Motherhood Connected Me To My Animal Self, Even When Society Tried To Civilize Me
I am Mother, hear me roar.
Jenny Uhling | Canva I like to think of myself as a forest animal because I live in the Pacific Northwest and I’m partial to forests.
This is about the mother as an animal, no matter the habitat.
The truth is the habitat that most Western human mothers find themselves in when we are most animal is completely antithetical to our animal selves. It’s a gleaming white hospital room, humming with machines, entirely devoid of nature.
Society has been toiling for years to sanitize and civilize the experience of early motherhood. Dull the pain, hide the breasts, and contain the fluids.
I gave birth to my son on all fours while roaring. I’ve never roared like that before or since. I didn’t know I had it in me.
I felt immensely powerful. The birth stood in such stark contrast to my first childbirth experience, during which I was splayed out and tied down on a bed, prodded with needles, quaking under the surgeon’s knife.
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It’s hard to be an animal in a world that insists on the sophistication and superiority of humans.
My breasts were tethered to my baby, but the world kept trying its hardest to pry us apart. It thrust plastic bottles at me, hooked me to milking machines, and forced me into sterile hard-edged office contours.
At home, it was all milk and mess. I hated it sometimes, but now I miss it, that visceral, whole-body experience of early motherhood.
I was a nighttime prowler, a Mama Bear, a songbird, a weaver of cocoons. I felt more connected to my fellow animal mothers than I did to most of my fellow humans Out There.
It was a gift, in retrospect, though it didn’t always feel like a gift when I was in the thick of it. To be reminded of my animal self, my innate power, my intrinsic rhythms.
Early motherhood, especially with my first baby, was also a time of grief. I thought I was grieving the loss of my former self, my autonomous self.
But really, I think it was something else. I think that I understood, with stark clarity, the irreconcilability of my animal self with the self the world demands of me. A self stripped of its power, its rhythms, its instincts.
Maybe it’s why, in my mid-life motherhood, I’ve become a tad bit obsessed with bodily experiences in forests.
There, everything is tangled and rooted in dirt. There, I can feel my heaving breath and the dribbling of sweat droplets down the small of my back. There, I can quiet my head enough to hear to hear the birds sing. There, I can revisit my wild animal self.
Kerala Taylor is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned cooperative.