A Halloween Story

So they say that humans make such good mothers. I think we're terribly selfish when it comes to raising our young. We hardly ever die for our children.

Sure, we carry them for nine months. Which is a long time, both in terms of average gestation periods and just in terms of time itself. There are animals that are pregnant longer, of course, but there are a lot more that aren't. We can only have one at a time--usually--which just seems...inefficient. Oh, sure, there's the trade-offs between lots of offspring and a few better-cared for ones, but on a level that's more purely illogical, I think that more matters. Matters most, even, maybe.

But there are animals that do so much more. Salmon die to breed, after all. Like all semelparous animals, they give up their lives for their offspring. Their bodies start to decay as they move upstream. They'll beat themselves to death against dams, trying to get to where they can spawn. They fight to die, because before they die they lay their eggs. That next generation is the primary imperative. They know that they'll die either way, no matter if they've passed on their genes or not.

I like frogs. Some of them. Most of them just abandon their eggs, like so many animals. But others--they take very careful care of their young. Like the Surinam toad. After the eggs are laid--extruded--and fertilized by the male, they're pushed onto the female's back. Her flesh bloats to cover up the eggs, protecting them. Inside her, they can live and grow, taking their nutrients from her. You can see them moving underneath her skin--it ripples, her back filled with her young. After a lunar month, they break through her skin, tear through it, perfectly formed miniatures. Would you do that? Even if you could?

The gastric brooding frog eats its eggs. To protect them, she doesn't digest anything for the six weeks it takes her young to mature. She starves herself as the young grow big off of her own body, so big until eventually there's no more room for her lungs to expand. She's forced to rely on the barely-sufficient oxygen she can absorb through her skin, as she slowly starves. So much love. She suffers for them.

The giant pacific octopus, too, starves for her young. She lays her eggs in a carefully constructed cave, like precious little grains of rice--hundreds of them. Then she walls herself inside the cave, so that predators can't get to them; so that the currents won't wash them away until after they've hatched. She blows water over the priceless clutch, keeping them clean and oxygenated; she chases away or kills anything that might eat them. She doesn't eat. She's dead by the time they hatch, or shortly afterwards, but they wouldn't have lived without her.

Would you die for your children? Really? Would you have had them at all, if you'd known that it would, inevitably, cause you to die?

The caecilian's young eat their mother. They eat the skin off of her, in one species. In another, it's the lining of the oviduct. Like if your fetal child ate--for as long as eleven months--the lining of your uterus. Or if your clutch of precious babies swarmed over you every three days, consuming every inch of skin on you, and waiting only long enough for you to regrow it before they did it again. And again. Every three days, for months. You don't love your children so much.

It's what makes us weak. We don't want the pain, the blood and violence of birth. We want to be drugged until it doesn't hurt. We want everything clean and sterilized. Everything as much like surgery as possible--c-sections even for the women who don't need them. Sickening. You should bleed for your child, it's the only thing you can do. Give them your own flesh, it's all you really have to give. Milk is a sick, weak replacement for your own blood. For your life. That's how you give love.

Best of all are the parasitoids. The wasps and flies that give up their duties of mothering to someone else, someone who can give more. They lay their precious young, very carefully, onto the back of a host. A surrogate mother, an adoptive parent--the ones who really will give up anything, everything, for the child that's come into their care, even though it's not really their flesh and blood. That sort of altruism is--touching. Something worth emulating, replicating. Wouldn't the world be a better place if we were all so selfless? It would be. A better place.

The infant wasp hatches and burrows into its host. It eats it, piece by piece. Eventually the surrogate dies, but not before it's raised the wasp to adulthood. It hatches out of the husk left behind. The ultimate sacrifice. "I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you." And when you are eaten of, you're enacting the most sacred rite and sacrament--giving life to another. Even all your selfish whims are taken away, at the very end. You only want to do your part.

I feel it. I'm heavy with child; caring for them. Giving them everything I have to give--all of myself. Not in the transparent, weak way that people mean when they say it, but in a way that means more. Everything: flesh, blood and life. And at first I resisted, but it was only because I didn't understand. Now, I welcome the prick of each ovipositor--the laying of each new egg, ready to hatch open and begin its new life within me. It's been a while since one has come, though, which makes me a little sad. I'm getting close to the end, they can sense my imminent death; with almost preternatural intuition, the wasps know that I'm coming close to death, that my parasite load grew too high. I took on too much. Welcomed it in, once I realized what it all meant.

I am a city. A palace. A testament to divinity, to becoming something more. You won't understand until you've felt it. All the glory of motherhood, only more so. Because what I'm doing--it's truly laudable. There's no way to describe it. As my organs fall apart, as my flesh begins to rot away, I'm creating. Even second-hand--it's the closest I'll ever come to being the perfect mother. The one who will die for her children.

Inevitable.