“Do what feels natural,” Helen Jukes is advised during early pregnancy. Our journey begins, exploring what is “natural” mothering, charted by Jukes’s lightning mind.
Rejecting the fruit-based foetal development chart – pomegranate seed to watermelon – Jukes forges another path. At four weeks, the foetus is akin to that of a fish, at seven the hands exhibit a muscle spread common in reptiles. She doodles myriad placental forms, finding we have them in common with: “expectant boa constrictors and water voles; with some sharks and rays and bony fish”.
Between hypnobirthing classes and C-section we discover what joins rather than separates us, including risk. Porcupines emerge with soft quills, complicating breech births. Squirrel monkeys’ large neonatal head size makes for a tight squeeze, with stillbirths reported.
Cast adrift by sleep deprivation, Jukes reaches for “parents that break rules, unsettle boundaries: animals weirder than I thought”. The beige-clad mothers co-opted to suggest naturalness in online shopping adverts are spurned. She dissects the role of Linnaeus’s classifications in the evolution of gender assumptions that reverberate today. Worms, spiders, giraffes and orcas are called on for evidence.
The book becomes a forensic excavation of mothering complexity, illuminating in a revelatory way what happens in our animal, mothering bodies, in our gory, gross and gloriously interconnected world. As Jukes struggles to breastfeed she scrutinises both her urge to persist, and the droves of helpful microorganisms in breastmilk colonising her baby’s intestines.
This animal porousness, and another quiet infiltrator, brings mothering vulnerability into sharp focus. Jukes cannot protect her child from the industrial chemicals circulating the globe and reaching babies via breastmilk. Considering this, she finds herself ill-equipped: “No mother should be put in the position of having to decide whether her milk is unpolluted enough.” Make-up, waterproofing on coats and recyclable coffee cups, and her new stain-resistant sofa are all sources of toxins. A toxicologist confides that while trying for a baby she keeps her work separate in her mind. An imaginary boundary for all-pervasive harm.
Our babies are mothered, we learn, not only by us, but by an ecology, a diverse, surprising and inspiring multitude, and by every molecule around us. Jukes’s book expresses a profound and urgent rebellion against concepts of motherhood which diminish and disempower us all.
