mothering in the pigwood
barbara felton
“My daughter would love to see the pigs!” The woman glanced down at the child beside her, a girl of about seven years standing in front of the counter. Wearing jeans and sneakers, she was dressed for a visit to the pigs but her face reflected none of her mother’s enthusiasm for the venture.
On Saturdays, our farm store draws steady customers and we offer shoppers the opportunity to visit the farm animals. My husband staffs the store—he can answer every quirky question about how cows grow and how the cuts have been specified and why we raise our cows and sheep on grass and our pigs on open pasture—and I escort people to see cows, sheep, or pigs, depending on the visitors’ preference. On that Saturday, a warm day in autumn, the pigs had gotten the nod.
As the three of us set out for the pigwood, I suggested we collect some apples to feed to the pigs. We’d had a bumper crop and, lacking the person-power to harvest them, I was grateful for any use anyone could make of them.The girl took to the task immediately, using both hands to pick up the apples that had fallen in great numbers at the base of the tree by the shed. Energetically plucking apples from the grass, she didn’t appear to be in any rush to get to the pigs.
I found a plastic bag in my back pocket and handed it to her.
“Let’s go,” said her mother, tugging the youngster forward, and we moved toward the woods.
The pigs greeted us with their usual enthusiasm. They raced away from us when they first caught sight of us, putting up great piles of dust as they fled, and then quickly turned around and rushed back to see who’d arrived, curiosity winning out over caution. Mother and daughter seemed impressed by the frenzy created by our forty pigs, the mother beaming and the daughter taking a step backward.
I stepped over the foot-high electric wire and went in with the pigs.
“Do you want to come in?” I asked, eyeing the mother’s suede pumps. I’d offered her alternative footwear down in the store—plastic boots to slip on over her shoes—but she’d declined, so here she was, ready to enter the pigs’ enclosure wearing low flats.
“Oh, can we?” The mother stepped right up to the fence edge, delight in her face as she peered at the bobbing, milling herd. If my job was connecting visitors with farm animals, I’d already succeeded as far as the mother was concerned. Not that I’d done anything. Some people, I’d learned, bonded with pigs instantaneously upon meeting them: they giggled, exclaimed, gurgled, cooed, or laughed outright. This woman was one of them: she’d been captured in an instant.
The daughter watched the bustling animals surrounding my feet, frowning as a few of them nibbled on my boots. The youngster’s eyes took in the scene while her feet stayed firmly planted on the non-pig side of the fence. She grasped the bag of apples with both hands.
“Oh, come on in,” mother said to daughter. The mother lifted her slender legs, clad in ballerina-style tights, up and over the fence and tried to pull the child forward.
The girl made a gesture as if trying to step over the fence. She raised one chubby leg toward it but quickly planted it back down.
“I can’t,” she said.
“We’ll lift you over,” offered the mother, making me her accomplice. The mother in me hesitated at the woman’s insistence, but I took the girl’s arm and together we helped her over the fence. Once inside with the pigs, the girl stood stiffly, holding her arms and legs rigid but moving her eyes across the swarming herd. She flinched as a pig rubbed against her coat.
The mother dove into the herd, eager to engage the pigs. She quickly learned to reach beyond a pig’s ears to scratch its head, avoiding the direct approach that sent the pig recoiling. She sighed a sympathetic “ahhh” as the pig she was scratching leaned into her touch.
“Give the pigs some apples,” the mother called to her daughter, gesturing with one hand toward the bag the girl was holding and keeping her other hand on the neck of a bristly Berkshire.
The girl remained frozen. Except for her darting eyes, she was a statue, holding herself in the smallest space she could possibly occupy. Couldn’t the mother see her child’s fear?
Standing in the gap between mother and daughter, I judged the scene. I tasted the bilious fumes in my throat—the acrid emanations from the toxic pool of mother-guilt that lay at the bottom on my stomach—but ignored the poison’s warning. Foolishly, and incredibly, at that moment in the pigwood, I acted as if I, the mother of a child who’d committed suicide, was free of maternal guilt. Yes, I had resolved much over the years: our deceased son had had obvious internal struggles, his brother had grown into an estimable young man, no one blamed me. I could pretend the missed moments in my mothering, all of the lapses, misjudgments, distracted missteps of regular motherhood and the weight of our older son’s death, had lost their force and meaning.
So I ignored the fumes of my own mother-guilt and pronounced judgment upon the woman among the pigs. She had shed her mother skin. She’d ignored her daughter’s fear and moved off, slipping away to indulge her own delight. Wasn’t this a clear case of negligence—the mother ignoring her child, looking away, missing the messages her child was sending her? Surely abandonment was a cardinal sin of motherhood. Wrong, so wrong of her to be so oblivious to her child.
“Here. Give me an apple,” trilled the mother to her daughter. “I’ll show you how to feed them to the pigs.” The mother held her hand out for the bag, but the girl continued to clutch it tightly to her coat.
“I want to get out,” the girl said in a small voice.
I could see the disappointment in her mother’s face. She remained unaware of her daughter’s fear. The taste of bile persisted, and meanly, I wanted to savor this mother’s failing. That sulfurous pool, that smelly, sloshing, liquid legacy of mother-guilt burbled up in blame. But I was the farmer, not the mother or the daughter, and so I pried myself away from motherhood and focused on my task here. Fear of pigs is not easily remediable. Mollifying people’s fears of cows is far easier, and I had much ready ammunition for that task. Cows don’t bite. They don’t even have upper teeth. They’re vegetarians. Pigs were tougher to shape into benign beings. They were irrepressible: not only did they not back off at a human’s approach, they hung around in an ever-moving mob and bit into the toes of your shoes, as the herd at the girl’s feet were doing now. When one of the larger pigs grabbed her shoelace, the girl gasped. I was helpless, I saw, to connect this young lady with the elemental joys of life among pigs.
I turned to the girl. “I’ll help you out if you want to leave the pigs,” I said.
She nodded vigorously and I walked toward her to help her back over the fence. Halfway across the low barrier, her body turned fluid and she stepped outside the fence with ease.
“Well,” said the mother. She had turned to take in the view of her daughter on the pig-free side of the fence.
“I guess you could throw the apples to the pigs from over there.”
The girl’s shoulders had dropped but her eyes continued to move across the teeming herd as if seeking assurance that the animals were going to stay inside the fence. Slowly, she put the bag of apples down on the ground, and after a cautious glance at the pigs, pulled one out. She threw it into the mob. As it hit the ground the apple drew the attention of a few pigs, and one or two nudged it with their noses, but all soon went back to milling about, one seeking out the mother’s attention by pulling on her leggings.
The girl threw another apple and the pigs greeted it with the same brief interest and then moved away. The girl had a decent pitching arm, I thought. She was still watching the pigs.
“Smash an apple with your foot,” I said. “The pigs’ mouths are too small to bite into a whole apple. They need you to break it apart for them.”
The girl stared at me and then placed an apple on the ground. She stamped on it. Her foot slid off the shiny surface on her first try, but she stamped again with greater force. Crunch. The red globe gave way to her foot and broke into several juicy pieces. She took out another apple and stamped on it. Smash. She grabbed another.
The girl’s mother and I reached over for the apple pieces and gave them to the pigs, spreading them around the heaving, gobbling mob. The girl continued to pull apples out of the bag and set them on the ground. Smash, smash, and smash again. She stamped and smashed over and over.
“Look at the pigs, honey!” cried her mother. “They love the apples!”
The girl glanced toward the animals, then turned back to the apples. Smash, smash. She’d found her pursuit here in the pigwood. Awakened by some internal force—impatience? anger?—she’d acted, taken hold of a task and forged a role for herself. She placed another apple on the ground: smash. Finally, she’d emptied the bag.
She straightened up, looked at me, and beamed. I picked up the plastic bag and returned it to my pocket.
“Let’s go, Mom.”
The mother winced slightly and hesitated. She glanced around at the herd as if searching for some last inducement to get her daughter over the fence and in with the pigs. She reached toward the largest one, stopped, then looked at her daughter and stepped out over the fence.
As we made our way downhill from the pigwood, the mountain range at the far edge of the pasture stood in solid curving arcs above the heads of mother and daughter. We regained firm footing on the farm lane and the mother took her daughter’s hand.
“What else do think the pigs would like to eat besides apples?” asked the mother.
“Oreos!” shouted the girl.
“How about pears?” Mother asked.
“Bananas!” came the reply.
Mother and child were connected again, no longer separated by pigs or electric fences, and no longer separated in the mind of the judgmental farmer-mother. How stupid of me to think I’d transcended guilt, escaped that liquid legacy, kept it from distilling into blame. I’d witnessed no crime in the mother’s solitary pursuit of pleasure in pigs.
On the ground, in real life, bonds between mother and child were stronger than those in a stranger’s imagination. Leave-takings—of mother from child as well as child from mother—were simple facts of life, inevitable. Separations didn’t need to be mutual or reciprocal. Mother pigs shook their sucklings off their teats and walked over to their trough when they got hungry.
Inhaling deeply, I could smell the scented ingredients of farm life: sweet grass and pungent manure. Fresh air was life, the fuel for renewal, available at every moment with a simple inhalation. That was the beauty of breathing, its revivifying of cells and organs, its restoration of life, both animal and human, of pigs and people and apples, of children grown and growing still, all ever possible because of breath, air.
The girl burbled on with her imagined diet for pigs: chocolate ice cream, peanut butter sandwiches, candy apples. My head was clear. Fresh air was the answer. And fresh air was everywhere.
