Feral Mum
fe·ral
/ˈferəl,ˈfirəl/
adjective
adjective: feral
(especially of an animal) in a wild state, especially after escape from captivity or domestication.: "a feral cat".
synonyms: wild, untamed, undomesticated, untrained, unused to humans, unbroken, not broken in, not house-trained, not housebroken
Rock Creek 2007, that was the year my children’s father passed away.
It was also the year that the foxes made a den at the end of the road where the dancing naked madrone trees twisted around one another. When it rained, their skins would shine and water would drop like bass tones from a shoulder or an elbow. A gust would pick up and their raised arms would quiver delightfully laughing an iridescent shower on the walker, fox den or driver below.
I had decided long ago when when I left my first husband that I didn’t want to raise my children alone. I wanted to raise them together with their grandmother Gaia.
She made the best toys of creek boulders, willow sticks, water striders, and twisted root gnome dwellings. I could also count on her to teach my kids to be attentive with her occasional unleashing of mud wasps, strokes of poison oak and constant barrage of mosquitos at sundown. Only she could teach my kids to allow their spirits to soar in imaginative play while also remaining alert for danger. She could teach them to be awake and whole, resilient and wild.
I didn’t have the benefit of learning this way in my childhood. No doubt I had a love affair with the occasional wilderness and the mysterious, grounded horses in my youth, but around every corner was danger of the two legged kind.
Namely, my twin older brothers and my distant and un-protective mother. I knew from my experiences in wild places with my dad, that there was a rightness and a wholeness that all living things belonged to, were dependent on and could rely on. I knew that somehow, when I’d simply return a rock back to its resting place after looking under it, I was respecting a natural order that was without a doubt existent. I spent a lot of time in my childhood wanting to be an ant with its power in numbers, a cat with its pleasure in life, a woodpecker, persistent and gifted with flight. I wanted to belong to the safe family I knew on my adventures to the wilderness with my dad.
I didn’t have a role model I could relate to for motherhood. So, when I divorced my first husband in 1995 at 21 years old, and I needed some guidance about how to be a good mother, I made a camp on the Rogue River for the whole summer with my first born son.
We slept each night gazing deeply into the sparkling sky eyes of Gaia, next to her laughing river, right on the rounded sandy curve of her chest where we could hear her heartbeat. That summer, I became a feral mother always wanting to return with my child to the deep wild after my jaunts with “normal living” within the construct of “good mother.”
Fast forward to 2007, I made my mother nest on a homesteaded piece of land in one of the most beautiful watersheds I’ve seen on Rock Creek. The thin canvas walls of my yurt were just the right amount of protection from wind, rain, bear and cougar and it was remote enough that there was far more wildlife than people. At 28 years old, weighing 104 lbs, I had no doubt I could handle an encounter with the largest of wild animals. I could predict them better than I could humans and I trusted their intentions more.
Looking back, I know this was because the animals aren’t socialized into hierarchical constructs based on age, gender, race, ability and economic status. Rather they are motivated by instincts. So I could predict that if I wasn’t threatening them or presenting myself as food for them, they wouldn’t threaten me. Not so with humans.
As I would lay in my loft, looking out the skylight of my yurt into grandmother’s eyes, I would hear the foxes calling from their den at the end of the road.
And it made me feel at ease that their family and mine were not unlike each other in our manner of living. Their night call brought them together and sent out a warning to the predator animals that they were paying attention. As did my fire and the pounding and splitting sounds that preceded it. We were in the woods together, not alone.
Eventually, I did decide to leave my wilderness shelter in favor of town living; out of necessity.
It was pretty hard on the kids. Especially my middle son. His best friends were a family of blue bellied fence lizards that inhabited a large pile of logs 100ft from our front door. He would spend hours and hours catching lizards, releasing them and just dreamily sitting atop those logs and looking over the creek toward the western horizon. He knew that the lizards all had to be released before the sun went completely down because they needed to warm up one last time before going undercover for the night. So his eyes were tethered to the sun as it lowered in the sky signaling play time was over.
I could feel his resolve to letting them go against his will to remain among them. It was obvious he felt one of their kind by the way he would talk about them at the dinner table, describing their different personalities, habits, and physical characteristics. Moving him to town to play on a plastic structure 100ft from our door with humans who were much less predictable, didn’t quietly watch the sun and cared not for sunbathing before turning in for the night was a genuine heart break.
Several times we visited our yurt site after our move.
Always he would try to bring some lizards home to town, but I had to dissuade him as it wasn’t their right environment. It wasn’t his right environment either, but we all had to learn to be more civilized, because that is how a good mother acquires the resources to provide for her family.
My youngest son enjoyed being in town well enough. He was 4 years old when we moved. When questioned about it, he will say that he doesn’t really remember our Rock Creek days, so he doesn’t harbor a feeling of missing it. I felt he was missing something big though, as the years went by in town.
When I graduated college, we had the good fortune to move onto a large irrigated lot in an old and diverse suburban neighborhood full of large old trees.
I immediately began to try to recreate some of the conditions of our Rock Creek home. I put in a large garden, acquired chickens and rabbits, and created little micro-climates for insects, frogs and lizards in an attempt to make my yard as inhabitable to wildlife as possible. I called my little homestead Sunny Joy Farm. I tried to wrap all this around my youngest son, but he showed minimal interest, preferring to collect Pokemon cards and practice Ninja moves with his town friends.
Sunny Joy Farm was ripe with lessons of wholeness from grandmother Gaia and I longed to share her wisdom. I began offering summer camps and an after-school program for local area children. We would start each day sitting quietly in the garden, just listening. Each lesson and activity was designed to foster belonging to the natural cycles and rhythms of nature.
My hope was that by providing an experience of belonging to the earth and its cycles, the experience would feel so deeply familiar and right that whatever the children went on to do in their adult lives, they would long to keep returning to that belonging.
I operated the programs for 5 years until my neighbor complained about the traffic when kids would get dropped off, prompting the City to require my program be licensed. Licensure would mean bleach cleaned countertops, paper towels, plastic silverware and no more playing with ducks swimming in a kiddie pool; because apparently standing water is dangerous to children in town. So Sunny Joy Farm morphed into Sundial Urban Homestead Education Center.
Over the years I’ve wondered if I adequately accomplished the sense of belonging to nature that I’d hoped to foster in my own children. I’ve wondered if they learned to be awake and whole and resilient and wild as grandmother Gaia and I tried to influence them to be.
I look for signs in how they spend their leisure time, what jobs they choose, what relationships they are drawn to, the food they eat and how they navigate challenges. Do they slow down enough to see the gravity of the sun in the afternoon? Do they love their work like I loved chopping firewood during our Rock Creek days? Do they know their friends like my middle son knew the blue bellied fence lizards? Can they plant a seed and watch it grow, eat its fruit and return its body to the soil to do it all again? Do they know how to keep safe from mud wasps without wiping out the species?
My youngest son, the one who doesn’t remember our Rock Creek days, now a young adult, came to me a month ago with some news. He let me know that he would be leaving Sundial Urban Homestead soon. He is tired of town life. He wants to live by candle-light and off-grid.
He wants to earn his living making music that soothes the soul and warms the heart and farming with friends he is getting to know like a family of blue bellied lizards. He wants to feel the weather from a modest shelter, to know more intimately his place as a man on this wild earth. He wants to have the freedom to watch the sunrise from a mountaintop.
He told me he regretted not trying harder to learn how to live off the land from me, and thanked me for our long camping trips that inspired his love of being in the wild. He may have expected me to be a good mother and tell him he should go to college, and prove his worth with his good grades, go to work in the health industry that pays well and will give him security. Nope.