When sheep see or hear a threat they will snort. It’s a violent shock of air against closed nostrils. A slap of sound. I’ve seen a lamb drop instantly to the ground at its mother’s snort. I’ve seen a mob of peacefully grazing wethers bolt on a single exhalation of air. It’s a warning danger, and the sound sends an adrenaline surge though all who speak the language.
It’s now the dawn of day 3 of our lambing season. Spring is upon us with a rush. It’s the time of year where I sit at my desk with the faint waft of sheep always around me no matter how hard I scrub my hands when I come in from outside.
We are hoping for a good lambing. We both still wear the scars of 2018 and 2019 when we lambed in the drought. The muscle memory of those seasons means I find myself gritting my teeth as we enter a paddock or sit on the hill and scan the flats for anything in trouble. This year the ewes will lamb onto a thick cover of grass. There’s water in the creeks and the dams are full. Our risk factors are the high number of twins we are expecting, (we scan - preg test - our ewes, and separate the multiples) and we have double the maidens (ewes who have not had a lamb). Last year, we didn’t join our 2 year-old ewes. They’d been born in the drought in 2018 and I don’t think any of them even knew what a blade of grass was until it rained in March 2020. We knew that in 2021 this decision would mean we’d have double the number of first time mothers. But it felt the right thing to do. Which brings us to a sunset lambing run on Sunday night. We find a cross bred ewe with a lamb stuck. It has one leg back. The lamb is dead. She’s a big ewe. Her udder is enormous. We wrestle her on the back of the ute and take her back to the yards just in case we have any motherless lambs.
In 1970s the anthropologist Dana Rapheal, student of Margaret Mead’s, coined the term Matrescence. It means to become a mother. The word has been popularised recently through the work of Alexandra Sacks. Turns out Rapheal was a bit ahead of her time. Now, nearly 50 years on from Rapheal’s work, the science of this event in a woman’s life is a burgeoning field. Of course, a woman who has become a mother knows it to be one of the most significant physical and psychological shifts she will experience. It is shape shifting, like puberty and menopause. I like the term because it gives a hint that becoming a mother is not an event, but a process.
My new book, which I pressed send on last week, has as a central theme the process of becoming and also unbecoming, a mother. It opens with the scene of my youngest child leaving home and swoops back in time to his birth. Scattered throughout are scenes from a diary I kept through lambing in the drought years of 2018 and 2019 so it feels somehow very right that I’ve finished it on the eve of lambing 2021. The book explores how we become mothers in all sorts of ways, not just to children.
We did our first full lambing run yesterday. We found a set of twins abandoned in the maiden mob. In such a season there is no excuse for a mother to walk away from her just born lambs. Their umbilical cords were still wet. Their coats had dried with the remains of their birthing sac stiffened by the morning sun. I picked the lambs up. The crossbred ewe in the yards, who had enough milk to raise 4 lambs would become a mother yet.
There’s a scene I keep thinking about in Louise Erdrich’s book The Night Watchman, where the grandmother gives her hungry, abandoned grandson her empty breast to suckle. The grandmother trusts her body to remember. If the child continues to suckle her milk will rise up.
Please do not imagine the ewe being glad to foster two lambs. She was furious. I spent yesterday visiting the yards every few hours, today will be the same. The lambs, who’d missed that vital moment to learn to suck, had to be taught to find her udder, taste the thick colostrum, fight to drink as she stomped and butted them away. I almost gave up several times. When you have a ewe who does not want to let her milk down and a lamb who does not want to suck you feel like a cruel ringmaster. I think about that Indian grandmother suckling her grandchild, and even if it has elements of the allegorical I still believe it. This ewe has the milk, she just doesn’t yet know these lambs as hers. But every time they drink, her resistance to mothering them grows softer.
The American writer Terry Tempest Williams says wilderness returns us to this one simple fact, we are all animals. I think of the snort of a ewe and the instinctive response of her lamb to drop to the ground, hiding from an unseen threat. In the next few weeks I’ll see again and again the act of becoming a mother played out across the paddocks and here’s hoping today I can convince that old crossbred ewe to take her new lambs.
MM
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Reading
Gabrielle Chan on Why You Should Give a F*#k about Farming - here’s a taster. I’m also thigh deep in Henry Reynold’s and Nicholas Clements new book Tongerlongeter: First Nation Leader and Tasmanian War Hero. It’s page turning, stomach rolling, important history.
Listening
If you read last week’s newsy you might remember I quoted a few lines from an Ada Limon poem. In exciting (for me) poddy news. Limon has taken up the howling hole left in my daily routine when Tracy K Smith stepped down from podcast The Slowdown. The idea for The Slowdown is simple. Smith would read a poem a day and write a reflection on what that poem made her feel. In reality it was a tiny droplet of art that started my day. It was never longer than 7 minutes. I would listen while I hung the clothes on the line, or did the breakfast dishes. Listening made ordinary chores shiny.
Writing
Well, I got that manuscript off. And yes, I am now driving myself mad checking my email in case any of the big bosses in Sydney might have finished reading it - despite the fact they have let me know that due to lockdown and working from home and printing blah blah it might take a moment longer than normal.
I won't ever forget the scene in the narrator-less documentary Sweetwater in which an orphaned lamb is dressed in what I thought was a conveniently purchased lamb-sized gro-suit. It was you who explained that it was the skin of one of its dead colleagues
Ah Maggie what a delightful read to wake up to. I must confess to a certain smugness that I read this with coffee, toes tucked back under the covers on a chilly morning… 15 deg!