Jukes Mother Animal

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78396-839-8
Verlag: Elliott & Thompson
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

An electrifying new vision of motherhood from the author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings - 'ASTONISHING' (Sunday Times) When Helen Jukes falls pregnant, she does what anyone else would do. She searches for information to help make sense of the changes underway inside her. But as the months pass and her body becomes increasingly strange,?the pregnancy guides seem insufficient; even the advice of her friends feels oppressive. So she widens her frame of reference, looking beyond humans to ask what motherhood looks like in other species. Here she begins a process of wilder 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. 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. __ 'Magnificent' Lucy Jones, author of Matrescence 'Joyful and expansive'Guardian 'Blows societal ideas about parenthood wide open.' Marchelle Farrell, author of Uprooting 'Extraordinary... Read it to feel a slow detonation of mind-blowing understanding.' Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters 'Honest and unflinching'Stylist

Helen Jukes' work has appeared in The New York Times, Port Magazine, Aeon and 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jukes, Helen

Leseproben

I

THE ENCLOSURE

The month I found out I was pregnant was a record-breaking one – the planet’s hottest since measurements had begun. It was July, and we were caught in a blistering heatwave; a pocket of high air pressure stretching from western Russia all the way to the Atlantic. Everywhere there were stories of desiccation and sudden deluge. In Berlin, police were using water cannons usually trained on rioters to cool the city’s trees; in France, they were cautioning the public against diving in unsanctioned pools. In Greece, helicopters had been brought in to stem wildfires that had whipped through sun-baked pine forests and over roads and into houses, sending inhabitants running for the sea from which the firefighters flew. On a farm near us, thousands of chickens had just sweltered to death when barn ventilation systems failed – an uneasy foreshadowing of the nearly 900 people in the UK who would die as a result of the heat that summer, most of them not out in parks or on beaches but in their own homes, which had overheated.

Our house, a small worker’s cottage built nearly four hundred years ago with thick limestone from the surrounding hills, held on to the cool – even in midsummer it was a place of shady corners, of surprise relief, the sash windows pulled down at the top and up at the bottom to catch any breeze that passed.

Outside, the earth hardened and the grass bleached. I went for walks in the early mornings and evenings, and if I passed others on the footpaths, we spoke of little but the weather – our tones initially elated and later, increasingly, alarmed. Inside, there were surprise infestations: ants teeming from the skirting boards, a wasp’s nest blooming over the back door. The insects were armoured and manifold, aggressive in their work of procreation – I, on the other hand, couldn’t seem to do a thing. I felt clammy and then swollen, as though I were retaining moisture somewhere, which I suppose I was – a thin layer of cells in my uterus having formed a filmy sack in which water and electrolytes and a small cluster of cells now floated and multiplied.

I thought at first it was the weather making me sick. I wasn’t used to the temperatures, the long hot days. I’d missed a period. But perhaps people missed periods in the heat? Still, I drove into town for a pregnancy test, returning pinked and nauseous, pupils shrunk to pinpricks, blinking. Squatting over the toilet, I fumbled with the plastic pen, blindly waving the flimsy thing as urine mixed with the paper strip and with the damp sweat on my palms.

A blue line. The colour of water, oceans, incontrovertible facts. The radio was on in the kitchen. There was talk of thunderstorms.

I’ve read that some escapologists and deepwater divers slow their heart rates and manage their fear by ‘remembering’ being in the womb – a time when mouth, nose, ears and lungs are filled with liquid, and we possess no fear of being submerged in water, or of being without it.

That night, the night of the pregnancy test, I remember the house looked different. I was suddenly aware of its imperfections: the cracks in the plaster, the loose wires hanging from the ceiling and the damp patches along the walls. The place seemed shaky somehow – full of waiting hazards and jobs that, since moving in the previous winter, had gone unfinished.

We sat at the table, making a list of tasks to be completed over the coming months. —We’ll have to fix the floorboards, I was saying —and we should repair the windows, and get the boiler serviced, we might have to replace it, don’t you think?

My boyfriend glanced in the direction of the window. Outside, the sky was cooling, the blue deepening, the heat lifting slowly from the hills. —Are you listening? I said. —Sure, he said. —Sure, the boiler service. Have you noticed the ants are back?

And there they were, visible as a patch of brittle-looking movement beside the skirting board. He frowned. —I’ll look it up, he said. —I’ll look up what to do.

And with that, we returned to our phones – he to his pest control measures, and me to the news. had done a photo feature on how animals were coping with the heat. There were pictures of zookeepers rubbing sun lotion onto the backs of tapirs and feeding ice lollies to polar bears; of farmers rescuing fish from lakes that were fast disappearing. I suppose this was intended to offer some comfort: look here, at Nature’s creatures! Look at these creatures And at these enterprising humans, still capable of rescue despite everything. I scrolled, clicked, scrolled again, and came across a video someone had posted of a bonobo mother in a zoo not far from us, sheltering her infant from the midday sun.

I remember feeling very keen, as I watched this film, to deduce the breadth and type of her enclosure. A climbing frame, a patch of grass. Fences, walls. The mother cradled the infant as she roved from one patch of cramped and crowded shade to another. But she looked nervous, I thought. She looked visibly stressed. She couldn’t escape, was the thing. She couldn’t escape the heat.

What the internet suggested we do about the ants:

What happened when I hoovered them: more came. And by September the inside of the hoover contained a layer of furry little carcasses gently decomposing inside the plastic.

The first trimester, then: 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 , meaning seasickness, and from the Greek , 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 .

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? Was it OK to want this, while fearing for its future?

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. 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.

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 . 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 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?

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...