A Pregnant Woman and Her Dog/Cosmic Mother Animal
Nothing could truly prepare me for what it’s like to be pregnant. The closest thing that comes to mind is the ability to trust my insistent instincts and my furry body.
I want to preface this article by recognizing both pregnancy privilege and that every body is different and every pregnancy is different. The experiences of becoming pregnant and of gestation are not equal amongst baby-carrying bodies. I recognize that there have been harms placed on baby-carrying bodies across space and time and that also varied complications that can arise throughout fertility cycles. Of course, all womxn and humans everywhere should have control of their own bodies. I recognize that baby-carrying bodies are all on their own profound journey and that I speak to only my own personal experience.
And, yes, I suppose this is the first sort of public/online announcement that I am pregnant. :~)
Deep in the minerals of my body, I have always had the profound sense that dogs are family. We did have 6 dogs throughout my childhood, not including the brief litter of puppies, so maybe those environmental cues activated this knowing. The family I come from sees dogs as companions. Admired, respected, laughed with, played with, and co-regulated with. We’ve always been dog people. I learned to walk while chasing that litter of labs in the verdant grass of early summer.
I have always felt a unique fascination and kindred spirit with furry things with four legs. Maybe it has something to do with being born in the thickness of mountain springtime, or amidst the year of the wood dog. Maybe my learning to walk while being captivated by, or perhaps emulating, those 4 chocolate puppies surfaced strong mammalian memory that continues to reverberate today.
Anywhere from 20,000 to 40,000 years ago (roughly 800 to 1,600 human generations ago) ancient wolf populations became domesticated dogs. The predominant dog scientists of our time say that wolves and humans mutual needs for companionship brought these two animals together. Wolves are pack animals who survive as a result of teamwork. They hunt together, den together, and raise pups together.
The idea that humans domesticated dogs, and assert their domestication prowess onto another animal is only one side of the story. Perhaps there is some truth to the idea that it is humans who were domesticated, at least partially, by ancient wolves. My husband and I joke that dogs and cats became cuter, think bigger eyes and floppy ears, as a way to domesticate humans into caring for them. Dr. Alexandra Horowitz speculates that perhaps humans became more cooperative and even tempered because we became companions of dogs.
During the ancient domestication process, early dogs often accompanied women while they were gathering plants and food, and women used them to help with tasks like guarding camps or protecting crops from rodents. Ancient dogs would also accompany the hunt by tracking, flushing, or retrieving game or make early warning systems against predators or hostile humans.
But how did wolves first form relation with humans?
According to dog expert Dr. Brian Hare, it’s likely that before agricultural human society, a certain population of wolves started hanging around foraging human populations. The wolves were attracted to human settlements specifically to take advantage of a new resource: waste and garbage generated by humans. It is probable that these wolves were also able to make eye contact with people, whereas this behavior is seen as a threat for most other animals.
This population of approachable wolves had a new advantage. Human garbage.
Hare says that via natural selection, the genes of wolves became naturally selected for friendliness and attraction to humans. As the wolves were attracted to humans, a new form of cooperative communication occurred, which Dr. Hare and his wife Vanessa Woods call “friendliness”. And then far down the timeline, the well known artificial selection where humans began creating breeds of dogs began. In some cases this started 2,000 years ago, but in most cases many of the breeds developed in the early 1800s.
Dr. Hare recounts a childhood story where his playful Labrador Retriever was often tossed two tennis balls at a time. The dog usually found one, but lost the other, especially since it was difficult to fit both of the tennis balls in one mouth. Upon coming back to the person who tossed the balls, this person would point to the location of the lost ball. The dog would actually take a cue from this gesture, learn something from this interaction, and run towards the area that was pointed out, circling and smelling for the lost ball. Sure enough, within a few seconds, the dog found the second tennis ball.
All typical human babies from around 9-12 months undergo this foundational transformation in social learning. When adults gesture to things, they realize that this means there is something new about the environment that can be learned, and that otherwise the baby would not be able to learn. During this revolutionary stage babies become less self-centered and more participatory in human culture. There is something new in their environment they can learn, with the help of somebody else pointing it out.
The Labrador Retriever example might seem like a mundane experience, but Hare recounts trying this gesturing practice with bonobos and chimpanzees for weeks. Although bonobos have plenty of incredibly friendly traits, our closest primate relatives didn’t understand this cooperative communication. Further, the bonobos and chimpanzees didn’t understand the gesturing even displayed by one another. Similarly, wolf puppies he has worked with aren’t good at reading human gestures.
An especially unique relationship has been cultivated between humans and dogs. One might even use the term symbiotic. Dogs became companions to us, and we became companions to them.
Nothing could truly prepare me for what it’s like to be pregnant. The closest thing that comes to mind is the ability to trust my insistent instincts and my furry body. There is no doubt in my mind that the spiraling mystery of giving birth and then being with baby are also future lives that you just can’t comprehend. I can only anticipate the material, emotional, and spiritual surrender, but until it actually happens I’m simply already overfilling with the abundant mystery of what now feels like.
Now feels different. Now there is a potato of a spirit alive and sustained by my galactic milky way. Now my biology hasn’t undergone this much consistent change since being 16. Now my senses of every kind have conceded to profound sensitivity. I have been ready to leave the house when all of a sudden become overwhelmed by the feeling of nausea. I wasn’t hungry. I looking forward to the upcoming social interaction. My body just clearly had other plans and I had no option but to listen to them. I stayed home. Maybe I made some tea and put my feet up on the couch with a book in hand.
I feel like an animal more than ever before. Maybe I haven’t felt this dark and damp and round and fluid since being a baby myself.
I came into this world with an astronomical fascination with the beginning of life and the pregnant body. As a toddler I began playing pretend pregnancy. I would insert a stuffed animal or an inflated balloon under my shirt and walked around the house, preparing play foods on my play stove, until it was time. My appetite for understanding how one got pregnant was nil. For all I knew, pregnancy was something that happened spontaneously and magically. It just happened to the female body when it was supposed to.
Soon I decided that giving birth happened out of the mouth. The baby somehow traveled up through the body and out through the wet cave where nourishment once entered. I forced every friend I had to play pregnancy, labor, and baby with me. Apologies to any of you who might be reading this, but you took it in stride.
My intuitive understanding as a 5 year old was that pregnancy happened at an obscure timing, something that wasn’t your decision but also not something that happened to you.
I imagined that something larger in me was privy to something larger in the cosmos. An agreement, trust, or commitment, that this was the right time for this to happen and for some magical reason you are pregnant.
Among Paleolithic and Neolithic peoples it was believed that children are placed in the mother’s womb by spirits — perhaps the returning spirits of dead kin. The man’s role in procreation was seen as one of “opening” the womb. Paleolithic peoples were often known as our “hunter-gatherer” relatives who lived 3 million to 11,700 years ago, about 10,000 to 125,000 generations ago, based on a 20-year generation. Neolithic peoples were about 400 to 500 generations ago (12,000 to 5,500 years ago), and were the ones who decided to settle down with cultivated land.
Somehow I was tuning into this paleo/neolithic knowing before I could verbally form “complete” sentences. Sure, just one egg needs to match with one sperm to kick this thing into gear, but it surely feels like there’s something more serpentine and oceanic at work than a scientific explanation.
This is not the first time I’ve been pregnant, but it is the first time it has endured. I’m not trying to paint a lucky, fairytale picture of my pregnancy and incite spite from others who have had years of difficulty with getting pregnant, because there are many.
My intention is to restore cultures where femininity is sacred and where the birth-death-birth cycle is divine and treated as such.
My intention is to restore cultures where femininity is sacred and where the birth-death-birth cycle is divine and treated as such. My intention is to create spaces where everyone’s pregnancy and birth story is honored and appreciated.
But something about pregnancy for me has felt so insanely accidental, that my husband and I joke about it being an “immaculate conception”. A harking of the very principle of divine mystery I’m elucidating - a time which originated the Black Madonna, a goddess rooted in paleolithic culture, a prominent goddess figure who contained life itself. The original mother. When God was womxn.
In the world’s oldest creation myths, the female god creates the world out of her own body. The first environment for all of new life is female: oozing, suckling, lulling, singing, and nourishing. When hunting and gathering people move, the infant is carried bound close to the mother’s body; when they settle, the women form an “inner circle” campsite of women and children. The socialization process begins here surrounding the hearth.
My intention is not to degrade and devalue the experience of anyone. But to retell narratives of divine femininity. There’s something too innocently honest about the Paleo/Neolithic understanding that the male role in procreation was that which “opened” the womb. That opened this doorway of possibility. That opened this portal of trust and commitment and love and belonging. Which made it possible for spirits to place babies in the mother’s womb.
My intention is to breathe life into this magical world that continues to exist for many of us in places that have been relegated as “the unconscious” or “simply imagination”.
The ancient witch that carries the snake in her body. The Great Mother is not simply a mental archetype, but a phenomenon rooted in lived experience. In this land of the Great Mother the practical and the sacred are not separated by the knife of logic.
“Martin Buber describes prenatal life as the original state of ecstatic consciousness within a sexual-spiritual universe, “a flowing toward each other, a bodily reciprocity.” the mother’s womb is a condensed experience of the cosmos. At birth we forget this undivided world, but we never forget completely.”
And so as I bear a mystery of life in my own body, my companionship with my fellow animals is so much more pronounced. A feeling, ineffable and without words. This is what the story of creation is about. Textures, temperatures, smells, foods. Telepathic companionship. And nobody else’s opinions matter, much, at all. My direct, sensual experience is all the information I need to make a decision.
My dog and I walk very first thing each morning, waking up together and noticing our habitat. How did the night leave? The odor of each morning’s air is a unique distillation — the exudate of the great waking up. I think about the odor. I think about it for a long time. Sometimes we are lucky enough to feel the sun’s rising rays slice into our skin amidst the freezing temperature. This morning walk is often accompanied by crystal soft layers of fresh snow these days. It reminds us both of where we’re from. We lick. We wag. We watch the rabbits. We come back for breakfast.
When people ask how I’m doing I say, “I feel animal.”
Great installment, i enjoyed the words; Charlie thought there should be more pictures of Bonzo!!!
Beautifully encompassed. Thank you. May you always stay intimate with nature and continue sharing your experiences.