Motherhood, Metamorphosis

Last summer, my daughter adopted a dead butterfly as a pet. She found it intact on the sidewalk, wings out as if pinned to a display at a natural history museum. She cupped the dead butterfly in her hands and slid it into the bug catcher I got for free from a neighbor. It was the kind with a netted top and plastic sides. The netted top let the (presumably living) bugs inside breathe. The plastic side let the viewer watch the (presumably living) bugs move.

I was honest. “The butterfly is not alive,” I told her as she picked up leaves to put into its new house like tacky IKEA rugs and just as durable. “It can’t eat or grow.”

“But it needs this,” she said, sliding in an acorn. “That’s its toy.”

“It’s dead,” I told her.

“For now,” she told me.

I get why she said it. Butterflies are nature’s Wonder Ball, with their transformation from egg to caterpillar to cocoon. From this dull cocoon, a sudden magic trick of flight and color. Why wouldn’t a kid assume that “Something new is coming soon; just wait.”

I began writing about insects in early 2016, when my children were three, one, and not a speck in my imagination. The writing began as blog posts on garden pests, before morphing into political essays and satire. During the blur of post-election grief and rage, I started writing a novel about an entomologist. The plot put my character in Iowa, like me, but I wanted to write someone very much not-me.

My main character Greta had no children, possessed a certain moral ambiguity, and a love of the small picture, not the big one. I wrote the first draft in about sixty days and spent the next three years studying entomology texts and revising. Researching entomology made me realize how little I knew about the world I inhabited, and which inhabited my house.

It’s easy to be interested in insects as a kid. Part of it is being closer to the ground. My youngest child, at two, is always finding ants and bringing them to me. He digs them out of sidewalk cracks and they skitter up and down his pudgy arms. Neither party seems too concerned about this. When I was young, I used to turn over rocks to find woodlice. Some people call them pillbugs—though my favorite name is rolly pollies. Poke them, and they curl up. I recognized that defensiveness.

The pandemic has woven our already tight lives tighter. This summer we spent hours outside, hiking or just circling the block—anything to avoid the house in which we spent too much time together. On one neighborhood walk with my children, a rabbit darted in front of our path.

Before it disappeared into a lilac bush, I pointed it out. “It runs because you’re bigger than it. Fight or flight.”

We created a list-game as we walked. Would this animal fight or flight? Shark, deer, wasp. Which snakes would fight? Which would flight, and did that mean they would grow wings?

I am glad I had children. I love them in ways that sound cliché, due to being uncomplicatedly true. I love their curiosity and wonder and undiluted joy. I love their individual passions and first forays into joke-telling. I love their grumpy faces when they wake up in the morning. I love them simply because they exist and need me. I tell them and show them my love and I don’t wish my life had turned out any other way.

To have an “and yet” here would be taboo. I do not wish to have not been a parent. But I think it is normal to imagine new existences when the world is crumbling.

*

My parents and my husband’s parents had children right out of college. At twenty-one and twenty-two, both sets conceived honeymoon babies, and then three more kids apiece. Most of my friends have delayed parenthood into their thirties—many haven’t started yet, if they plan to ever.

I had my third, and perhaps final, child two years ago after I turned thirty. Most of this was strategic: My husband is six years older than I am, and I wanted a partner who wasn’t too far in their career to make room for the act of co-parenting. I married my husband after the first year of my master’s program in English literature; I was elbow-deep in treatise on King Lear and wedding invitations, at the same time. I graduated sans honeymoon baby, and we started trying.

After a miscarriage, we conceived our oldest child when I was twenty-five. The miscarriage made the act of later pregnancies both more terrifying and more wanted. I was pot-committed. Every week that passed was a week that I didn’t have to start over, and another week I didn’t have to mourn.

Many of us have a false idea about what happens when caterpillars become butterflies. Something from our Very Hungry Caterpillar roots makes the process seem cleaner than it is. Author Eric Carle’s artwork depicts a pudgy green larva eating holes through apples and ice cream cones. All those tiny holes-worth of food transform him into a butterfly.

The painterly collaged cocoon only takes up two pages of the picture book, easy to speed through as the child grows restless on your lap. Our minds, too, glide over that cocoon time, but research shows that the process of metamorphosis isn’t a neat one. Caterpillar bodies break down, dissolving into caterpillar ooze. They remake themselves from this insectoid soup, cells dividing and reassembling rapidly to make wings, antennae, and all the other necessary new parts.

In his 1957 study, the first to challenge the accepted fact that children brought familial contentment, E.E. LeMasters found that eighty-three percent of all new mothers and fathers were in “severe crisis.” Research on the upheaval of parenthood has been upheld in studies afterward, including a longitudinal study conducted by researchers from Texas A&M and the University of Denver published in 2009, which noted that ninety percent of the surveyed one hundred and thirty-two couples experienced a decline in marital satisfaction after the birth of their first child.

I didn’t understand how completely the change in myself would be once I became a parent. The cocoon phase could have been thought of as pregnancy, but that wasn’t accurate for me. To be a pregnant person is to be a host to a strange and separate thing and to live with a thousand small inconveniences. Largely, though my behavior changed in a million ways from sleeping to food, I wasn’t changed. Parenting remade me. I wouldn’t say my children dissolved me into a liquid form of myself, but I wouldn’t not say that.

I do not wish to have not been a parent. But I think it is normal to imagine new existences when the world is crumbling.

*

My daughter’s pet was a dead painted lady butterfly, whose population fluctuates widely year over year due to their unusual migratory habits. Farmers nearby hate it—the caterpillars eat their crops. It is hard for people not in agriculture to see butterflies as pests. Caterpillars are only larva. If there were a children’s book about the very hungry fly larvae, perhaps flies would disgust us less, too.

As a child, I never considered the inner life of the parents around me. One of my neighborhood friends growing up had a painter for a mother. I consider how to talk about her. A mother who paints sounds different, hobbyish. Her still-lifes are displayed in galleries in the city where I grew up. Her online portfolio displays giant canvases detailing the fine veins of hostas. A leggy geranium grows out of its pot in a beam of sunlight.

I remember her painting area as off-limits—it was in a corner in the attic. This was before I heard of Virginia Woolf. This was before I thought about the interiority of parenting. Now I wonder if I am a mother who writes, or if my children have a writer as a mother.

While researching and writing essays before the publication of my debut, I spoke to an entomologist who studies wasp behavior. I had become mildly obsessed with a video she had posted of taking on a bee beard. She told me it’s a common activity for amateur beekeepers—this ritual of wearing a swarm. I asked her if it hurt, but she told me that bees used for bearding are newly hatched and unable to sting. Keepers train the swarm to find the queen, who they suspend in a small cage. Pheromone hide and seek. Once they can track her, anyone could wear the cage and let the bees land on them.

I asked what it felt like to wear bees, and she said, “They are warm. Their tiny bodies make heat that you don’t notice until there are thousands on you. Their tiny feet have tiny claws. You have to be passive. You have to be a structure they are interacting with.”

The passivity is one of the hardest things about parenthood, too. Before parenthood, I hadn’t so distinctly felt the act of wanting something: sleep, independence, even a long car ride by myself. Sometimes, while playing with my young son on the floor, I imagined things I wish I were doing. Stacks of blocks toppled down and got rebuilt while I hated myself, my boredom, and my desire. I wanted to be somewhere, doing something, but I had to force myself to exist in the moment and be there. Was this a crisis? This rapid and total re-centering of my gravity to exist within the frame of someone else’s skin?

Sometimes, though not a new parent, I still feel these emotions hit me like a wave. I don’t feel as shiftless as I did as the mom of a newborn or toddler—no more itch from the full cloak of other people’s lives on me, while I sit passively. My children, if pressed to explain why they love me, say that they do because I’m their mother. But my need for them, and theirs for me, is not the entirety of who I am.

These days, I feel more like a collaged fruit from Eric Carle—a small hole in the center of me, where the children put their fingers. That is their favorite part. That is why that book is so loved.

*

My husband unceremoniously recycled my daughter’s bug box with the butterfly inside last winter, and only my daughter noted its absence from the tool bench in the garage. He isn’t heartless; he just didn’t notice the small, decomposing bug inside a nest of curled brown leaves. I can see how it looked like trash.

“Where did it go?” she asked.

“It got thrown away.”

She looked at me, biting her lip. Finally, she said, “I miss it.”

“It’s okay to miss things,” I told her.

“It probably flew away and took the cage with it.”

I could not correct her because it was just the kind of thing I would have liked to imagine, too.

• 0