The World-Ending Fire by Wendell Berry

Author:Wendell Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2018-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

(1982)

A Few Words for Motherhood

It is the season of motherhood again, and we are preoccupied with the pregnant and the unborn. When birth is imminent, especially with a ewe or a mare, we are at the barn the last thing before we go to bed, at least once in the middle of the night, and well before daylight in the morning. It is a sort of joke here that we have almost never had anything born in the middle of the night. And yet somebody must get up and go out anyway. With motherhood, you don’t argue probabilities.

I set the alarm, but always wake up before it goes off. Some part of the mind is given to the barn, these times, and you can’t put it to sleep. For a few minutes after I wake up, I lie there wondering where I will get the will and the energy to drag myself out of bed again. Anxiety takes care of that: maybe the ewe has started into labor, and is in trouble. But it isn’t just anxiety. It is curiosity too, and the eagerness for new life that goes with motherhood. I want to see what nature and breeding and care and the passage of time have led to. If I open the barn door and hear a little bleat coming out of the darkness, I will be glad to be awake. My liking for that always returns with a force that surprises me.

These are bad times for motherhood – a kind of biological drudgery, some say, using up women who could do better things. Thoreau may have been the first to assert that people should not belong to farm animals, but the idea is now established doctrine with many farmers – and it has received amendments to the effect that people should not belong to children, or to each other. But we all have to belong to something, if only to the idea that we should not belong to anything. We all have to be used up by something. And though I will never be a mother, I am glad to be used up by motherhood and what it leads to, just as – most of the time – I gladly belong to my wife, my children, and several head of cattle, sheep, and horses. What better way to be used up? How else to be a farmer?

There are good arguments against female animals that need help in giving birth; I know what they are, and have gone over them many times. And yet – if the ordeal is not too painful or too long, and if it succeeds – I always wind up a little grateful to the ones that need help. Then I get to take part, get to go through the process another time, and I invariably come away from it feeling instructed and awed and pleased.

My wife and son and I find the heifer in a far corner of the field. In maybe two hours of labor she has managed to give birth to one small foot.

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