An Extract From Helen Jukes’ Masterpiece Mother Animal

An Extract From Helen Jukes’ Masterpiece Mother Animal

Helen Jukes has appeared in the New York Times, Port Magazine, Aeon and many others. Her first book, A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings, received wide critical acclaim, and was shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag non-fiction award. Helen has led creative writing
workshops for universities, literary organisations, a homelessness charity and a prison; she currently teaches at the University of Oxford, and lives with her daughter on the edge of the Peak District.

When Helen falls pregnant, she searches for information to help make sense of the changes underway inside her. But as her body becomes increasingly strange, the pregnancy guides seem insufficient and even the advice of her friends feels oddly oppressive. So she widens her frame of reference, looking beyond humans to ask what motherhood looks like in other species.

Here she begins a wilder process of enquiry, in which stories of spiders, polar bears, bonobos and burying beetles (among others) begin to unsettle and expand her notion of what mothering is; what it could be. During the sleeplessness, chaos and intimate discoveries of life with
a newborn, these animal stories become Helen’s comforting companions and guides. They allow her to explore the origins of our animal instincts, and how the polluted stuff of human industry has come to influence life, even from its very beginnings.

A passionate, visceral and intimate account of a body changed, Mother Animal combines personal memoir with fresh insights from evolutionary biology, zoology and toxicology to ask the big questions that lie at the heart of what it means to be alive – and a mother – today.

It is a profoundingly moving and original book which demystifies the notions of ‘natural motherhood’ constructed and repeated generationally, so often through a limiting and misogynististic lens.

It answered many pressing questions I’ve personally been searching the answers for since starting my motherhood journey in 2010. It is an honour to share an edited extract, with permission, from Helen’s masterpiece Mother Animal, out now.

I urge every parent to read it!

Extract:

The first trimester: sticky, nauseous, a strong aversion to most tastes and smells, a sudden desire to disinfect everything, foggy-headedness, tense hope. 

The word nausea comes from the Latin nausea, meaning seasickness, and from the Greek nausia, meaning disgust and – literally – ship-sickness, but in English the word has always held associations beyond oceans. In nausea, it is possible to be both at sea and landlocked; to inhabit a body utterly persuaded that all taste, all touch, all outside stimulation is utterly, incorrigibly detestable. You long for the world to become still, for all movement to stop – knowing as you do that the source of your problem resides not with the world but your own insides, which have conspired to hold you like this: confined, desperate, unable to stop feeling.

Standing shakily in front of the bedroom mirror, I scoured my body for signs of change. Was my left breast not slightly fuller than last week? Was there not a new roundedness, now, to my middle? 

It seemed unthinkable that I, my body, this taut and nervy frame, might possess the practical wherewithal to gestate and birth another being. Yet if this was truly happening, it appeared to be proceeding in a surprisingly haphazard way. Discernible changes were not limited to those parts of myself Where I had assumed gestation took place, but instead proliferated wildly, erupting in sudden and increasingly bizarre ways: tears at bedtime; light-headedness in the shower; new dark hairs springing from around my ankles and upper lip. What was I becoming? During pregnancy, the singer Adele reportedly grew a beard. ‘I call it Larry,’ she told a magazine, as though in coming to motherhood one might birth not just a baby but an alter ego – a second self. (Did Adele discover too that, in the months after childbirth, a mother’s voice deepens by as much as a piano note? That the reverse happens outside of pregnancy and around the time of ovulation, when voice pitch increases, since the hormones behind egg release also have a hand in voice?)

I bought a foetal development chart and hung it up in the kitchen. The chart broke pregnancy down into forty pages and forty weeks; each week, a picture of a different fruit corresponded to the size of the growing foetus.

Six weeks: a pomegranate seed.

Seven weeks: a blueberry.

The delicious horror of skipping ahead – imagining oneself harbouring an aubergine, a watermelon.

By now I’d dipped into pregnancy websites and learned the dos and don’ts by heart. Do rest, eat plenty of fruit and vegetables (but be sure to wash them first), exercise (but nothing too strenuous) and trust your instincts. Don’t eat raw meat, unpasteurised milk or cheese, uncooked eggs or shark or swordfish; don’t drink alcohol; don’t inhale cigarette smoke or some paint fumes; avoid dry-cleaning fluids, cat litter, hair dye and overly hot baths. Also, use your seat belt. Also, don’t be anxious.

So the air I breathed contained petrochemical fumes that increased the risk of miscarriage; the soil on a carrot could contain parasites that could cause foetal brain or liver damage, or miscarriage. And what if on occasion I forgot the rules? What if I misinterpreted them, or misplaced them, or ate a cheese I shouldn’t? Miscarriage!

I was not just a vessel but a membrane – a thinking, feeling boundary between my unborn child and the rest of the world, both at the mercy of whatever threats were at large in my environment and locked in an urgent, impossible struggle to control it. I began peeling mushrooms before eating them. I ordered an organic veg box, roasted a cauliflower for the first time, spent long minutes scanning the ingredients on food packets in the supermarket. Was it still OK to reheat old rice? Was it less OK than before? And all this in service to a different kind of foreignness – a body of cells, now person-shaped, steadily blossoming on my inside.

The first time I heard my daughter cry I was strapped to an operating table, numbed from the waist down, and she was on the other side of the room, hidden behind a person or it might have been people in hospital gowns. Someone, some moments before, had whispered from behind my left ear that she was out (they didn’t say ‘born’), so I had known to listen for her. There was a lag, though, between this anonymous whisperer and the sound of her scream; a breathless wait in which – what? She gasped? Was suctioned? Her mouth, nose, throat and lungs struggled against the foreign substance into which she had just unceremoniously been dragged?

Grey whales, I’ve learned, emerge not into water but the air. The mother swims upside down, her flanks breaching the ocean’s surface; her calf is born head first, skywards. Our first breath is deeper than the rest, and slower. The next are irregular, interrupted. By sixty minutes, the repeated intake/outtake has usually fallen into a pattern.

When it came, her sound, it was high and clear and the realest thing I’ve ever heard, and immensely far away. Moments ago, she’d been inside me; now and ever after, she was not.

I lay there, immobilised, teeth chattering insanely – a side effect of the anaesthetic. At my shoulder, my boyfriend reminded me to breathe. Again I waited, until finally I was handed her – soft, purpled and dressed in an overly large knitted hat. Days later, I would see this hat lying on a side and realise that in fact it was not large at all, indeed it was very small, and I would understand then that the thirty-eight-week emergency scan had not been wrong; that she was indeed very tiny, almost in fact too tiny – that something in the placenta’s system of delivery had failed such that I had given birth not to a baby but a sparrow – a sparrow had come, been taken, ‘out’.

She landed on my chest. Bony, feather-light, her limbs furled. In fact, to say that she was sparrow-like is inaccurate. It is too specific. She was simply all creature; all wild thing. Before language, before culture, before thought, confusion, longing, I saw now, we exist first as this: body. Need. Raw flesh. A deception too, though – she arrived with me clean.

I knew what newborn babies were supposed to look like from the telly. On hospital dramas I’d seen infants emerge blue and bloodied and covered in vernix – a thick, cheese-like substance made up of fatty glandular secretions and dead skin cells that works to form a moisture-retaining barrier in the last stages of pregnancy (yes, it’s true – our cells have already begun dying before we’ve even been born). If left on a newborn’s skin, vernix can continue to protect against dryness and infection; by delaying the clamping of the umbilical cord, more iron-rich blood is able to pass through to the infant from the placenta, which keeps their blood pressure stabilised as they take their first breaths. So who’d washed my daughter, who’d severed the cord, before I saw her? Who’d washed my daughter before me? And how was I to enter motherhood without some visual evidence of what the two of us had undergone? A friend of mine had her placenta made into a tincture; another cooked hers up in a frying pan. I meanwhile had only the fact of our flesh; the large dressing taped across my stomach; the plastic tubes extending outward from my chest, hand and urinary tract; the anaesthetic’s slow retreat.

You can purchase Mother Animal here.