During her pregnancy, she says: ‘I begin to understand the nature of my sacrifice… I’m pregnant with an owl-baby. The owl-baby infiltrates every part of Tiny’s body and mind. In the narrative, Tiny then shifts to addressing everything to her baby, telling her: ‘Your owlness is with you from the very beginning… and on the day that you are born – on the day when I first look down on your pinched-red, tiny-clawed, outraged little body lying naked and intubated in a box – I won’t have the slightest idea about who you are, or what I will become.’ After a vivid dream, in which she is ‘making tender love with an owl’, she wakes the next morning with ‘talon marks across my chest that trace the path of my owl-lover’s embrace.’ She tells her husband that the baby is not his, and that she will give birth to an “owl-baby”, an outsider just like her. I wasn’t afraid, because the trees took care of me, and they brooded and bent over me, and sang to me their melancholy songs, and fed me, and gave me succor, until the Bird of the Wood found me and took me home with her and taught me to trust to the sound of my own voice.The novel opens in Sacramento, California, where our protagonist, professional cellist Tiny, finds out about her pregnancy. And so I left my mother, and went on without her. The wind in the trees sounded like the voices of women singing in chorus, and their voices were filled with glottal embellishments, as if sung by throats made of wood. Is it true that her long toes were burying themselves in the ground, so deeply that she could no longer take a step? Do I honestly remember seeing her two feet rooting themselves to the spot? Did her skin really become hard and rough all over, like a tree? Were there really spring-green leaves spilling forth from her fingertips? Or has my adult mind painted the memory of this night in such unlikely colors, as a way to assuage my guilt for leaving her? I could hear men shouting and dogs barking, coming closer. It could be that your talon is dipped in the poison of mother-love.”

It could be that you've injected me with your little talon. At some point, there in the dark, after staring at you for so long, and after it gets so dark in this room that I can't see you at all, you become very beautiful to me, and I say yes to being your mother.

We sit and rock together until it grows dark all around. I remind myself that all firstborn things are hideously ugly. It was easier to love you before you were born. I tried not to think that last thought, but the thought snuck in. To habituate myself to the idea of loving you, I say it many times. I ponder the mystery of who you are, little stranger, and who you will become. I ponder the loving, soft, yielding wonder of motherhood. I ponder the lonely, cruel, relentless obligation of motherhood.

Chouette by claire oshetsky