Killdeer

A belated Mother's Day reflection

There is a Killdeer mother nesting in our pasture. I’m not there to bother her, I’m doing people-things - changing the irrigation water or checking on the horses. Nonetheless, she screeches and flutters all around me. She calls incessantly, a piercing chirpy sound that people say sounds like “Killllll deerrrr!” although I don’t hear that. I just hear her desperation.

She laid eggs somewhere, they are camouflaged in the grass. I’d never know they were there if she wasn’t flapping about. Her intensity is supposed to be a distraction for predators, a warning, or even bait if needed. Her embodied panic is a poured out offering, useless except in the service of her children.

Her fear is palpable. She is intent on protecting her chicks from something she can only vaguely sense, and can’t fight. Her instinct propels her: she obsessively cries and flutters and runs across the spring grass in desperation. She reminds me of myself.

I think it’s a normal mother instinct to fear for your kids, to want to hold them forever. Addy wants to go to summer camp this year and I am already coaching myself not to cry when she does. I wish I was a Killdeer mother, so that this behavior was perfect, right-on, exactly what I’m made to do. If I was a Killdeer mother, I would have lifelong chances to have more babies, yearly opportunities to protect them and get it right, all I would have to do would be keep them alive for a few months and let them go. But that’s not how human motherhood works. I have to let my babies go out of the nest, yes, but they are still young. I feel like they need protecting even when they don’t, even when the situation is perfectly safe. Every fiber in my being tells me to hold on to them, to keep their world small and protected, like a hidden nest in the big open field.

Jesse is already out of the baby stage, he wants to get in his own seat and brush his own teeth and not hold mama’s hand in the grocery store. I find myself fluttering, calling out. The other day in the busy Wilco parking lot, he ran away from me. I was surprised by my own guttural cry, my internal Killdeer mother screeching to protect my baby at all costs. At this call, my incorrigible youngest child stopped and looked back at me, surprised. He is confident and sure of himself, he thinks it’s impossible to be hit by a car or eaten by a predator. I’m sure the Killdeer mothers have had similar chicks.

I wish I could have more babies because I always dreamed of a big family, yes, but also - I know how to do it. Killdeer mothers have it easy - sure they make fools of themselves all spring, but they protect those youngsters by gum! They are competent at this motherhood thing, their instincts are infallible. Their job is done when the nest is abandoned in a month or two. They feel accomplished: “another busy spring of screeching, another successful chick season” I’m sure they toast each other in August. I, too, am great at the baby stage. (By the way, if the Killdeer mothers don’t mind an interloper, I too would like a toast to my prowess). I am unbothered by the schmutz and the sleeplessness, I like wearing that rotund soul wrapped snugly on my person and being in tune with a bossy little being.

I am also called to adoption.

For a decade now, adoption for us meant years of savings, loving a birth family and walking through uncertain legal hurdles and complex, ever-changing regulations. It’s easy to think that’s all adoption is. That’s been the lion’s share of the adoption experience for us, at least. But now, today, we are still called to adoption. It just looks different for our family now.

In my heart I know that we owe our kids a life, now that we risked everything to give them one. I know that adoption is about more than the initial act of it.

I also know I can’t keep doing the Killdeer thing, because unlike a Killdeer mother, I’m not just called to protect a nest. I have kids who need me, even though their need looks much different than it used to. My kids need help with homework and friend drama and emotional upheavals. My kids are learning how to be kind under pressure and how to pee in the potty.

Besides, if a Killdeer chick grows up to screech and throw herself at predators, her mother has done well. That’s what a Killdeer is born to do. I’m not so sure that a panicky, discontented, clutching and fearful parenthood is what I want to model for my own kids’ futures.

I tell myself this, and sometimes I hold it together. Sometimes I remember that motherhood is long, that protection is not the only virtue.

But other times I am flailing, flapping, crying, trying to protect my babies and making things worse. It seems to me that a predator wouldn’t even know a nest was there without the Killdeer mother’s panic. The eggs are so camouflaged, the nests so unlikely. But the mother can’t help it, so she tells everyone in earshot that her babies are close by. Perhaps, sometimes, her fear actually brings about the outcome she fears most.

I miss knowing that as long as I am holding my baby, they are safe. I miss the security of keeping them in the nest and standing guard. They don’t need me to screech my protection anymore. Perhaps they never did.

The honest truth is that I am not sure who I am without a baby, without an upcoming adoption. This is my Killdeer instinct, the thing I was born to do. So I’m standing in my pasture in the gathering dusk, listening to the mother bird warn me away, watching the green grass turn gold and the blue sky fold over into greyish-pink layers as the day ends. I’m asking God to give me wisdom to stop flapping and start flying again. I’m asking for faith to believe that I have done enough, that the nest was plenty safe and that the pasture will be too.

I want to know that I don’t have to flutter and cry in order to protect my kids, that keeping them small is not the only way to keep them safe.