Read "A few Words for Motherhood" by Wendell Berry online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
IT IS the season of motherhood again, and we are preoccupied with the pregnant and the unborn. When birth is imminent, especially with a ewe or a mare, we are at the barn the last thing before we go to bed, at least once in the middle of the night, and well before daylight in the morning. It is a sort of joke here that we have almost never had anything born in the middle of the night. And yet somebody must get up and go out anyway. With motherhood, you don't argue probabilities.
I set the alarm, but always wake up before it goes off. Some part of the mind is given to the barn, these times, and you can't put it to sleep. For a few minutes after I wake up, I lie there wondering where I will get the will and the energy to drag myself out of bed again. Anxiety takes care of that: maybe the ewe has started into labor, and is in trouble. But it isn't just anxiety. It is curiosity too, and the eagerness for new life that goes with motherhood. I want to see what nature and breeding and care and the passage of time have led to. If I open the barn door and hear a little bleat coming out of the darkness, I will be glad to be awake. My liking for that always returns with a force that surprises me.