Mothering Nature
Rev. Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
May 12, 2002 – Mother’s Day

Readings: 	Exodus 1:22 to 2:10 
		Excerpt from “The Marvels of Insect life” by Erica Funkhouser, from Pursuit (Houghton Mifflin 2002) 

	Mother’s Day poses such a challenge that many ministers ave given up preaching on it altogether. Some of the problems are the same ones I mentioned in my sermon on breastfeeding in February: a good portion of us are not equipped by plumbing to be mothers, and for those who are so equipped, a good portion of you will not bear children either through choice or circumstance; and for those who have born children, there is always this nagging guilt when we talk about mothers – was I a good enough mother? 
	I am going down at the end of this month to help my real mother organize her things as she prepares to move to an assisted-living facility in my hometown.  If I know my mother, I expect that we will have many a poignant reminiscence over old photos and objects that would have no conceivable worth to anyone outside our family.  We may not get a lot of sorting done, but we’ll have a lot of good memories.  At one occasion like this in the past, my mother looked at a picture of her mother and started crying softly, “I feel so ashamed when I think of my own mother and am glad she’s not alive to see how far I’ve fallen.”  Well, I didn’t exactly think of my mother as a fallen woman; she held down a good responsible and worthwhile job until she was past eighty, and was a loving and caring mother and grandmother within her circumstances and resources.  But measured against her image, what I will call here the mommy-myth, she wasn’t good enough.
	I used the mommy-myth this month in my newsletter column as some of you may have seen.  I wished there were a super mom who could take Ariel Sharon and Yasir Arafat by the scruff of their necks and send them to their rooms until they learned to behave.  Such is the power of the image.  Of course no real person can do that.  
	But I think just because it is so problematic, because it has so many edges of guilt and loss and bad feelings, the mommy-myth is worth dealing with.  For it is my notion here this morning that we have built a halo around motherhood which equates it with goodness, and that that halo is as hard to wear for those who have been mothers as it is to bear for the rest of us.
	The mommy-myth halo bespeaks an obligation to be good which is almost infinite, and is impossible for anyone to achieve in practice.  That’s the bad news.  The good news is that fortunately, actual mothering requires something quite different from goodness, it requires, in all species from the flea to the wasp to the human, a finagling, a juggling of the available resources against the demands of biology, to try for the best outcome in particular circumstances.
	I can see the headline now: iconoclastic pastor takes on motherhood; will apple pie be next?  The mommy-myth as an explanatory device holds  that all mothers are endowed with a maternal instinct which will lead them infallibly not only to nurture and protect their offspring, but to do so at their own sacrifice if need be.  It is this pervasive idea that generates so much guilt among those who have had children.  If I am anything less than the perfect mother, if I have ever been cruel to my child or anything less than fully supportive, I must be some kind of unnatural monster.  There must be something wrong with me.
	You may have seen the New Yorker Magazine’s Mother’s Day cover this week.  It depicts a Mother Hen, in bed, being given a breakfast in bed on her special day by her adorable little chick, all decked out in a beanie.  But instead of being pleased by this gesture, the mother hen is wearing a look of great anxiety, with a sweat bead popping out of her forehead and her lips so tightly drawn you can see her teeth, a rare sight indeed in a hen.  What has made her so anxious is that the breakfast her little chick has brought her on its neat wooden tray consists of two eggs, sunnyside up.  She is being invited, in other words, into an act of cannibalism.  
	The reason this visual joke works is that it plays with the mommy-myth.  The idea of a mother eating her young is repugnant to us, and the mommy-myth says it doesn’t happen in nature.  There is nothing wrong with it being repugnant; I’m not here arguing that it’s good for mothers to harm or kill their children.  What I want to show is that this moral idea is culturally conditioned, a product of our time and values, not a biological given, not a hard-wired instinct derived from evolution.
	This whole area was explored in fascinating detail in a book I’ve mentioned before, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection, by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist at the University of California at Davis.  Hrdy set out to look at the whole question of a maternal instinct, what it is, what it isn’t, and how it might have evolved.  
	Now you would think that Darwinian evolution would tend to create a strong maternal instinct, and that this instinct would display at its strongest in animals such as humans where the young have the longest period of dependency.  For those mothers who exhibited the greatest protective behavior to their young would be the ones whose young were most likely to survive and pass on the genes of the mother to succeeding generations.  There is seemingly a scientific basis to the mommy-myth.  After all, haven’t we all seen films on the nature channel of the mother bird faking a broken wing in order to draw the predator’s attention away from the nest?
	Well, that is part of the story, but it’s not the whole story by any means.  The poem I read a few minutes ago describes how mother wasps, when their larvae have no chance of survival, deliberately kill them and leave them out for the birds to eat.  Hrdy describes infanticide throughout the animal and human kingdoms.  Not in every species, but in a lot.
	Most commonly babies are killed by males, particularly males who did not father them.   This is true in several species of primates and monkeys as well as other mammals which don’t have pair-bonding for life.   In langur monkeys, for instance, a new male moves into a group of females and will kill any infant who is not weaned.  Because this interrupts the mother’s lactation, she becomes sexually receptive and thus the new male can mate with her.  This male behavior might be predicted by Darwinian selection, since the male has the incentive to propagate his own gene-line and eliminate the gene-line of other males.  
	More surprising are the instances of female infanticide, killing of babies by mothers.  There are certain species of mice who mate for life.  If the male is not around for any reason when the mother gives birth, she will kill her offspring rather than raise them by herself.  According to Hrdy, biologists have found evidence among beetles, spiders, fish, birds, mice, ground squirrels, prairie dogs, wolves, beards, lions, tigers, hippopotami and wild dogs that there are a range of conditions under which mothers cull their litters and abandon or cannibalize their young.  To be sure, there is a wider range of conditions under which rival males or other females 
kill them.
	We find this fact repugnant of course.  The present Catholic church scandal and all the day-care scandals of the 1980s in the legal sphere gain their shock value from the fact that most of us instinctively want to protect children and we find it hard to understand why anyone would harm them. And yet, as Hrdy shifts her focus from animals to humans, it is clear that infanticide is well-known and documented in human society as well.
	At one end we have the deliberate and intentional killing of babies.  These are rare enough to make the news.  When we see a mother arrested for the killing of her children, we are inclined immediately to assume she’s crazy.
	She may or may not be; it depends.  There is a prevalent pattern in American culture of teenage mothers killing their children or leaving them in a dumpster because they are emotionally unprepared for motherhood or are traumatized by the stigma attached to teenage motherhood.  As this stigma lessens, the prevalence of this type of infanticide should diminish.
	Putting these teen mothers to one side, Hrdy says that  the adult mother who deliberately kills by an affirmative act like smothering or use of weapons may indeed be an aberration.  However, infanticide by abandonment or exposure is so common throughout human history that it cannot be put down as “unnatural.”  Our repugnance leads us to distance ourselves from it, and our ethnocentrism wants to say that if humans do this, it must be the barbarians, the primitive peoples.  Wrong again.  The only difference between Western and non-Western abandonment of infants is that in the West an institution was developed to aid in the task.  It was called the foundling hospital, and it flourished in all the major cities of Europe from the Renaissance up into the twentieth century.  
	The foundling hospital in Florence Italy, the Ospedale degli Innocenti, was built in 1419 and still stands today.   They kept very accurate records.   The first year it was built, 90 babies were left there.  In 1539, a famine year, 961 babies were left.  Eventually five thousand infants a year poured in from all corners of Tuscany.
	Hrdy points out that there were high mortality rates in these foundling homes, sometimes reaching as high as 95 percent, so that parents who delivered their children there must have known that they were practically condemning them to death.  The reason for the high death rates was that there were not enough wet-nurses to go around, and in the absence of sterilized bottles and formulas, the majority of babies in these institutions simply starved to death or succumbed to diseases like dysentery.  Yet the institutions kept on. Some of them installed a rotating door so that parents could deposit their infants without being seen, like the night deposit slot on a library.  	Do you know someone named Esposito?  That name means “exposed,” and was one of the names given by foundling hospitals in Italy to the children who managed to survive long enough to be baptized.  
	Foundling homes, and infant abandonment in general, would not be possible if the maternal instinct worked as the mommy-myth says.  Hrdy does not deny that there is a bonding between mother and infant, and that there is a biological basis for the bond, but apparently the hormones which are strongest in generating the bond occur as a result of nursing.  And historical data suggests that most human mothers who abandon their children never start nursing.
	Now we covered nursing a lot in February but I want to revisit it here to make the point that before the invention of effective contraceptives in the twentieth century, nursing was the principal means that human mothers had to control their reproduction, since women generally are not fertile while they are nursing.  When the practice of farming ones babies out to other women to nurse, which is called wet-nursing, became popular in Eighteenth-Century France, the result was that the birthrate soared, creating more babies to be fed and overwhelming the supply of wet-nurses and the spaces in the foundling hospitals.  It was a vicious cycle.
	There are also found in nature instances in which  mothers, without deliberately killing the young or abandoning them, arrange it so that some have a better chance of survival than others.  In many species of birds, the female lays eggs about a day apart.   Instead of waiting until the clutch is complete, the mother will starting brooding the eggs right away, with the result that the first-laid egg hatches several days before the last one.  From that point on, the die is cast.  The first-born chick will have a great advantage over its younger siblings, and will already have received enough food from the parents by the time the last ones hatch.  If there is not enough food to go around, the stronger older sibling will outcompete the younger ones with the result that these younger ones starve.  The mother doesn’t directly kill any of her children, but the brooding strategy she adopts ensures that the eventual size of the brood will be in line with the food supply.
	And this is the model which Hrdy maintains is everywhere in nature.  Motherhood is not basically about instincts, it is about tradeoffs.  The mother may trade the survival of all of her brood for the survival of a few who might live to maturity, given scarce food resources.  The mother birds I just talked about lays the extra eggs on spec, so to speak.  If food is plentiful, the while brood will survive to maturity; if not, the first born will survive.
	Again, this is repugnant to our sense of  morality.  One of the most powerful novels  of the Twentieth Century, made into a popular movie, is Sophie’s choice, where the central dramatic moment is where the heroine, a prisoner of the Nazis, is forced on a train platform outside the death camp to choose which of her two children will live and which one will die in the camp.  It is about the most excruciating situation that any of us can imagine ourselves in, because it enlists the innocent mother in the evil perpetrated by her captors.
	Yet animals make this choice every day, and in human societies which favor babies of one sex over another, it is common for mothers to kill babies of the disfavored sex.
	Enough, I hear you screaming, why are we being subjected to this on Mother’s Day? Well, I need to tell you first that there is a bracing quality to look at maternal behavior across cultures and across species because the mommy-myth is so deeply engrained.  Second, there is a bright side to this picture in the natural world as well.  Hrdy emphasizes that one of the strategies that a mother uses to figure out how to rear the children she bears is rearing assistants or what Hrdy calls allomothers.  These are defined simply as anyone who helps take care of a child.  
	Allomothers are found throughout nature.  In beehives we have a whole class of organisms devoted to serving the larvae.  Among monkeys and primates, the females typically travel in groups with the young and cooperate in their rearing.  Fathers, of course, can be allomothers, particularly in species which are pair-bonded.
	We have a lot of allomothers in this church – indeed in a sense the whole church is allomother to the little charges we have downstairs.  Perhaps Kathryn is our allomother-in-chief.  Teachers, day-care workers, grandparents, resident relatives, nannies, aunts and uncles all serve as allomothers in our society.  They served more frequently in this capacity in previous generations than in the present, with our far-flung families.  A speaker at this same Star Island conference began her talk by saying, “I come from a dysfunctional nuclear family, which is a redundancy.”  What she meant was that every family cut off from its more distant relatives will be dysfunctional  When Sarah Hrdy herself was on Star Island two summers ago with her two children, she brought along a young woman and listed her occupation in the conference directory as “allomother.”
	Hrdy poses an interesting question: what is the evolutionary reason why human females live for decades beyond their reproductive years?  In Darwinian theory, any trait is selected for its contribution to success in reproduction.  What does a woman’s lifespan beyond her biologically fertile years contribute to survival?  The answer may be in allomothering, a long tradition that post-menopausal women help in child-rearing and thus help to assure the continuity of the gene-line.
	This is where we get examples of altruism in human behavior which doesn’t seem to fit with Darwinian theory.  Hrdy collects several instances of older women sacrificing themselves for the benefit of children who are not their own but are related to them.  
	Well, nature shows us, in other words, that motherhood isn’t all apple pie.  Rather, it is a constant negotiation to get the best outcome for the greatest number of offspring given the circumstances.  This is beautifully illustrated by the story of Moses’ birth.  
	Moses is a male Hebrew child born under a decree from Pharaoh saying that all male Hebrew children must be killed.  The Egyptians were worried about being out-populated by their slaves.  So this child’s mother using the available resources, figures out a way to abandon the child without completely foreclosing hope, and the child gets found by the daughter of Pharaoh.  The daughter then places the child with his own mother as a wet-nurse.  The mother’s strategy succeeds, against all odds, in averting the mortal danger to her child, who will grow up to lead the Hebrews out of the bonds of slavery.
	What does this have to do with religion, you may be asking?  Why are we getting this science lecture from the pulpit of a church?  I think it has a lot to do with our own sense of ourselves, with our common humanity, to realize that mothering always involves a finagling, a choice among resources.  My own mother’s guilt that she wasn’t the saint that her own mother was is misplaced because she didn’t face the same world that her mother did in raising her.  To raise children in Columbia South Carolina in the 1950's was a very different thing than to raise them there in the 1920's; the resources available to a mother were different.  Every mother has to deal with the circumstances she is given.  
	This also affects, I think, our view of God.  There is a real interplay, a dialectic, between our view of our own parents and our conceptions of the deity.  The metaphor for God that is most prevalent in the West throughout history is of a father, though since we are trying to overcome the patriarchy of our past many of us will opt for an image of God as a mother.  In either case, we are using the best metaphors we have of all-encompassing, unconditional love, and we ascribe that to God.  But before we ascribe it to God, we ascribe it to our parents and in particular to our mothers.  
	And the cost of doing that is we lay on our mothers this mommy-myth that no one can actually live up to.  Yes, you have unconditional love for your children, mothers of the world, and thank you for rearing them. But it is not the perfect world, it does not require you to be saints.  It does not set an infinitely high bar and tell you to live up to it.
	If you look around you at the natural world and the human world, you will find a wide variety of mothering behaviors.  I’m sorry if I’ve shocked anyone this morning with my attempt at a comprehensive view.  It doesn’t take away from our respect for our own mothers or our gratitude towards them.  I wouldn’t insult your mother, or mine either. What it does is, I hope, to help us free ourselves from the bondage to old stereotypes and the guilt that goes with them.
Amen.