contract, named my price. 

Did I understand what it was that I had sold?

For the woman in the story her problem begins before the birth of her child; it begins when her true craft, her gift, her work is no longer enough for father or king. It begins when they both want more and ever more, when spinning for warmth, or softness, or beauty, is no longer enough, when instead she must spin for gold. It begins with the king who will kill her if she doesn’t produce that gold. It begins with the creation of kings, with conquest and enslavement, slaughter and rape, commerce and trade, it begins when the boy-king is taught as a child to care only for power and gold, and nothing for life. 

It begins with the unthought of part of the story, the part that exists in darkness; with the birth of Rumpelstiltskin.

If you go back, and back, and back, you will find that this evil imp is the severed heart of the king, his sweet boy’s heart, severed and sent away, banished to a little house, high on a mountain, at the end of the forest, with a bright fire burning, far from palace and power. And with this severing, this separation, this brutal weaning, both king and kingdom become heartless and cold. And the heart, bereft, becomes stalker, trickster, predator, coming to seize your child.

Because after all: it is Rumpelstiltskin who is offered all the riches in the kingdom and says No:  

something alive is dearer to me than all the treasures in the world. 

My mind absorbed itself in work. My body, for its part, wanted only to be pregnant again. David and I drove all over town interviewing highly recommended Ivy-educated obstetricians and perinatologists. We sat before them like supplicants, our sorrowing hearts and our careful lists of questions in our hands, their framed degrees and board certifications staring down on us. My body’s silent question for each one was simply this: do you or do you not have a huge and gaping vacuum at the core of your being? It was the fairy tale test my body demanded; some proof of a heart not of gold but of warm beating blood. One after another, they failed the test, answering our questions with a cautious mix of clinical precision and studied vagueness, handling my medical history as though it were a slab of tainted fish and referring to our lost child as a “negative outcome.”  

When we went to see Dr. Hussein he sat across from us quietly leafing through the two inch thick hospital file while his eyes filled with tears. That was it for me. That and the fact that he had an impeccable reputation as an uber-chill medical hotshot who could get you and your baby safely through even the most hopelessly complicated pregnancy.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a believer in the routine imposition of Modern Science on the process of birth. “Small-s” science, like a thousand generations of midwives from all over the world, will tell you that a woman’s body has the innate power to bring life to full fruition with no intervention at all in almost every case. Almost. But there is Bad Shit that happens, and Dr. Hussein was the Emperor of Bad Shit. If a woman was carrying triplets and one of them died in utero, she came to him. If a woman got diagnosed with cancer while she was pregnant, she came to him. If a woman had preeclampsia or gestational diabetes or toxoplasmosis or oligohydramnios or a baby with hydrocephalus or spina bifida or a hypoplastic left heart she came to him. 

And if a woman had been specially marked out by a lightning bolt from the universe, if she didn’t deserve to be happy, if she was the kind of person who would always get caught––  

There was only one moment when I had reservations about Dr. Hussein. As our initial consultation drew to a close, he flatly told me to wait nine months before trying to get pregnant again. My body might be ready, he said, but my emotions were not. It was very bossy how he said that, I thought at the time. I wanted to be pregnant immediately if not sooner, to stay pregnant as it were, to fill myself with another baby so I would not drown in the spectral gray sea of emptiness that heaved and whispered inside me. 

But of course he was right, as later became obvious.  

“Eva, forever in our hearts,” said the little Christmas ornament stitched in needlepoint by the Parent Support Coordinator at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. A sentimental thought, you might think; a fanciful image, like cherubs floating in a cloudbank, to comfort the childless parent.

But it turns out that when a woman is pregnant, cells from her unborn child may migrate through the placenta into her body, into blood and muscle and skin, lungs and liver and kidneys; they may take up residence in her heart. Like stem cells that can transform as needed, they may become nerve cells in her brain, weaving themselves into her mind. It’s called microchimerism, after the ancient Greek Chimera, part serpent, part lion, part goat. A woman may have cells from her mother and grandmother as well as from each of her children. 

She is not one, but many.

Why does this feel like something we’ve always known, or should have known? 

“Forever in our hearts.” How precious, you may think, patronizingly, patriarchally. Then “small-s” scientists discover that in a mother rat with heart damage, microchimeric cells migrate to the heart and differentiate into heart cells to repair the damage. 

So when I tell you that Eva is with me, her heart in my heart, I am not being precious. And I will tell you another thing: from the moment I held her, from the moment I watched her heartbeat on the monitor synchronize with mine, I understood this:

We were not two, but one. 

After all these years, I can still feel it.

If you think that's unscientific, you can go fuck yourself.

Because in that moment, everything changed. I didn’t know it at first. It would take years before I understood, really, what had happened. 

But everything had shifted.

My mind kept circling back to it. I began to read, to look for answers. There was no internet then, so I turned to libraries and arcane catalogs of books. I read about childbirth and infant care in other cultures. I learned that in cultures all over the world, babies are held close to the heart, not just by their mothers but by grandmothers and aunts, sisters and brothers, fathers and uncles and cousins. They know. I learned that in one culture, people believe a baby must be held close for the first three months or her spirit may wander away. They know. 

I pored over the photographs, from all over the world, of women with their babies; women working, talking, laughing, going about their business, with babies in their arms, at their breasts, on their backs, in slings, in carriers, in cradleboards. Babies bright eyed, alert, content, quiet, looking like they’ve known you for a hundred years. Babies at home in the world, bodies melded to their mothers’ bodies, deep in a peace so sweet, a sweetness in the bone. 

I go deeper. I read about animals, mammals, about parenting in primates, in ungulates, in canines and cats. I read about the mother-calf bond in dolphins, in whales. I learn that each mammal has its own natural history, its own way of mothering — caching, carrying, nesting, following — its own way of nursing and its own time of weaning. I learn that chimpanzees, our closest relatives, nurse their young for five years, and I read of cultures all over the world where human children nurse for three years, four years, five years, longer, as long as they want to, where the women nurse each other’s children, each one held and cherished by all. I learn that women all over the world are horrified when they hear of babies being left alone in a crib in a room by themselves. They say it sounds like child abuse.

And I realize: we have forgotten who we are. We have forgotten that we are animals, mammals; forgotten that we too are part of the world. That we too have evolutionary imperatives, that we are not exempt. We have forgotten that our bodies, our blood, our cells, our DNA, still hold a knowledge that is deeper than our own, a knowledge we are only beginning to understand. 

I remembered something Inez had told me, while we sat in the little storage room with Eva. Inez had worked on a team of nurses researching “kangaroo care,” the practice where a premature baby, instead of being kept in an isolette, is held in skin-to-skin contact with her mother. The babies held this way, close to the mother’s heart, slept better; they nursed better; they grew faster; their breathing and heart rate and body temperature stabilized. They got fewer infections, had fewer complications from surgeries and medications. 

They were more likely to live. They were less likely to die.

A woman's breast, Inez had said, could raise or lower its temperature by two degrees in response to changes in her baby's temperature; warming if the baby was cold, cooling if the baby was hot.

Dr. Rao came to the door as we were talking.

But why do they call it “kangaroo” care? I was asking. I mean, it's not what a kangaroo does. It’s what––

Dr. Rao finished my sentence, smiling: ––a human being does?

Inez just raised her eyebrows, as if to say, White people. What can I tell you.

I couldn’t take this in. How could the doctors not know this? And if they did know, how could they not act on it? How could they let babies get sicker, stay in the hospital longer, when something so simple could help them? It seemed —

Inez and Dr. Rao looked at each other, and hesitated.

[Oh child, there is a world of sorrow too big to fit inside your tiny head.]

Finally, Inez said, Well. You know. Neonatal intensive care is…

I didn’t know.

She trailed off.

Finally Dr. Rao finished her sentence: ––a profit center for the hospital.

What? 

She repeated it.

Neonatal intensive care is a profit center for the hospital.

The way it came to me was this:

My people are out of their minds.

And in that moment, everything shifted.

It would take years before I understood, really, what had happened. 

But everything had changed.