Lambing Season | Audrey Wu

It is 3pm on a Friday afternoon and I am thinking of you, Mama. I am thinking of your stub of a nose that resembles mine. I am thinking of the gold chain around your neck and how my sister and I wear ones identical to it with our own Chinese zodiac signs. I am thinking of how I rarely have any pictures of the two of us together past the age of twelve. I am thinking of the playlist I made for your birthday one year, how you listen to it everyday and say it is the best gift anyone has ever given you.

I am thinking this in the barn as we crowd around the fence watching a pregnant sheep give birth to her babies. She is tired, dark eclipses surrounding her eyes, swallowing her figure whole. Her stomach is inflated, a swollen moon with a diameter of 2 feet. She is in pain. When sheep go into labor, they do it the way all women do: painfully. To be a woman is to be beautiful. To be beautiful is to feel pain. The ewe bleats violently and digs at the ground, as if she is searching for something more. As if she is uncovering something with each swipe of her hooves against the brassy hay. As if she is saying, I am happening. It is happening to me.

I watch in complete silence as her body contracts, each movement so sharp that I feel it in my own body as the rhythmic pushing grows faster and heavier. And then, almost effortlessly, two tiny hooves come out. The ewe’s breathing stops, her body stills. She looks relieved. She looks at me as if she is just as in shock as I am. I smile back at her. I know, my eyes tell her, I know. My body swells with pride, resembling her once swollen belly.

The baby is gooey and steaming from the heat of his mother’s body. The heat rises off the surface of its delicate skin, off white, and covered in blood and mucus. The mother gingerly nudges the baby with her nose and licks the surface of her child, piecing away the placenta. She runs her tongue like water over the newborn lamb, and then, it hits me.

This lamb is alive. This body, which has been inside its mother, has existed for 145 days but this is the first time it is seeing the world. Before this moment, it was just a heartbeat within a heartbeat. A life that could only exist with the dependency of another one. My body aches to remember, to hold on to the recollection of living for the first time. I wonder how the baby lamb must feel, to touch the hay for the very first time. To nurse on its mother’s udder, never having done so before. To let oxygen enter each bronchiole and leave with each exhale. To feel safe.

I cut the umbilical cord with trembling hands and careful precision, dipping the skin that once tethered the lamb to its mother in iodine. The ewe bleats again, loudly, eyeing me as I hold her newborn. The lamb, which has been alive for no more than twenty minutes, stands for the first time, on quaking limbs. His ankles shake as he steadies himself and looks to his mother for approval. He takes his first steps, walking towards her, leaning against the cradle of her body. With her touch, he is no longer shaking.

Mama, I think of you when I see this and I begin to cry. Softly, slowly, as if I am worried my tears will scare the mother sheep, I let the pearls of salt drip down my cheek and soak into my pores. I think of you as the baby rests his tiny frame on his mother’s weight. I think of you as she starts moaning again, preparing for her second lamb to be born. I think of how you held me in your body. How you gave me someone to belong to and something to live for.

You and Baba often argue about the single trait you would bestow to your child if you could. Baba always says persistence. You said joie de vivre and you exhibit it in everything you do. You stop at any place that has cute font or the word “dairy” in its title. You order rainbow sprinkles because you think it looks more fun. You smile from your eyes and sing loudly, even though you know your voice is horrible. You don’t care, you do it anyway. When the man in your office told you he wasn’t used to women like you who were “opinionated orientals,” you worked your ass off everyday, and two years later, when you were the boss of his boss, you fired him. You asked me to cut your hair once, in the backyard, and when it came out choppy and uneven you told me it added character. You developed sciatica and pain in your joints from hours of driving me and Bobo from place to place. You never complained. You like long hikes and bike rides, you used to take me and Bobo on the back of your bicycle through the hills of Cambridge while we squealed with glee and ordered you to go faster. And you always did. You signed the two of us up for boxing because I mentioned it once as a coping mechanism for my depression. You signed us up for lion dancing when I told you I wanted to try.

In my 17 years of living, I have never looked you in the eye. I am afraid I will see myself in the corner of your retina. I am afraid I will become you. Or worse, I am afraid I will see who I really have become, and I am afraid that is not what you wished me to be.

The baby lamb leans against his mother’s teat full of milk she has been saving for him. He laps his tongue on the surface of her skin, hungry and impatient. She has just given birth to another lamb and is laying down in the hay, as if her body cannot support the weight any longer and will collapse if she stands. There is still blood, fresh on the forehead of the firstborn’s scalp.

I’ve asked you about the story of my birth dozens of times. Each time, you tell me how easy I was. How quick the labor was, and how it was worth it immediately when you saw my face, saw that I had come out of you and that I would become a mini human. You said when you chose my name for me, you were giving a piece of yourself to me since I wore my father’s last name. And I never understood how much you gave. The hours you spent talking to me while I was still just a fetus in your womb. How much you worked to create a life for me, to mold it from the ground and set in the roots so I could focus on being a bulb. The protection you gave me, always warning me about the harshness of the world but trying to show me the best of it anyways. You save me the best parts of the mango, the ripe insides, and use your teeth to scrape the meat off the pit of the fruit. You say “I’m sorry you feel that way” because it was how you were raised. You know no other way to apologize. And yet, you forgive and give and give and give. You deteriorate so I have what I need to be happy. You don’t do it because you’re a mother. You don’t do it because it is your job. You do it because you love me.

This lamb, who has lived for no longer than half an hour, is already being raised to die. By next year at this time, he will no longer be lying on soft hay between his mothers legs, but on a glass plate, dressed in sauces and seasoning, accessorized in sprigs of parsley and boiled potatoes. The saying is that when you send a lamb to slaughter, you are responsible for causing harm to a heartbeat that does not yet know it will no longer get to pulsate, a body that does not fight back or recognize the difference between an abattoir and heaven. But the word “slaughter” contains the word “laughter.” There cannot be slaughter without laughter, just like how there cannot be death without life or heartbreak without love. Looking at the lamb now, his face wrinkled up, skin still sizzling with warmth from his mother’s belly, I watch his mother as she shields him with her body, skin to skin, to keep him from the cold. I think of how you wrapped yourself around me, gave me your layers to shelter me from the winter wind.

The thing about sheep is that the ewe will release oxytocin, the love chemical, before it proceeds in the process of birthing. Part of the ambiotic fluid, oxytocin is released when you are happy or when you are in love. There is something beautiful and raw about the idea that the most painful moment of an ewe’s life is one in which her body knows to release oxytocin, her body knows what to do without ever having done it before. The chemicals her body releases serve the purpose of helping the milk come down into the udder, and the mother will let her body decay, sag, and hang to give her lamb what they need. The lambs will nurse until they are grown and it is no longer necessary. They will push against the mother’s udder and nudge their heads against her teat hoping to tease out more milk. The mother will give and give until her body runs out of milk. Animals know and are able to see things that we never will. The mother knows instinctively when her baby is in danger, when she must protect them. To be a mother, for a lamb means to give everything you have so that your child can be happy and have that be enough.

And I think maybe we are not that different, sheep and humans.

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Audrey Wu is a high school student from Cambridge, Massachusetts. For Audrey, writing serves as a coping mechanism and she focuses on writing poetry to heal. In addition to editing for a variety of literary magazines, she has attended the Kenyon Review Young Writers workshop, Iowa Young Writers studio, Grubstreet’s Young Adult Writer’s program, and Northwestern Creative Writing for Talent Development among others. Outside of writing, Audrey enjoys good music, comfort food and looking for the silver linings in life.