René Roberts

I’ve always been drawn to elephants. I look like one more and more every day. Isn’t it funny how your nose gets bigger the older you get? It’s funny how we say funny when we mean awful. You know it’s going to be a tough day when you digress two lines into your blog.

I love elephants. Maybe I have Dalene Matthee and Oupoot to thank for that, but ever since I can remember I had a fascination with elephants. So, imagine how excited I was when I realized that Jodi Picoult’s latest novel is all about elephants and their behaviour. I read that line and I wonder how I managed to get a girlfriend. I’m so exciting.

I did some research and found that what inspired this novel was the fact that Jodi’s youngest daughter was getting ready to leave the nest to go to college and Jodi did what all great mothers do. She fell apart. At the time she learned an interesting fact about elephants. She learned that a mother and daughter in the elephant kingdom stay together until one of them dies. Till death do us part. So she jumped on a plane and visited Botswana to study elephant behaviour. What followed was a wonderful novel about coping with loss and grief. About learning to do it like the elephants do it.

Elephants do what they call allomothering. Allomothering is indeed, like Jodi says, a single word to describe the phrase that goes : it takes a village to raise a child. The entire herd takes up responsibility of caring for and nurturing the newborns. So elephant calves are lucky enough to have a whole bunch of mothers, protecting them as if they gave birth to them. She also relays a story about how an elephant bull, even after having broken away from the female herd, came across the scattered remains of his birth mother (whom he hadn’t seen for years) and stood guard and mourned on the spot for days on end. The connection he shared with his birth mother was that intense that he would recognize her sun-bleached skull as that of his mother’s.

She tells a story about a calf that was orphaned and wouldn’t move from his mother’s grave site. He was found by another matriarch from another tribe of elephants. This matriarch had no connection to him and most certainly no obligation. She stormed at him, bellowing, but he stood his ground and cried out in despair, not moving an inch. That matriarch walked away from him, but she didn’t get far. He cried out another time, secreting from his eyes and she turned around. She stepped over him, hovering there for a while and then she led him away from his mother’s corpse and into her herd. Her motherly instincts didn’t allow her to leave that grieving calf exposed to the elements and heartbroken.

Now, I’m not going to bore you to death with more anecdotes from the book. What I will say is this.

Sadly, not all of us were destined to be mothers. If you’re reading this you might not be a mother, but you most definitely have one. For a few minutes, I’ll pretend you actually give a shit about what I think and give you my take on motherhood.

Now, don’t be an asshole and tell me I can’t comment on it because I’m not a mother myself. I’ll cut you. You don’t have to be an artist to admire The Mona Lisa, now do you? Asshole.

This is what I’ve learned simply by being mothered by the best one on God’s green earth :

1) Being a mother WILL be the most important job you’ll ever do. Everything else becomes background noise.

2) The emotional connection between a mother and child is infinite. She still hurts when you do even when you’re thirty two. You are in fact one person, which is also why she tells YOU to put a jersey on when SHE gets cold.

3) Mothers have superpowers. They know things before you do, which is why they’ll tell you to get off that wall seconds before you crash down and break your arm. You can count on it. They also know who’ll break your heart and do everything in their power to hide you in the closet to prevent that.

4) No, that’s not how I turned out to be gay.

5) Mothers do not know how to love you less when it becomes inconvenient for you. The fact that you have piercings, tattoos and pubic hair does nothing to tarnish the image she’ll always have of you. To some extent, you’ll always be wrapped up in a blankie with your fingers wrapped around her pinkie.

6) You don’t really have to try very hard to reverse those rolls. Before a mother knows it, you have HER wrapped around YOUR pinkie. Cool how that works, hey. Use it Addison. I’ll give you some tips baby girl.

7) Mothers forget to get hungry, they refuse to get sick and they’re completely immune to being tired. It becomes their constant state of mind until they die. Don’t feel bad, they chose it that way.

8) The day you were born, your mother chucked her needs into a shoe box and stored it in the bottom drawer somewhere. She might find it again when you finally leave her house for good, but there’s a real possibility that she completely forgets about its existence.

9) Your mother is your biggest fan. She’s delusional man. She thinks you’re the best thing since sliced bread and she tells anyone with ears how wonderful you are. She sees them rolling their eyes and she doesn’t care.

10) Your mother is your most prized possession. Know this early on in your life so you can celebrate her while she’s around. Hug her until she chases you away and sit by her feet until they stop treading this earth.

See? Didn’t I tell you I get it?

Lastly, I’ll quote from Jodi’s book. Now don’t email her and get me sued.

“I have never seen a better mother than an elephant.”

She hasn’t met my mom, I guess.