NATURE, NOT FOR THE FRAGILE
Any mother (or father for that matter) can tell you that
once you have children, you suddenly become unable to watch (or read about)
many shows/films that you used to watch before. Be it their subject content or their tone,
you find yourself in mid program cringing in fear or weeping like a child as you feel your parental synapses
on meltdown. You soon realize that you’ve suddenly become much more precious - and frighteningly empathetic - since parenting took hold.
Admittedly, I was okay for awhile…or perhaps I was just too tired to find the correct remote control, and then of course the
brain took hold, emotions ran amuck and I found myself weeping at commercials
appealing to end world’s hunger, especially those commercials with children
looking bereft and hungry (not that I didn’t weep before, but suddenly it
became a necessity to end world hunger NOW since the birth of the King). Not to
mention, when I watched certain TV shows I could hear myself uttering phrases that
sounded like something my mother would say – ‘Do they need all this excessive
violence? Why must they show that, it’s only 8 o clock for god sakes.’
The other night, when I was uttering my usual phrase to my husband of, 'let’s
just not watch anything too dark,' we opted for a sweet little nature show that
had aired on the BBC. I, feeling rather precious at the time, figured a harmless nature show about animals parenting their young could be right up my
alley. I mean, honestly, what could be so bad? UM, well, seemingly I forgot
that what occurs in nature is bloody ruthless and it makes a pack of wild four
year olds look like choirboys. For starters, as I clearly forgot, merely
keeping your baby alive out in the wild is a feat for any animal. Everyone is prey to someone
bigger, scarier and hungrier and that makes for problematic parenting. Forget about trying to find appropriate childcare, just
making sure your kid doesn't become lunch becomes the main occupation for many animals.
Be it the buffalo who has to protect their young from unrelenting wolves, who as you can
imagine are much more dexterous and quick than a lumbering buffalo, to the
spider monkeys (I think it was a spider monkey, at a certain size all monkeys
start to look the same to me) who have to fend off other freaking monkeys from
killing their young, it’s a cutthroat world out in nature land. Fine, fear another species, but an attack from your own kind? That's just rude.
Then there were the animals that flat out abandoned their
young even before their birth, as clearly in their species childrearing is not part of the package (yes,
humans have sadly mirrored this all too often). The sea turtle for example who battled unbelievable odds just to get on the damn beach (through rocks, storms and
other things trying to kill it) to lay her eggs, only to amble off and
disappear back into the ocean never to be seen again. This of course caused me
to scream at the TV, while my husband tried to calm me down with herbal tea, ‘What the hell?? She’s
just going to leave her kids like that after all that effort?! Who the hell is
going to raise them now?’ He didn’t have the heart to break it to me that most
baby turtles don’t make it to the ocean’s edge after busting out of their eggshell.
Then there was a bird that innocently sat on her eggs waiting eagerly to become
a mother. Little did she know that a rival bird had put her own egg in the
mother’s nest so that she didn’t have to raise it. And not only was this bird
much uglier at birth (I know, love is unconditional…and clearly very very blind), but once out of
the shell, it had the audacity to push the mother's biological eggs out of the nest when
Mamma bird was out foraging for food. And let me tell you, this poor unsuspecting
Mamma bird had to hightail it out of the nest every two minutes to find food. This monstrous little ball of feathers made the King look like a food amateur. Ah yes, a mother's work is tireless.
Needless to say, after my nerves were frayed and I realized nature
(and human kind) is not for the precious or the overly sensitive, I reached for my book with not a death
scene or child abandonment issue in sight (and suddenly realised why my older sister has taken to watching the CW Channel). Come to think of it, I’ll be watching Korean cartoons (don’t
ask) with the King in no time.