Feeding The Kids
Motherhood in a hostile world
It was that fox again — the one with the limp. It stared in through the patio doors, swaying a little from side to side as if on the verge of collapse, brown stains running from eyes to muzzle like tears. I wanted to let it into the warmth, or at the very least throw it some scraps from the kitchen. But I couldn’t. That’s how they got you, if the news stories were to be believed. And I believed them.
I pictured the poor thing limping across field after field, squirming through hedgerow after hedgerow, desperately searching for food despite its twisted limb. It had left its babies back home in its den, small and pink and blind and growing skinnier by the hour, bleating forlornly for milk. Milk that would only flow if their mother could eat. And she hadn’t eaten for days. I could see it in her eyes while she stood there gazing at me through the patio doors, a silent communication from one mother to another.
We’re not too different, humans and animals. All we want is to feed our kids. We’ll cling to life with whatever meagre strength we have, holding on just long enough to raise our offspring into childbearing adults so that the whole cycle can begin again. Almost seems futile in a world like this, but we do it anyway. And I felt as if I knew that limping fox’s struggles as intimately as if they had been my own. I had…
