Fallen: Dead Baby Birds

Spring: such beautiful things and dead baby birds.  I have spent hours each day walking the puppy child, our new baby, and listening to podcasts.  That he has to go out, HAS to, has been a blessing.  I'd been slowly descending into a muted-colored and muffled depression, the kind that for me comes in cycles related to the moon and the mood of the last phrase read, music absorbed through the skin, line in a drawing or slight from a family member who either doesn't care or doesn't recognize their callousness when I discovered the podcast, "The Hilarious World of Depression."*  While listening to PLACEBO: A Conversation with Ana Maria Cox (5/5) , walking through an open field full of clover patches, dandelions and "wishes" I nearly tripped over one, then two dead babies.  They were featherless, with bulging closed eyes that were black and blue.  Their skin was 70s-band-aid flesh and their tiny beaks and claws looked like baby finger nails.  They were so plastic and so still and so hopeless.  The sight of them caused me to gasp and dart in another direction.  I didn't want to stand by too long, to stare too long, to come so close that their lost hope might touch me.  It was drizzling, preparing for rain, so I put up my hood and stared across the field.  And then I walked back.

The day before I'd seen a bird and a squirrel quarreling above my head in my own yard.  I'd never seen an interspecies battle like this so was drawn to all the desperate, violent chatter between the two of them.  I understood, even from my vantage point, that something wasn't right.  The blackbird was beside herself and the squirrel seemed so caustically aloof and reckless.  I found myself getting annoyed with that damned squirrel. But the puppy found something more curious and interesting across the yard and I walked with him to find someone else's shit to roll in (yeah, I pulled him up before that could happen.). 

Early the next morning, I'd raced behind Ivan as he bolted down the stairs and out the door to relieve himself after a long night of "holding it in."  He was playful and fluffy and so early-morning baby sweet so, even though I was in my nightgown with a sweatshirt over it, pulled on haphazardly as I tried to protect myself from the morning's cold, I let him tour me through the open yards that sprawled behind ours and our neighbors' houses.  As we left the wall that holds the creek that runs through town, he discovered what all the fuss had been about just the day before. Two babies had taken a long, miserable fall to the ground.  Below the nest now lay lifeless a developing bird and the head of its sibling.  Ivan licked the head and I pulled him more aggressively than I'd meant to get him away from it.  I couldn't bear to look.  And then I couldn't stop.

I studied the lifeless body, saw the articulation in its exposed wing, considered its fall, looked up to see the nests that dotted that tree and wondered from which it had fallen.  I thought of the hysteria in the mother's cawing and flapping as the squirrel had teased and taunted.  I wondered for how long an animal mourns or if it does at all.  These two babies were dead but were there others?  Could she love the others more fiercely because they'd survived or was she just meeting the task at hand, the imperative, keeping them alive?  I remembered the first time I'd seen little baby birds, they'd been tiny chicks in an incubator, I and thought of their smell and the warmth that surrounded them and the peep-peep-peep of all of them hovering close to one another.  I wished for that for this dead bird.  Warmth.

Against my better judgment, I took my family to my parents' home in sunny Florida for spring break, the Florida weather promising a break from the bleak, rainy April we'd been having.  We'd had to leave Ivan who'd not been with us so long and I considered for a moment staying behind.  I have been torn to shreds by how much of a relationship I should allow between my parents and my children.  On the one hand, I'd rather just suck it up and not have to explain the intricacies of dysfunctional family dynamics to two little girls who have felt the fullness of my love and protection from the moment we'd promised ourselves to one another, and on the other I am shattered to endure the aggressive, palpable disdain and contempt in which my parents hold me.  It's only warm outside in sunny Florida.  I'd fallen out of the tree.

While searching through old photo albums, I found my baby book where I learned that I'd not left the hospital until 18 days after I was born. Eighteen days in Vassar Hospital in the cold of a Poughkeepsie winter in January.  I knew I'd been born prematurely and that I'd been placed in an incubator for care and protection in my early days but was told very little else. When I first learned as a child that I'd been in an incubator, I thought immediately of myself on a tiny tray, cuddled up trying to get warm and become strong enough to face this thing called life.  I also thought about "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble" (a movie starring John Travolta as "the boy" that I'd watched as a girl) because I imagined in my frailty and sickness, I could not and should not have been much handled.  I sat in isolation with visits from my mother when she was dropped off at the hospital by my father each morning.  And how did I miss her touch?  How did I feel in that silence?  Those first eighteen days have marked me, imprinted me as a fallen bird.

Nature is not sentimental.  The fittest survive and the others perish.  Animals and plants and we humans have to adapt and evolve or lose our one shot.  The grass beneath the birds was so lush and green after weeks of rain, and pollen from all the beautiful flowers in bloom coated the world chartreuse and yellow.  The green of the whole scene swallowed up those tiny bodies until I was right upon them.  I felt a responsibility to them, a need to bury and protect their brief moment here.  To honor their attempt to live their tiny lives.  Perhaps they'd stuck their necks out too long to reach for their food or been knocked over by a squirrel or the wind.  Maybe they'd arrived too early, when the spring thaw had not quite happened and it was too cold for them to survive and their mother had long abandoned the nest.  Maybe their mother felt the environment too unsafe to risk caring for them where she'd built her nest or knew they were too weak to survive and had flown away.

When humans touch baby animals that have been lost or fallen or hurt they doom them to never be lovable or acceptable to their mothers.  It had always terrified me, the thought of the baby animal picked up and returned to its nest or burrow or clearing, saved, only to be rejected by its mother and left in the world to defend itself and surely die.  It seemed so cold, so callous, so heartless, and so unfair that a chance moment could change the course of a new life. 

As the drizzling developed into a steady rain, I turned away from the birds along the path.  The green of the spring dotted with the vibrant colors of the flowering trees and well planted tulips and other blooms gave my walk back an other-worldly haze.  I stopped abruptly as the hosts of the podcast quietly uttered the pain around the suicide of one's brother and the failed attempts of one of the hosts.  There was silence and grief and palpable pain.  The silvered light of this grey day sharpened and I caught my breath.  The sound of my gasp in my ears as my headphones shielded me from the noises outside of my personal space echoed and stilled me.  I felt so suddenly alone.  The emptiness of navigating the world alone shook me.  I was vulnerable, unguarded, stealing oxygen for my tiny lungs.  Motherless.  I'd fallen from the nest.

And once you are out of the nest and find yourself alive you have to make a choice.  I took a little longer at first to meet the milestones that are the bullets on any mother's checklist.  I was small but met the developmental challenges easily.  I don't remember much contact.  I suppose one wouldn't but the continued lack of it throughout my life hints that there wasn't very much.  It is as crushing to write this as it is to know.  I have never had much emotional, psychic, or physical connection with my parents, often feeling indifference or active disdain.  I have always believed it was because I arrived as imperfectly as I did, premature, small, fragile, and sensitive, because I fell.  It has made me profoundly sad and secretive.  I have hurt so deeply and so silently, have faded into life's lushness, felt small and frail and alone.  I have listened to countless explanations and excuses from others as though what I feel and experience in my heart could not be truth enough.  My heart that beats and mourns the tiny, dead baby birds along my dog walking route couldn't possibly know.

Now the rain was coming at a steady clip and even Ivan was ready to go home.  It's warm inside.  Our house has pillows and blankets, delicious smells, soft light, private spaces and nooks, communal tables and couches.  It is plush like the swelling comfort of spring's garden and every place is safe.  I finished out the podcast with my headphones over my ears, sitting on the floor of the kitchen with Ivan and his toys.  I stroked his soft white fur and kissed him on his pink nose and let him lick me.  The licks to my face and mouth that I swore I'd never allow now covered me.  My puppy licked my salty tears and fell over on his back for me to rub and pet the fur on his belly.  We'd found him in the shelter, in a viewing room with his sister.  Though my husband had seen pictures, we'd never known his parents.  They weren't with him anymore.  We are his new family and I am his mother.



(c)Copyright 2017.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.



*"The Hilarious World of Depression" is a podcast hosted by John Moe that offers frank, funny, smart conversations with well-known comedians and humorists about their battles with depression and other mental health issues.