Bird Mother
We went to Memphis for a week for my best friend’s wedding. While we were dancing or crying or gawking at the baby alligators inside the Bass Pro Shop inside the sixth largest pyramid in the world (all of that is real), a robin (who, full discretion, I now sometimes call “mommy”), built a nest on our deck at home and laid three blue eggs.
I noticed it the day after we got home, the day my daughter and I stayed in our pajamas all day.
Had our house been truly empty, as this tiny mommy had come to believe, given our week-long absence, the location of her nest would have been perfect. It’s secluded and sturdy and safe from the weather. Unfortunately, we do live here, and our child primarily plays in the backyard and on the deck. Whoops!
I feel so guilty every time she flies away when we walk from our garage to our back door. I’m trying to explain to my toddler why I don’t want to swing her for longer than five minutes, how we scare the mom, and it’s inconsiderate because eggs need the warmth of her belly to grow into chicks. She’s three, so she just wants to swing. While I push her in the green bucket swing from the walnut tree just starting to bud, she points at every bird she sees and says, “Maybe that’s the mama.” All of these birds are perched on houses and wires and trees around us, watching us intently. One of them is definitely her.
I watch her, too. From the bathroom window that looks out onto our deck, I take a peek 10 times a day at least. I consider Googling how many hours a day a bird needs to sit on an egg for it to hatch. But I know myself, and I know I will obsess and probably get a timer involved and start militantly forbidding play in the backyard until the chicks hatch. I don’t want this, either, because I’m already tired.
I involuntarily smile every time I see her snuggled in there, her tail flipped up like a light switch. I’m proud of her for picking such a good spot. I’m sad it turned out to not be such a good spot.
My dad had been unwell for many years when my husband and I decided to have a baby. A major factor in the baby decision was my dad being able to meet the baby. I was worried he’d die before she was born. That was soon replaced with the worry that he’d die while I was pregnant and the grief would somehow . . . ruin? my baby? I don’t know, I didn’t think that one through totally. But that was then replaced by the worry that he would die when she was so young that she wouldn’t remember him.
The latter came true; he died right before she turned two.
She can still recognize him in photos, waves “Hi, Grampy!” when she sees the moon (I told her once that when he died, he went there; is that okay??), and she asks me the most thoughtful, crystalline questions about him (“Do you think Grampy can see the stars?” 💔). But when she’s 25, she won’t hold any of him in motion in the reels of her memory. That makes me super mad, if you were wondering.
This mother robin is here on my deck. And she is only here. She’s not regretting her choice of nest home. She’s not worried about where her next worm will come from. She’s not wondering who her babies are going to look like. She sits and sits and sits until it’s too scary or she’s too hungry and she flies away. She comes back. I imagine she doesn’t know why she is here, but she is.
I see the little robin sitting in her nest all day and I am impressed by her ability to do and be a single thing: she is just a bird mother. It is enough. She literally just sits and it is enough for her, enough for her chicks. I fantasize about what kind of mother I could have been had my dad been well, and then had he not died. I fantasize, of course, that early motherhood would have been easier. It would’ve been, right?
With a healthy dad, I would have been unburdened by a constant anxiety that today would be The Day. Maybe that would’ve translated to less postpartum anxiety. No Zoloft required. Maybe had he not died, I’d have taken my baby on more trips or been less irritable because I just wanted to lie in bed and cry for a whole weekend but literally could not.
It’s a pointless mental exercise because how long would have been long enough with him? It’s ridiculous. Never. It was never going to be enough.
Three days after my dad died, we headed to Michigan, where he and my mom lived, to be with her and my siblings for ten days. There aren’t many pictures of her and me together, but I have approximately 900 of her. Her riding her scooter, sleeping in her carseat, sitting in a sea of rhododendrons, rolling around and laughing her ass off in the Lake Michigan beach sand in her white cardigan, pushing a tiny shopping cart at the co-op, and sitting on my husband’s shoulders watching a sunset while we all huddled and wept around her. In the muddy, sludgy, slow days of new grief, I looked at her to stay steady somehow.
I don’t remember taking any of the photos, but maybe it was to remind myself that all of it was real at once. She had not changed at all since he died while I struggled to find one thing the same about myself. Each of us on the same planet, somehow.
Over the last couple of days, the robin has gotten more comfortable with our presence outside. She doesn’t automatically bolt when we walk in or out of the door. Today, my daughter made some “clover and petal” soup in her mud kitchen for me and my mom. Just beyond a short wooden wall, the robin sat on her little straw tuffet, watching us. When my daughter got bored of being the executive chef, she walked onto the deck and whispered, “Hi!” to the robin.
She stayed.
Beautiful meditation on the nature of birds, motherhood, and death. One quick note though: I think we could all have used a LITTLE more Bass Pro content. But I'm not a writer
Birds are so uncomplicated and so generous with there time and precious signs of perfection! After all they can fly!! 😉