savagemama

We’ve had yet another chicken massacre around here. Seth and I like to gently joke that our little farm is where chickens come to die. Seriously, I can’t even count the number of plump hens that have vanished over the years. And, yes, we’ve tried to keep them safe but to no avail.

The other day Lucille and I were hanging out, doing cheers I remembered from junior high when it occurred to me to go check on our eight chicks and one hen. When I opened the gate of the new, high-fenced coop Seth had build a few weeks earlier I found some stressed-out teenage birds and one dead hen. There were only four chicks left, the other four had been disappeared by who knows what. The hen, a black and white speckled beauty, was lying feet up, her head separated from her body. I know, gruesome right? And it is only because we’ve had so many chicken casualties over the years that I can talk so nonchalantly about it.

There was the time just after I’d had Lucille that I watched a beagle carry off bird after bird through the living room window. I had a nursing newborn and an almost two-year-old. By the time I got outside that neighbor dog had carried off at least six chickens. Then there was the time a friend’s dog took one out but really that was minor compared to the armloads of birds we’ve lost over the years to stealthy predators.

Other than the beagle confirmation, we’ve been largely in the dark about what was stealing our chickens in the dead of night. We’ve had our theories, though. A fox, a raccoon, a coyote. But we’ve never been sure. The other night Seth got curious once again and stalked the coop. Just at dusk he saw something hovering just above the chicks. I watched from the window and saw it too. I thought it was a big barn cat that had wandered down from one of our neighbors’ houses. Then I saw it lift its wings. It was huge, balancing on the wooden rail, between fence posts. Then it turned its head in an unmistakable owl gesture. Turns out it’s been all Stellaluna all the time around here and we didn’t even know it.

We have known for years that some really big birds live in the cottonwoods in the pasture. Every year around calving season they sit high in the naked trees and watch the ground below for birthing cows. They descend to eat the rich afterbirth left behind by so many animals laboring over a few short weeks. They are ready, too, for the occasional tender, weak calf.

Seth used to joke that I needed flash cards to identify animals and it’s still true. I grew up in a subdivision far from here and I still refer to the creatures in our pasture as “big ole birds.” Seth tells me they are bald eagles, red-tailed hawks, turkey vultures. He tells our children these things too.

About a month ago we noticed a big brown hump in our neighbor’s field. A cow, probably in labor, had died and her body lay exposed to the elements, those birds. I finally got brave enough to go investigate and confirmed that yes, it was a cow and yes, she was dead. Our neighbor left her there and we’ve watched as her body has slowly disappeared behind tall grass. She’s been a topic of some interest for Eliza and Lucille. They want to know when we’ll see her bones. When we venture out to where she lay we can still see hide clinging to ribs over the fence that separates her from us. Soon, I tell them, we will see those bones bleached in the summer sun.

Lucille waited on the porch for me the day I found the dead hen.

“What happened mama?” she said.

“Oh, some of our chicks are gone baby and the big chicken is dead. I’m so sorry,” I said.

Ready to cradle her and promise more fuzzy animals and tighter security, I picked her up and said I was sorry again.

“Where is the chicken?” she said.

“I took her out to the pasture,” I said.

“Can I see her?” she asked.

“I don’t think so babe, she’s way out there,” I said pointing. I didn’t think a decapitated chicken was necessarily the best thing to show my three-year-old.

“Did you put her out there with the dead cow?” she said.

And it occurred to me in that moment, holding my tiny girl, spiky hair and all, that this child will not need animal flash cards. Neither will her sister. The cycle of life and death, the greening up of the farm in spring, eagles waiting patiently in cottonwoods will be a fundamental part of who they are. They’ll remember the owl sitting above the chicken coop and somehow deep down have an untangled sense of how things work.

As I walked in the pasture that day, Lucille snug on my hip, I thought once again how glad I am we live here.

This story originally appeared on mamalode. 

Lately Eliza has been suffering from a series of maladies. A broken arm, a broken leg. She hobbles around on sticks fashioned as crutches and wears her arm in a makeshift sling. She tucks one leg into her shorts and steadies herself on the wall, the stairs, the kitchen chairs as she tries to make it in this modern world with a peg leg. While her bones are actually still in tact, you wouldn’t know it by watching her limp across the yard with the aid of a snow shovel under her arm. I can hear her coming — clang, clang, clang — hopping on one foot, stopping to rest because the trek from the swings to the tree house is just so exhausting when you have a fresh tib-fib fracture or was it a crushed ankle this time?

Yesterday I stepped over the shapes of kindergarteners traced in chalk on the sidewalk outside of her classroom. As I studied them I began to be able to make out the shapes of the children in Eliza’s class. Then I saw one drawn to look as though someone had had an above-the-knee amputation and I knew that was my girl.

“Look Mama, that’s me!” she said as we passed the shapes on the way to the car. “My leg stops at my knee and my arm stops at my elbow!”

She bounded off toward the car, my little amputee, thrilled that her chalk outline represented the maimed child of her daydreams.

At home, she wears ten or so socks on one foot to affect the look of a cast and she’s gone through so much toilet paper trying to create one that last week I broke down and bought her an Ace bandage. She’s wrapped it around every part of her body and begs to wear it to school. I’ve held my ground on this front but she wears it everywhere else.

“Is he okay?” strangers ask because inevitably she’s wearing her bandage under a pair of little boy denim cargo shorts that hang down past her knees.

“Oh, he’s fine,” I say. “Just fine.”

We went to Utah last month and on the car ride down Eliza tied the arms of one of her long-sleeved t -shirtstogether and made herself a sling for her right arm. She wore it the entire trip. In the car, to the hot springs, in the tent at night. I think she even wore it into her first slot canyon. Her faux broken arm was such a constant on our trip that normal things like buckling her seat belt became a negotiation. When we’d insist, she’d raise her arm, cloaked in that grubby skull and cross bones shirt and say, “But mom, my arm.”

In preparation for our trip Seth had, of course, been listening to one of his podcasts. I suppose he chose Canyons of the Colorado by John Wesley Powell because we were headed straight for that river. As we passed one stunning desert landscape after another Seth would share tidbits of Powell’s journey.

“He’d get out of the boat and climb to the tops of these canyons to take measurements,” he said. “All with one arm.”

Somewhere along the way Eliza caught on that this Powell character lived a long time ago and did some pretty amazing things in desert country. But, really, all she cared about was that he did it with one arm. By the end of the trip we were calling her John Wesley Quackenbush and she beamed at the honor.

It’s a little like living in a David Sedaris essay around here these days with our own little one-armed explorer. Next thing you know she’ll be licking the neighbors gnome and the light switch covers at school. But for now she just looks like she’s returning from the Civil War battlefield, just as Powell did, with a hastily wrapped bandage around her ankle, her arm in a homemade sling, ready, it seems, for her next adventure.

This essay originally appeared on mamalode.

I was born in North Carolina in a medium-sized town just west of Charlotte. Against the backdrop of dinner is at 2 p.m. on Sundays and love my neck when you leave, I grew up listening to my grandparents and extended families talking about the shifts they worked at the local textile mill. They all aspired to the first shift, daytime work. Some made it, others worked the third shift until they were forced to retire in the late 1980s when their jobs simply went away. They never said it out right but I knew they worked hard. They told me to study hard, to go to school and get into college. So I did. I never worked third shift spinning cotton. I left North Carolina but it’s never left me.

So Tuesday I was following with great interest the vote there on Amendment One, the constitutional amendment on the ballot to ban same-sex marriage. I think I knew down deep that it would likely pass but I held out hope that maybe just maybe my home state would not become the 20th state to adopt a marriage-is-between-one-man-and-one-woman edict.

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I was not proud of the vote in N.C. but I understood how the amendment passed. I don’t know if my grandmothers voted Tuesday but I do know if they did, they voted yes. Neither has ever met a same-sex couple (that they were aware of) in their lives and they have no frame of reference for this debate. One man, one woman mirrors their lives. It’s all they know.

But it isn’t all I know. For them this conversation is faceless but for me it is anything but. When I think of marriage equality I see friends, families, regular people just trying to live their lives. People who deserve every right I enjoy.

For years I worked as an abortion counselor and I used to get so frustrated at the political dickering that went on around the debate. Mandatory ultrasounds, parental notification, counseling requirements, spousal notification. Every week, I saw through the smoke and mirrors of political distraction a woman asking me to hold her hand, wipe the tears streaming down her face, call her husband to tell him it was over. In that job, I saw the love women are capable of. But all of the yammering on the campaign trails and in the halls of the legislature neglects to mention these women at all.

I felt a similar frustration yesterday when I heard President Obama had finally come out of his own “my views are evolving” closet to support marriage equality. While I understand the significance of, as one friend put it, a sitting president speaking out in support of marriage equality, I am still a little annoyed at his timing. Did you finally get a backbone Mr. President? Or did some statistician whisper in your ear that the day after a big vote in a swing state was precisely the right time to show your support? I suspect the latter and I think that’s what saddens me most.

I understand there is likely necessary political strategy at work but it’s the principle of the thing, Mr. President. Just as the abortion debate is so far from a woman sitting in an exam room, so is this discussion so far from the women, men and children it affects. You are playing with their lives, their rights and, by turn, you are playing with yours and mine. Maybe it’s just too much to ask but I don’t want the scraps of support offered at a time of vulnerability, I want from-the-gut, it’s-the-right-thing-to-do kind of support that forces a deeper conversation and systematic change. I know it’s a pipe dream but a girl can hope. Remember that word, Mr. President? I do.

Last week an audio clip was circulating the interwebs of a North Carolina Baptist preacher who advocated giving gender non-conforming children “a good punch.” Pastor Sean Harris of Fayetteville tells dads of their four-year old sons that may be wearing dresses for fun “…the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up.” He basically says that anyone who doesn’t toe the line of gender stereotypes as an adult is “acting out childhood fantasies that should have been squashed,” evidently at the violent hand of their parents.

I purposely didn’t listen it to his tirade at first. I’ve spent a fair bit of time in Baptist churches in North Carolina and I had a feeling I’d heard it all before. I chalked it up to another zealot spewing hate who didn’t deserve my time so I passed over the story. Then as I kept seeing it on blogs I read, my Facebook and Twitter feeds and the Huffington Post Queer Voices, to which I subscribe. By the end of the day I’d caught a few snippets of the transcript like this one:

“And when your daughter starts acting Butch you reign her in. And you say, ‘Oh, no, sweetheart. You can play sports. Play them to the glory of God. But sometimes you are going to act like a girl and walk like a girl and talk like a girl and smell like a girl and that means you are going to be beautiful. You are going to be attractive. You are going to dress yourself up.”

That’s when the hair on the back of my neck stood up. Hey Buddy, I thought, that’s my kid you’re talking about. I wondered if he thought I should give her “a good punch” because she likes to wear camo cargo shorts and little boy underwear? Should I tell her now that she’s going to “act like a girl” and what exactly does that look like? Should I force her to wear pink and hope that the amazing, creative and lovely little person she is slips away into some kind of self loathing just so she can fit nicely into the role society has created for her? Should I tell her that there are clear lines she cannot cross or that violence awaits her?

Well, I’m not going to tell her any of these things. I am going to tell her that there are arrogant and ignorant people among us and that she should watch out for them. I’m going to tell her that there are people in positions of power that use it to harm children. I’m going to tell her that there is no limit to what these people will do to run away from their own fears.

Then I’m going to tell her that there is a big wide world full of love and tolerance. I’m going to tell her over and over again that she is beautiful and wise no matter what she wears or how she identifies herself.  I’m going to tell her that she is loved deeply and without exception. I’m going to tell her that there will be pressure, strong and persistent, to conform to what other people think she ought to be, how she should act, whom she should love but that she’s known exactly who she was since she was three and other people speed a lifetime trying to figure that out. I’m going to tell her to walk confidently past people like Mr. Harris with his delusions and deep seeded bigotry. That I will be waiting for her there, arms wide, ready to hold her for as long as she needs because she will always be my child and that she is perfect exactly the way she is.

 This essay originally appeared on mamalode. Read savagemama every Thursday.