Mother Animal by Helen Jukes: Think giving birth is hard? Try being a porcupine!
Mother Animal by Helen Jukes (Elliott & Thompson £16.99, 224pp)
When the writer Helen Jukes became pregnant, she found herself navigating the usual maze of edicts and advice: don’t eat this, don’t drink that, avoid cat litter and overly hot baths, don’t be anxious.
Week by week, her unborn child was being quixotically compared to fruit – a passion fruit one moment, a kiwi the next – and at one point, a midwife asked: ‘Are you feeling connected with the baby?’ It was a hard question to work out: how to experience a connection with a being not yet separate from her?
As Jukes sets out in this poised collection of essays, she soon began looking to the natural world for stories of ‘motherhood’s deviations, its hidden transgressions and silent vastnesses’.
We might think of human labour as a uniquely cursed affliction – other primates tend to give birth in under two hours, whereas the average human labour extends to nearly nine – but as she discovered, many animals have a rough time of it too.
Llamas and alpacas bellow or hum during labour, as they do when injured. The spotted hyena gives birth through her clitoris. Porcupine offspring (the delightfully named porcupettes) emerge from their mothers’ bodies fully quilled, while kiwi bird eggs are so big that laying one is the equivalent of a human birthing a four-year-old child.
Porcupettes emerge from their mothers’ bodies fully quilled
It was long believed that humans were unique in providing one another with assistance during birth, but as Jukes notes, some other animals do this too.
Common marmoset fathers act as midwives of sorts, grooming and licking newborns, and female bonobos have been observed guarding a birthing mother from approaching males, and even trying to catch the baby as it emerges.
We might think of the natural world as a conservative place – where males thump their chests and females get on with the softer business of mothering – but this isn’t always the case.
Care-giving is not always the sole responsibility of the biological mother: giraffes will often feed each other’s offspring, and female dwarf mongooses will lactate to provide milk for the young in their pack, even if they’ve never been pregnant.
While most fish don’t look after their offspring, among those that do, it’s the male that takes up the slack. The three-spined stickleback, for instance, builds a nest for his eggs, fanning them to circulate oxygen.
Jukes also wades into more depressing territory, exploring – in a chapter dispiritingly weighed down with acronyms – how chemical pollution is corrupting even the remotest parts of the world, and how babies fed from plastic bottles are consuming vast quantities of microplastics.
Takes a village: giraffes will often feed each other’s offspring
These sections leave the reader feeling decidedly gloomy, particularly given that Jukes’s whole point is that there’s scandalously little we can do to escape the consequences of ecological damage.
Moments in which she studies her own experience of motherhood are much more engaging.
As for so many women, there was a gap, she writes, between what she expected of motherhood and how it turned out.
She was even a little afraid of her baby in the early days: she had expected to see ‘some sign of familiarity’ in her daughter’s face, ‘some feature that belonged to me’, but the baby felt inescapably ‘other’.
And she captures beautifully the eeriness of new motherhood, and its intensity. On the first night with her daughter at home, she hears cats fighting outside, foxes mating, a milk van passing before dawn – ‘a freight I hadn’t known existed here’.
Later, as her relationship with the father of her child is breaking down, she feeds her daughter vegetables sticks one by one, delighting in her merriness, in her sweet, tiny toes.