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PatchWork
by Joyce Whitis |
On this day, when we pay tribute to all mothers wherever they may be, I am remembering how much I have learned about the responsibilities, joys and pain of being a mother from other than human mothers. Spiders place food in the web for their babies to eat as soon as they are hatched , lay their eggs and then die. Fish span the two extremes of motherhood either by attacking and eating their babies as soon as they are born, like Guppies are prone to do, or else defend their hatchlings against much bigger enemies such as Convicts. Cowbirds lay their eggs in the nests of other birds for them to hatch out and feed, while the Killdeer will fight any intruder to defend her youngsters.
A true story that never fails to stir deep emotion with the telling is the one about the mother "killdee" that challenged my husband as he was plowing a field. When the tractor got close to her nest of eggs, the tiny bird stood up on her skinny little legs and screamed into the face of the man and machine. That explains why there was an unplowed spot in that field until the eggs hatched and the babies were long gone.
Cats often show great courage and skill as mothers and to me are among the best examples of motherhood. Most kittens are born in the early spring, so around Mother's Day, they are showing the results of good mothering. The cats feed their babies several times a day, leaving them only to care for their personal needs. They search out a nesting place in advance but will always move their kittens if that place seems unsafe. The babies are groomed every day and taught to be careful of strangers. Soon mother cats show them how to get food, where to sleep, and then they take their children on shopping trips for mice, rabbits, snakes, and birds.
A sight I look forward to in early summer is watching a mother cat talking to her weaned kittens and explaining about the hunting trip that's coming up. Her voice is loud and encouraging, telling them, no doubt about the adventures waiting for them in the fencerow. Soon she heads out down the driveway with her children marching single file behind. Some hours later, they all come back, a little tired but with happy looks on their faces, like human children returning from Six Flags.
The best story about motherhood that I know, concerns a barn cat that we took into the house one year. She wasn't much to look at, beauty-wise, but was way ahead of the pack when it came to intelligence. She wore a coat of many colors, mostly gray with patches of yellow and black and her hair was long. In the beginning she sat out on the back sidewalk in all kinds of weather and cried to get in the house. Among all the cats who made homes in the barns and sheds around the place, she alone wished to live in the house with us. She had been expressing herself in this way for sometime so that at last, on a chilly day in February, with a cold rain falling, I opened the back door and told her to come on in.
Mouse (we named her that because of her mouse colored hair), walked in, sat down in front of the washing machine and began to groom herself. I stared at her. She was expecting! Well....too late to turn her out now. I made a bed for her in a cardboard box with lots of worn out towels. Placed bowls of food and water beside it and left her there on our back porch turned utility room turned into an extention of the kitchen.
There were four fuzzy little kittens of several colors and Mouse purring so loud you could hear her twelve feet away, the next morning. She lay there and kept squinting her eyes at me as she talked to her babies and slowly extended and retracted the claws on her left foot. All the food was gone so I filled the dish again and left her to her motherly duties. We established a routine where no litter box was necessary because she sat by the back door when she wanted out and cried to get back in when she was done.
When the kittens were about three weeks old, I answered a call where an orphaned Chihuahua puppy was involved. The pup was only a few hours old and in need of a foster mom. When I gave the puppy to Mouse, she washed it briefly and placed it right in there with her four children where it stopped crying immediately and began to fill its stomach. The cat accepted the puppy, which was the same size as her natural children. Everybody was loved and cared for.
One night, when her kittens were about six weeks old, and the pup was about three, I let Mouse outside while we watching the news. When Johnny Carson came on she hadn't come back. When the Tonight Show went off she was still gone. I looked around outside and called to her but there was no answer so I decided she meant to take the night off and locked up and went to bed.
Imagine my surprise the next morning when I walked out on the back porch and there was Mouse with her family, yellow eyes squinting up at me as she flexed her claws and purred loud enough to be heard in the living room. After a search of the house I discovered how that brave, clever mother got back in bed with her children after a night on the country. She came down the fireplace chimney! Not only did she climb up on the roof, she slid down inside the brick chimney, landed in the sooty fireplace, pushed back the glass screen, left black catprints on the carpet through the den, the living room, the dining area, the kitchen, and thus to her kittens and one pup that were sleeping.
Now that, boys and girls, is a determined mother!