Reflections - cover2

Rocks in my Laundry Basket - Nesting
We went to Europe for a month that fall – the trip had been planned and saved up for long before the pregnancy occurred – and Paul’s fear that we
would have to cancel the trip had contributed to his decided lack of enthusiasm for the coming baby. We boarded a plane with Mother’s “Impossible,
Im-possible!” ringing in our ears, but we had assured everyone that there were indeed good hospitals and fine doctors in Europe. I
missed two things on that trip – trying on fantastic clothes in Paris and getting pinched on the rear in Italy. Italians don’t pinch pregnant ladies,
but they do give their seats on buses and trains. We returned home October 15 and Baby Kate arrived well-traveled on November 26. It had been a
memorable year.
…
Pregnancy itself must be the strangest condition of the human experience. It’s not a disease, so one does get over it, but one never gets over the
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effects – the “effects” are screaming and fighting in the next room. These “effects” go on to produce their “effects”, and so on, and so forth.
Regardless of the anxiety and fear that I might feel while waiting for the results of the doctor’s tests, upon hearing his positive diagnosis, I would
begin suddenly to feel that I was a part of that great, unknown, cosmic scheme of things. My condition became a mystical communion with
immortality. I was somehow above and apart from other common mortals. The nesting instinct took over immediately, and the importance of
exterior events subsided to such an alarming degree that my mental vision would focus on one thing only – that egg in the nest. Everything else
seemed like a discourteous intrusion on the important work at hand. My body had become a super-efficient factory which would ultimately
produce a new model human being. I felt a warm, steady, soft hum of activity inside; and listening to that hum was almost a form of meditation.
No thought or activity could be disassociated from the fact, “I am pregnant.” This psychological condition must be peculiar to pregnancy, and I
decided to call it “interiorization.”
Since entering the mystical realms of Motherhood, I have had profound respect and affection for mother hens. As a child, I would peek quietly
through the hen house door and marvel at the warm, busy, contented hum that I sensed as all those Rhode Island Reds sat quietly with their
feathers poufed out “just so” over their neatly arranged nests and their eyes focused on some shadowy point a million miles away. I wouldn’t
understand why I was greeted with such shrieks of irritation and panic when I tried to gather the eggs. The hen house would explode with
hundreds of flapping wings, pecking beaks, and scratching talons as I staggered towards the door. Breathless, with the door safely shut behind me,
I would stop to count my treasure. The basket was always empty.
My grandmother, who raised eight children on a dusty, dry Texas ranch, had little sympathy for my egg-gathering efforts. She, having had much
experience with the phenomenon of “interiorization” would step purposely and quietly through the door, softly “cluck-clucking” to the hens and
soothing them with her sympathetic voice, slip her hand under their nesting bodies, and spirit those eggs into her basket without raising a feather.
How many times have I felt just like those nesting hens? How many times did I long for someone to “cluck-cluck” softly to me instead of brusquely
knocking me off the nest? Of all species, I think hens and humans interiorize most intensely during incubation. I never see a hen at the meat
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