My Mother is Part Cow

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This piece by Caroline Evans Abbott is the fifth post in the Emotional Ecologies series edited by Sarah York-Bertram and Jessica DeWitt. In this series, contributors were asked to reflect on what role emotion plays in connecting humans to their environment and more-than-human beings.

For five years this Faulknerian absurdism has become familiar, arising circumstantially in variants oft-repeated by its progenitor, my mother, to her own amusement.1 It is equal parts inside joke and open one, a nod to the trauma of individual moments in time and her existence at large, the continuance of a lifelong love of bending light before the eye of the beholder (or those of prying strangers). It follows our discourse, skirting her daily runs alongside a local dairy farm where she lives in rural Connecticut, occasionally repeated to new, bewildered ears. And it is true.

In her chest beats a living artifact, home to one of the first procedures of its kind, a surgery she underwent at age ten in 1967. Its echo is monitored by more than one leading specialist team to answer questions which better inform the care of today’s children facing the same congenital differences. When her aortic valve required unexpected and urgent replacement, her cardiology team conferred with us extensively on an important choice. To choose between a mechanical or bioprosthetic valve is a highly individual, nuanced decision; what is right for one patient is not always right or possible for another, and extensive, intersectional consultation should be involved. Bioprosthetic valves are, typically, of bovine origin, and (for now), they are irreplaceable by lab-grown tissue. For patients like my mother, their availability is life or death. For her, a cow’s heart was the key to saving her own, an upsetting irony not at all lost on her, and in 2018, a journey of more-than-human entanglement began at what for many represents the corporeal embodiment and epicenter of love and emotion.

For her, a cow’s heart was the key to saving her own, an upsetting irony not at all lost on her, and in 2018, a journey of more-than-human entanglement began at what for many represents the corporeal embodiment and epicenter of love and emotion.

My mother's hand grasps mine along as we walk through the rooftop garden or "healing garden" of Boston Children's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts following her second of three open-heart surgeries.
My mother’s hand grasps mine along as we walk through the rooftop garden or “healing garden” of Boston Children’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts following her second of three open-heart surgeries. May 2018. Caroline Abbott.

For two of her three open-heart procedures so far, I have walked with her in a carer role, darning rips in a tapestry of our time together while other stitches healed. This essay asks me to embrace their entangled threads. It explores the experience as an emotional ecology, first, offering consideration for the journey by which the other-than-human tissue in my mother’s heart shaped me as a carer and heightened my awareness of more-than-human intersection in hospital as sites of care. Finally, I consider how this experience has improved my approach to the more-than-human histories I now directly engage in telling in my own work.

A composite image. On the left, a sign from her favourite local greenhouse reads "open all year". On the right, her hand reaches for some annuals. Pre-surgery.
A composite image. On the left, a sign from her favourite local greenhouse reads “open all year.” On the right, her hand reaches for some annuals. Pre-surgery. Tolland Connecticut, May 2018.

Acknowledging my mother’s heart as a site of eventual multi-species entanglement shaped me fundamentally as a carer. The journey to acknowledge that entanglement — which now fits so well into a word I did not know then as I know it now — will appear to many a simpler project than exploring it as a site of debate for the “ethical reorganization of human-nonhuman relations” Maria Puig de la Bellacasa rightly called for that same year (2017). The “evolving needs and material realities” of my mother’s life, of our lives together, and the lives of so many other patients dependent upon this tissue, existed largely in mutual exclusion to those of the cow. The calls for “caring obligations that enact non exploitative forms of togetherness” were, in those moments, mutually exclusive to my own obligations as carer.2 The “feelings, hopes, fears and wants” of the cow were directly and immovably opposite to us.3 A mere twenty-five, hacking into the soil of my mother’s garden beds while she gave orders, and we worked through our grief, anger, and fear together, my obligation was to convince her to proceed with the surgery which would save her life. Her organs had been the grounds of debate, already, enough. We honoured these feelings in gracious and ugly ways; feeding pollinators, walking among the cows, eating burgers (at her team’s insistence that she consume more heme iron). This was a messy time.

A vase of sunflowers dresses an otherwise-austere hospital room on the cardiac unit in yellow. Pumps, wires, and breathing toys encroach upon the periphery, coexisting.
 A vase of sunflowers dresses an otherwise-austere hospital room on the cardiac unit in yellow. Pumps, wires, and breathing toys encroach upon the periphery, coexisting. Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, May 2018.

The other-than-human tissue in her heart would heighten my every awareness of more-than-human intersection on those hospital grounds. When surgery day came and she was wheeled off on something like a cloud, jokes and all, to the operating room, what Donna Haraway might consider more-than-human “figures” and “kin” surrounded us.4 Printed patterns on scrubs, bulletin boards, and ceilings blurred together in two-dimensional effigy to the world outside, paired with photographs of other-than-human family very much missed in those first hours as we waited for word, blind to anything but. With the sigh that she had won her first battle, the next began, and it was not long before two-dimensional, multispecies effigies emerged in the barren intensive care unit where she arrived next.

A composite image. On the left, paper flowers adorn the walls of the ICU. On the right, pre-existing flowers which dotted the windows on our arrival to her room after the ICU
A composite image. On the left, paper flowers adorn the walls of the ICU. On the right, pre-existing flowers which dotted the windows on our arrival to her room after the ICU. Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, May 2018.

There, amid the austerity of wires, pumps, and tubes, robotic and mechanical sounds fertilised the budding-up of unit-approved, sterile paper sunflowers, which grew ever higher up the walls as her condition improved. Days drew on, and the hospital’s rooftop garden overlooking Boston opened up before us; a milestone and “new leaf” opportunity at reclamation of the “ethical reorganization of human-nonhuman relations” which had felt so hard to realise just days prior.5 When at last she had outgrown it, seeds filled her pockets as we ventured back to our own gardens and the next phase of her care.

A composite image of three images. On the left, ruderal plants cling to the building outside of the perspex walls of the rooftop garden, thriving even against the winds of Boston. Next, an iris blooms, the city skyline in the background. On the right, the iris bed, and a statuary "kin," a fox, convene in an ecology all their own as families walk the paths between their neighbouring beds.
A composite image of three images. On the left, ruderal plants cling to the building outside of the perspex walls of the rooftop garden, thriving even against the winds of Boston. Next, an iris blooms, the city skyline in the background. On the right, the iris bed, and a statuary “kin,” a fox, convene in an ecology all their own as families walk the paths between their neighbouring beds. Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, May 2018.

Each chance interaction was an ecology of care, uniquely filled with other humans on their own journeys of multi-species entanglement alongside still other other-than-humans. At each convergence, new stratifications, new layers, new opportunity for the fulfillment of emotion, be it hope, anger, confliction, or grief. They formed surprising vectors by which “caring obligations” might be realized at sites of multi-species convergence and all their complexities — no matter their associated feeling.6 In hospital, these sites of multi-species convergence restructured hope itself: no longer a “thing with wings” but a ruderal, undying being which sprung from every crack in bureaucracy in which it could entwine its roots, growing at the top of a skyscraper next to a helipad.7

Frameworks which consider emotion a bridge to peripheral and embodied natures not only offer perspective on the historical record and directly counter their often-human-centered narratives: they disclose a spectrum of entanglement and a magnitude of necessary work to better acknowledge more-than-human experience in the histories humans write.

An awareness of my own experience as a carer amid these entangled, ecological realities has improved my approach to telling the more-than-human histories I now gravitate towards in my own work. Frameworks which consider emotion a bridge to peripheral and embodied natures not only offer perspective on the historical record and directly counter their often-human-centered narratives: they disclose a spectrum of entanglement and a magnitude of necessary work to better acknowledge more-than-human experience in the histories humans write. With an overwhelming number of women, femme, and Queer individuals in these intimate, caring roles and the natures they intersect, McDonagh’s reminder that the “lives of women and other marginalised groups” are vital informants to comprehensive analyses of spatial history takes on more-than-human meaning.8

A composite image. On the left, the blur of my mother's motion off camera captured the fluorescent orange of her sweatshirt. On the right, a conference with a dairy cow that same day.
A composite image. On the left, the blur of my mother’s motion off camera captured the fluorescent orange of her sweatshirt. On the right, a conference with a dairy cow that same day. Connecticut, May 2018.

When the human body becomes the site of more-than-human entanglement in such a traumatic, medical sense, the resulting embodiment of more-than-human ecology allows historians to recalibrate other histories in which bodies have been made “new” by their interactions with environment.9 By these means, histories which apply the lens of emotional ecology will challenge historical notions which declare nature spaces worthy of and existing “only for the excellent” by further challenging who the excellent has historically been.10 Caring follows the carer into the future in all they do, and as “gender and space” remain “co-constituted,” to acknowledge caring as a deeply stratified ecology, as place, as nature, is a radical act.11

A landscape. My parents convene with the cows in thanks after surgery. Mom attends another conference [with a cow behind a fence]. Dad keeps lookout.

My emotional ecology is neither a vacuum of feminine softness nor its playground. It is instead a site of coexistence, a brutal frontier…

My mother’s favourite poem by E. E. Cummings is a confessional. “I carry your heart with me,” it sings. “(I carry it in my heart).”12 This essay is not a confessional to “whatever a”[n] emotional ecology “has always meant,”13 but it will to this commit: my emotional ecology is neither a vacuum of feminine softness nor its playground. It is instead a site of coexistence, a brutal frontier, the site of stories entangled in the fray of a nature no less “red in tooth and claw” as the ones with which western notions of history regard as “real,” the place of reshaped beings, beat or be beaten. For better (for her), or for worse (for the cow), her heart still does. For this, I am grateful. To the cows I confess as often as I can.

A composite image. On the left, a field of calves lie in the sun, resting. On the right, my mother, in the distance, runs on what she calls "cow power."
A composite image. On the left, a field of calves lie in the sun, resting. On the right, my mother, in the distance, runs on what she calls “cow power.” Photos courtesy of Sandra L. Evans-Abbott and Ronald M. Abbott, Spring and Summer 2023.
Feature Image: A hospital bed, vacant, sheets tangled, pumps, wires, and background elements complementing a vase of sunflowers arranged at the bedside at dawn with light streaming in. May 2018. Courtesy of Caroline Abbott.

Notes

1 This reference, and the title, refers to William Faulkner’s famous line in As I Lay Dying (1930), “my mother is a fish,” in which a coffin going down-river prompts the narrator to refer to her as a fish. This conceptualisation parallels non-human frameworks to come, including mention of Donna Harraway, whose beloved comparison of a moss-covered stump shaped like a dog helps her to form the idea of other-than-human beings, or “figures” as themselves constructions of multi species entanglement.

2 de la Bellacasa, Maria Puig. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More-Than-Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

3 Ibid.

4 Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press.

5 de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care, 2017.

6 Ibid.

7 Dickinson, Emily. “Hope.” 1891. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12242/12242-h/12242-h.htm.

8 Briony McDonagh, Review of Feminist Historical Geographies: Doing and Being. Gender, Place & Culture 25 (11): 1563–78, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1080

9 Coleman, Jon T., Here Lies Hugh Glass: A Mountain Man, a Bear, and the Rise of the American Nation, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).

10 Hadamitzky, Christiana. Heroism in Victorian Periodicals 1850 -1900, (Germany: University of Freiburg, 2020), 3—12.

11 McDonagh, Review of Feminist Historical Geographies, 2018.

12 Cummings, E. E. “[I Carry Your Heart With Me (I Carry It In)].” 1952. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/49493/i-carry-your-heart-with-mei-carry-it-in.

13 Ibid.

14 (@academmeic). 2021. “Postfeminism is why we need softness but is also what makes softness difficult.” Instagram, July 6, 2021. https://www.instagram.com/p/CQ_Vp2ZNsBo/?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ%3D%3D.

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Caroline Abbott

Caroline (she/her) is a PhD student in History at the University of Cambridge, and a recent graduate of Glasgow University (M.Res. 2019). Her scholarship focuses on the intersections of animal history and frontier, with particular attention to environmental histories which challenge or expand our understanding of the relationships between empire, environment, and other-than-human beings and place these global actors in greater ecological, social, and gendered context. She is managed by a small gray rescue Manx and a formerly-feral house panther.

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