This Week in Joyful Practice: a Calf is Born
in the middle of the night
In the middle of the night, in the liminal space between Sunday and Monday, I woke with a start because someone was standing over me. What? I said, trying to make out through the darkness which child it was.
But it wasn’t a child, it was my partner. She was dressed already. Baby cow is coming, she said.
Ok, good luck, I said, and then I fell back asleep immediately.
These days, when I think back on all the sleep I’ve lost over the last seventeen years of babies and kids and puppies, I first feel mystified at how I ever rallied, and then I feel called to do nothing but sleep for two weeks straight.
I woke again when my phone rang.
It was the mama cow calling me. Just one low moo, and then another.
Did You Mean To Call Me? I shouted into the phone.
Oh, Sorry, my partner said. I could use a hand.
The calf was tawny and poodle-sized with wet, rumpled fur. She was trying to find her way around in that clumsy, disoriented way of a creature who is—brand new to this realm—learning all at once to breathe and see and walk.
(to Breathe! and See! and Walk!)
And so she kept stumbling into the water trough, which—I’m sorry, no offense—was a truly terrible idea. I mean, wtf baby?
Can you try and keep her out of the water? my partner hollered to me. She was wrestling the mama cow, maybe trying to get a halter on her, but honestly I was too bleary-eyed to make sense of it all. Big things were happening. So much mooing.
As I approached the calf, she stepped once more into the trough (I mean, come on!) and I pulled her out with both hands.
The calf was fine. And then my hands were covered with warm, wet afterbirth, which felt both gross and magical. I wanted to go back to bed so badly.
My partner had already milked colostrum from the mama. She had sent me to fetch a special bottle designed for baby cows, which looks a lot like a bottle for baby humans, only the rubber nipple is the size and shape of a cow teat. Anyways, I had fetched it, and my partner had filled it, and now she was holding it for the calf who was making giant sucking sounds, so that was good, and I knew it was good because my partner said it was good, that this was the thing we were working for, the sucking reflex, the imbibing, the impulse to stay alive, and I said Can I go back to bed now?
And so anyways, now I know what it feels like to be a father.
Registration is open for Build a Personal Oracle Deck (a joyful practice virtual workshop)
I can’t wait for this community experiment where we will play around with the images that most haunt us. Please believe me when I say this is for anyone who wants to engage with creative practice. No special expertise and skillset required. Honestly, it’s more fun that way—just a bunch of folks in community, making stuff.
You can learn more and register here.