Learning to Be Tame – by Carla Silbert
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Books with pastel covers tell me to expect the sensation of butterflies flapping deep in my stomach when I first feel ‘the little one’ kick. A butterfly is a fragile creature – a tiny rip in its wing renders it flightless. In my guts, an orca whale is doing somersaults. It is flipping and rolling in a too-small swimming pool, its smooth skin stretching the edges. I nickname the baby Tilikum after the orca who spent its life performing for tourists at SeaWorld in Florida.
I hear how my life will change once the baby is born. Friends and strangers tell me that going on a plane will be impossible, going up the street will be a challenge, going to the bathroom alone will be an achievement.
The pregnancy tracks against my travel calendar: first trimester – the Philippines, the second – Europe, the third – Thailand and Japan. My body expands in sync with the crossing of continents for work and pleasure as if I can hold these last hurrahs of freedom inside my belly with the whale.
In Kosovo, I keep my pregnancy secret. I am here for a workshop and my stretched body can be easily hidden under the folds of a woollen jumper. I don’t want to appear as if there is anything else on my mind but work. It is October, a month of blue skies and pink-cheek air and Tilikum is just starting to move with force.
The workshop organisers have arranged a tour for us in Pristina. Kosovo was established in 2008 and Pristina is one of the newest capital cities in the world. A monument spelling ‘NEWBORN’ stands at the centre of the city, unveiled on the day the nation declared independence. The English word screams heavy on the pavement amidst the passing sounds of Albanian and Serbian. It is a birth announcement to the rest of the world, but it is not universally heard. Half of the world’s countries do not recognise Kosovo as an independent state, and it is still a nation struggling to stand on its own.
As I cross borders, clothes no longer conceal my growing body. In every country I am asked if the baby will be a boy or a girl and what I will call it. I don’t have the answer to either of these questions, but I learn quickly that people don’t want to hear that. I invent increasingly eccentric names, but I don’t think they are really listening. So long as I give them an answer they will smile in satisfaction and tell me it’s lovely.
*
Zoos often name captive animals in Indigenous languages. I think this is meant to honour the land the animals come from, but to me it feels cruel. As if it is not enough that the animal is caged, it must now carry a name that links it to a wildness it can never be part of. I look up the meaning of tilikum and find it means ‘friend’ in the Chinook Jargon.
When a wild animal is captured, it can experience a level of stress that causes its muscles to fail and its body to shut down. This condition, known as capture myopathy, is nearly always fatal.
For certain species, death is preferable to being confined.
Some animals taken from the wild adjust to being in captivity, learning the rhythms of their new homes in research centres or zoos. Others never adapt and experience lifelong captivity stress and chronic changes to their physiology and behaviour. It is 2019 and I don’t know yet the ways in which we will all soon learn which category we fit into.
In Thailand, I can’t hide my growing middle any longer. Work colleagues reel off a list of rules, instructing me not to eat raw papaya as it will overheat the baby, or spicy food as it will be born with no hair. I ask if they practised confinement after their pregnancies – the tradition of staying inside after childbirth for a month or more until the body is healed. Yes and no, they tell me. I lay by fire for two weeks to regain heat, one of them says, but my mother-in-law let me leave one time to go to the hairdresser.
A year later this will be a game we are all playing – if you could do anything, go anywhere, be free for just one day, what would you choose to do?
Home in Melbourne, I prepare for the final weeks of pregnancy. I feel like a beached whale, a friend groans to me as she points out her swollen ankles. Her baby is due three weeks ahead of mine and I cling to her every word about what to expect next like she is an all-knowing oracle. The nesting phase never arrives. Instead, I spend a sweltering February soaking daily in the shallows of Elwood beach staring at freight ships marking the edge of the visible ocean with white trails, hoping to see beyond the border of the bay.
The waves of my belly swirl. I watch them curiously and wait for the day when they will turn from a gentle crest to an urgent crash. Eat curry, do yoga, my friend tells me to coax its rhythms faster, but it remains calm and even. Tilikum doesn’t know that it has taken up residence in a home not built to last. If it doesn’t leave on its own, it will be dragged out with force.
*
The doctor holds a lanky, blue-tinged creature at my side and asks look – what do you see? I think I am being asked to look at its genitals – to exclaim with surprise at the sex of the baby – but all I can focus on is two bulbous terrified eyes, and a mouth opening and closing like a fish without sound. It is as if the creature’s soul has yet to enter its body and it is consumed with such terror as to not even be able to scream for help. The doctor grips with one hand around the baby’s head and the other beneath its bottom, its thin, veined legs dangling below. What I see is a perfectly formed extra-terrestrial, but I don’t tell the doctor that. Instead, I say hello friend.
At all hours, when the baby won’t sleep, or when it does but I can’t, the butterfly house at Melbourne Zoo keeps us company. When the zoos fell quiet and visitors were locked out, the Zoo livestreamed the enclosures around the clock. There are otters and elephants and meerkats, but the butterfly house with its waterfall soundtrack is our favourite. The baby and I are both transfixed by the brilliant movement and perfect stillness. Keepers at the Zoo observed that without visitors, the butterflies took over the walkways ordinarily reserved for humans, immediately reclaiming the space. We watch in silence as hundreds of painted ladies flutter while yellow admirals perch unmoving at the eye of the webcam, as if holding still for a portrait, before switching roles and taking flight. They know intrinsically when to fly and when to hold still, or maybe it just looks that way to the baby and me. Maybe they are just looking for a way out. ▼
Photo by Iewek Gnos on Unsplash
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