We Are All Foxes, We Are All Hens

TW: Pregnancy loss

A hen is born with all the eggs she will ever lay.

— Dina Rudick, Barnyard Kids

I pull on my mud-spattered Xtra Tuffs and step out into the driving rain. I make my way down the few steps of the deck without looking out to the ocean; it’s too gray to see much of anything anyway. The girls hear me coming as I turn the corner of the house and head toward the coop, and they start to cluck. They know I’m unpredictable: I might be bringing freshly cooked farro or leftover oatmeal (a favorite), or it could be a browning apple that was nibbled by a toddler. They’re not discriminating, which is a desirable quality in a trio of animals who ended up in our yard on a whim.

Not sure what I’m going to do with them, Kevin said when he told us he was moving out of the house across the street, leaving Alaska for a job in Oregon. Unless you want them? Within a few weeks, my brother-in-law had built the coop (some vacation), my husband had grounded the electric fence, and I’d shoveled a dump truck’s worth of wood chips into the backyard. It should last us more than a year if we muck the coop only occasionally, which is my goal. It wasn’t until we helped hoist the nesting box from Kevin’s truck that we realized it wouldn’t fit through the door of the new coop. Shit, someone said. I guess we should have measured, someone else said. We unhooked the chicken wire from the chain link—the chicken wire we had painstakingly zip-tied to the chain link twenty minutes earlier—and passed the nesting box through the side of the coop. There’ve been a fair amount of other small mistakes, including buying a bunch of pretty books about chickens and assuming my seven-year-old would find them interesting.

Uuuuunh, she’ll say at lunch, her voice rising at the end as if she’s just discovered I put a slug in her water glass. Can we read about something other than chickens? Noted. The problem is, when I encounter something new, I dive in deep. I want to know, as one of the books tells me, that hens squawk loudest when they’ve just laid an egg, because they’re hoping one of the other chickens will also lay and decrease the likelihood of their own egg being eaten by a fox. The irony is not lost on me that I lick my chops when I hear that particular Bok bok bok bah-GAW! I am the fox.

Eating eggs has been commonplace among humans since the Neolithic Age. Makes sense: taking down a wooly mammoth is a lot of work. But raiding a nest? Simple. There are records from Egypt and China dating as far back as 1400 BCE showing that people were domesticating fowl for the express purpose of eating their eggs. Alas, eggs are such easy prey. But do the chickens always know their efforts are for naught? Or do they live with a sense of hope that is renewed daily—perhaps this particular egg will not be eaten, whether by foxes or humans; perhaps by some miracle, even in the absence of a rooster, this particular egg will be transformed into a fluffy chick who taps her way out of the shell and burrows under her mother’s wing. They sing their song after every egg they lay; hens are eternal optimists.

I smile at this thought as I unlatch the coop and watch them pecking aimlessly at the ground. They’re just chickens. Do chickens have feelings—and if they did, would optimism be one of them? For that matter, would disappointment? Today I’ve brought them barley. A person might scoff, or squeal with delight, but I already know the chickens will have neither response. I open the coop and squeeze in with the barley, dumping it in the metal bowl next to their feed bucket. I step back through the gate and watch them as they discover their breakfast.

When we use the expression pecking order to refer to the relative statuses of people in a group, we are adopting this quite literally from chicken behavior. In my very small flock, Mrs. Frisby, a strutting Wyandotte, is invariably the first to start pecking at breakfast. She is fat and white, and she stands out against the brown of the wood chips, the grey of the fencing, the green of the moss that passes for our lawn. If we had a rooster, Frisby would be just below him in the pecking order; in chicken terms, she is the head hen. Next is Grendel, a Rhode Island Red, lithe and fast but often preoccupied. Once she realizes breakfast has arrived, she hightails it over to the metal bowl and joins Frisby. My daughter, who is seven and as far as I know has never read Beowulf, suggested the name Grendel. It’s a great name for a chicken, and it also makes me think my daughter is a literary savant. Miss Jingles, who is possibly a La Flèche but more likely just a Random Black Chicken, is fascinating only to my two-year-old son, the one who named her. I have never noticed her do anything interesting, never seen her take initiative; she’s the dowdy school secretary in an eighties-era after school special. This morning is no exception: I walk away before Jingles has even made it to the bowl.

I check the nesting box and find a perfectly-shaped egg the color of chocolate milk; it looks like the eggs you see in cartoons or picture books. Egg collection is usually my daughter’s job, but occasionally she will allow someone else that tiny frisson of seeing an egg lying there on its shredded paper bed, its colors telegraphing its provenance. I should qualify that: the eggs are different colors, but I do not actually know which chicken lays which color egg. My daughter thinks she does. Even my son weighs in when there’s an egg in the box. Miss Jingle lay a egg, he’ll say, to which I’ll respond, surprised, Oh! Then: Gwendl lay a egg. Oh, I’ll say again, realizing he, like me, has absolutely no idea which of the three has laid this egg. By the time he chimes in with, Mrs. Cribby lay a egg, I’ve patted him on the head and moved on with my morning. So while we get eggs of varying sizes and color, whose eggs they are is still a mystery to me.

It has been clear from the beginning of their time with us that only two of the three hens are laying at all; while we see two eggs that are distinct in size and color, we never see a third variation. When they first arrived, upside down in Kevin’s arms, momentarily hypnotized (apparently easier than it sounds), I attributed the laying strike to stress. No one laid for a day or two and then behold! An egg! And then… two! Day after day, we’d find an egg or two—one a touch smaller, grayer and more oval, the other rounder, fuller, browner. Two hens were settled in, happy in their new life across the street. One hen, it seemed, was not. Kevin hadn’t moved yet, so I mentioned it to him.

Oh yeah, probably stress, he said. Could be the white one. She’s five years old, this might have hit her a little harder.

I consulted the chicken books. Something in Kevin’s casually dismissive tone had fizzed through me. I was right to wonder: it turns out that five is pretty old for a chicken. Mrs. Frisby, it seems, is in henopause.

The number of eggs (a hen will lay) begins to taper off at about two years of age.

—Melissa Caughey, How to Speak Chicken

A few months before the chickens crossed the road, I bought a pregnancy test. At 43, I experienced the same mix of thrilled alarm I might have felt having a pregnancy scare as a teen. I was late, though only by a few days. I was exhausted but would wake up for hours in the middle of every night. I’d had a three-day long headache and my brain felt foggy. My sister was very pregnant herself, so she and I texted back and forth while I waited for the little pink bar to appear (or not), tamping down fear (It would be really hard to have another right now,) while fanning that tiny flicker of excitement (Oh my gosh, though, what if…??) When the bar didn’t appear, I gave it more time (It says at least ten minutes…) Then I put it in the medicine cabinet, in case it decided to change its mind. I looked at it every so often over the next day, before finally tossing it in the trash. A part of me was glad not to be pregnant, and my husband was visibly relieved. (I’m way too old for this.) But it was a reminder that at one time I was making decisions about when and whether to try to have babies, and then when and whether to have more. I too was born with all the eggs I’ll ever lay, which is to say: there once seemed to be so much possibility for the future of my family, and for the family of my future. But someday very soon, and that day may well be past, I will no longer have any decisions to make. The decisions will have been made, my family will be what it is, and the configuration of that family will be static, unchanging, until one of us dies.

So I wasn’t pregnant, but I did have these symptoms. I had another symptom too, though it was the odd one out, the one I’d never experienced while pregnant: I was suffering from a level of anger disproportionate to anything happening in my life. Stepping on an errant colored pencil would send me into a hot rage, and I’d berate my children for a solid minute before retreating to the kitchen to bang pots and pretend to make dinner. It occurred to me that these symptoms might all be related to perimenopause, that nebulous transition from fertility to menopause. It’s the point at which the ovaries gradually begin to produce less estrogen, as many as ten years before the onset of actual menopause; it happens to everyone who menstruates, and it is rarely discussed. Symptoms include insomnia, mood swings, and decrease in cognitive function (check, check, and check), as well as a host of other issues I felt fortunate not to be experiencing: incontinence, abdominal weight gain, low libido, night sweats. I wondered if any of these symptoms were the same in chickens—whether Mrs. Frisby was sweating through the wood chips each night while her roommates raised their eyebrows and scooted far away from her overheated, middle-aged body.

I went in for a well woman’s visit with my midwife. How are you feeling? Patty asked. Physically fine, I said. Emotionally? Not great. It was an understatement. My rage was all-consuming. But just saying the word out loud—perimenopause—felt like releasing a helium balloon into the sky and watching as it floated through the clouds. These feelings weren’t honest—I didn’t hate my children—but they were real. In the worst moments, I had a flash of believing that I did hate my children. Needless to say, this left me with a powerful guilt and the need to hug them hard, tears blurring my eyes, after I’d calmed myself down. I’m not sure why I get so mad, I’d say. But I’m sorry. I hope you know how much I love you. I wasn’t sure what to do about any of this, except to tell Patty. She squeaked her rolling stool over in my direction.

This is normal, Patty said. But you don’t have to live with it.           

She prescribed me with a form of birth control that would regulate my hormones and, she said, would also mean the cessation of periods. Instead, the first month I bled for two straight weeks. A note for non-menstruating humans who’ve made it this far: five to seven days is pretty average. Two weeks is a hellscape. Another note, though you probably already know this: losing blood for two weeks will make a person feel noticeably iron-deficient. By the end of it I turned to my husband and said, I need a goddamn hamburger. We drove to Knudsen Cove Marina with the kids and I got a mushroom Swiss burger with a side of sweet potato fries and a chocolate shake, the burger juice dripping down my fingers as I ate the thing in a few huge bites. I was temporarily revitalized.

Month two, there was the tiniest bit of pink on the toilet paper and then… nothing. The bleeding was gone, but it was not a miracle cure; I still got angry, still snapped at the kids. Maybe the deep, seething rage mellowed the littlest bit. I wasn’t sure, but I willed it to be so. Before the pharmacological estrogen kicked in, I’d looked at my daughter and thought, I have ten more years with her at home. What if I’m mean to her one week of every month until she leaves? That’s what prompted my conversation with Patty in the first place—the fear that I’d miss out on something I couldn’t possibly get back. The fear that I’d say something terrible my children would always remember—that in my anger I’d destroy their confidence and do irreparable damage to our relationships.

On average, one hen lays 260 eggs per year.

—Julia Rothman, Farm Anatomy

My sister had her third son the week we got the chickens. I always wanted to give birth to three babies, Jane told me, in those whispered phone conversations when she was newly pregnant. But I got so busy with work, and then the boys got bigger, and it no longer seemed like it was going to happen. Then COVID hit and suddenly she wasn’t busy anymore, or at least not too busy to think about what it was that she wanted.

The birth of my third nephew, I kept telling Jane, meant that I didn’t have to have another baby—she was doing it for me. And I was happy to be an aunt again, but was it a consolation prize? I’m not sure. What if one day a horny rooster wandered into our yard and fertilized Grendel’s and Miss Jingle’s eggs, and two little cousins tapped their way through the thin shells? I’ve read that chickens are smart, but I’m not sure how the mothers would know which is which and whose is whose. It might not matter to chickens, and they’d care for any old chick who came along—the genesis of the term mother hen, maybe. But I like to think it does matter. I like to think a mother knows her babies, has a biological desire to see them grow, feels a lifting in her chest as she watches them tumble, then stumble, then finally strut through the barnyard, clear-eyed and confident. I do know nothing truer than this: if I’d started having babies in my twenties like my sister did, I would never have stopped. I mean, eventually. Eventually I would have stopped. Like, obviously. But I wouldn’t have stopped when I did.

After I gave birth to one healthy child I felt invincible. I couldn’t know there would be something very wrong with my next baby, that at 21 weeks I would hold her tiny dead body in my arms. When I did, though, a voice tickled my ear: Your story is not yet written. The choice to become pregnant again when the last inhabitant of your womb spent her whole life dying requires an Odyssean level of hubris. But I knew that if I didn’t try to have another baby, I would be living with the fresh wound of my daughter’s death for a long time, maybe for the rest of my life. A living baby cannot replace a dead one—that I can say with authority. But the birth of my son changed the narrative: no, I do not have daughters. But I have children. My daughter doesn’t have a sister. But she has a sibling. It turns out, I gave birth to three babies too; I just didn’t get to take them all home.

The egg represents the origins of life…

the world and the gods were born

from one gigantic cosmic egg.

—Barbara Sandri and Francesco Giubbilini,

Chickenology

My daughter named Mrs. Frisby after the titular character in a middle grade book about a widowed mouse who enlists the help of powerful rats to move her house from one part of a field to the other. The rats have developed super-rat strength and intelligence after their time at the National Institute of Mental Health, where they were experimented upon. It should be noted that these are the kinds of books that were written for kids in the seventies and eighties: books where birds have near death experiences (Jonathan Livingston Seagull) and where your friend might die in the woods and it’s your fault (Bridge to Terabithia). On the one hand, I wonder how anyone my age can function in society, under the psychic weight of all these childhood books. On the other hand, perhaps this fifth-grade reading prepared me for a hard knock life: I have always expected the worst, and been surprised when it didn’t come to that. Mrs. Frisby expects the worst too. She is an ordinary mouse-heroine; she herself has no special powers, no mother’s little helper. All she has on her side is a singular desire to move her children out of the path of a plow that will roll over their home during harvest time. Her sick son can’t get out of bed, seemingly dooming the move; only the rats of NIMH can help. It is not lost on me that the family is ultimately saved thanks to a powerful pharmaceutical. I wonder if the same can happen for me.

This morning, when I check the nesting box, there are three eggs. One: smaller, grayer, more oval. Two: browner, fuller, rounder, similar but not identical. All three hens are laying. Frisby is getting old, but damn it if she’s not still relevant. In my imagination, she calls out to the other hens, Bok bok bok bah-GAW! She taunts them with her waning fertility—Come and lay, and let your eggs be eaten by foxes. My egg will be safe. My egg will become a chick, never mind the odds. I am chicken, hear me roar.

This is one interpretation. But in a different book I read a conflicting account. A hen does not bok bok bok bah-GAW to spare the life of her own egg, but to express her joy; it is called the egg song, and it is a celebration. When the chickens join in the singing, they are doing so because they are proud of the accomplishment of their friend, of their sister. If they then lay, it is because they have been encouraged to do so—not so their babies will be sacrificed to the belly of the fox, but so they can make aunties of the other chickens in the coop.

I make my way back inside. I fry up all three eggs in a little olive oil and serve them to my kids on buttery slabs of whole grain bread. We are all foxes, and we are all hens. We want what’s best for the little creatures who depend on us. We can’t always know what will happen to them, but we raise our eyes to the Alaskan skies and whisper incantations to the forces beyond our control. And then we eat.

Brooklyn native Elizabeth Bolton is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Liz was a 2022 winner of the AWP Intro Journals Project as well as an inaugural recipient of the Frank Soos Creative Writing Scholarship, and she recently finished a yearlong graduate fellowship with the Herstory/Coalition for Community Writing Institute.

Published July 15 2023