(m)other voices

I’ve always been painfully, sweetly naive.  Sometimes foolish, sometimes narrowly averting danger.  In my teens, I would get into cars driven by almost-strangers; in my twenties, I stepped into a Native American man’s van because he told me he was going to “check my spirit.”  I’d like to think that in my better naive-moments, I am filled with hope, with a kind of light reserved for people who dream of endless possibilities in the world.

I must’ve been about eight, and walking, as I liked to, around a lake a few miles from my home.  I was listening to the crisp crackle of leaves beneath my feet, shuddering in the chill of early fall, and ambling along dreamily when I spotted a walnut-sized, pale yellow egg a few feet from the water’s silvery edge.  I slipped it into my hoodie pocket, heart beating furiously, wildly.  I imagined the baby chick fluffy yellow and impossibly alone, sleeping and waiting to crack its shell.  Without me, its would have emerged into the world, motherless and bewildered.  Without me, it surely would die.

At home, I nestled the egg into a shoe box filled with strips of paper.  My sisters snickered and elbowed each other as they watched me angle my desk lamp so that it would beat warmth down on the egg.  And I waited.  Hours.  Days.  Weeks.  I held the egg in my grubby hands, willing it to live, to gather its courage and peck its way into the world that was my bedroom, pink and frilly and waiting for its yellow adorableness.  Finally my mother, armed with her trusty sidekick, the broom, a saint of cleaning and domestic witch extraordinaire, sidled up beside me as I sat at my desk, cradling the little egg in my little palm.  “You know,” she began.

“It’s not alive, is it?”  In my voice was the flat, toneless quality of those who admit they’ve failed.

“Well, it’s possible that it was never alive to begin with.  That it was never a chick….just an egg.  Like the kind we eat for breakfast.”

I nodded as she stroked my arm, pushing the hairs back and forth.

Later that day I placed the egg under a pine tree in our side yard, back out in the sunshine and wind.  I had been a surrogate mother for a brief few weeks to an egg-chick or not-and had loved and cared for it.  It was love that placed it into my hand, and love that made me stoop down, gaze at it once more, wondering, and walk away.