A Calf Is Born
The calf is born with his tiny, wrinkled scrotum hanging down between his legs. I had hoped that if I prepared myself for the calf to be a boy, it would actually be a girl — like reverse psychology for the universe. I hoped I would have been able to manipulate the universe with my relaxed expectations, that my readiness for what I didn’t want would somehow give me what I wanted. The universe would offer us up a golden girl on a silver calf platter in exchange for making peace with something unwanted. It would reward our generosity and willingness to accept a bull. We were blessed with a girl the first time around, we could take a boy this time. I winked at the universe.
But no, instead — a wrinkled scrotum.
I have never seen a calf scrotum but I am not prepared for it to be so visible from birth. One of our barn kittens is a boy and I am only able to see his scrotum coming in (like a new tooth) after eight weeks! For the first eight weeks, kittens are genderless and their backends are smooth. All you can see is the puckering of their anus if you look close enough.
I don’t want to put any negative energy on Billie after he is born so I pretend I am glad he is a boy — for his sake. I hide my disappointment as he struggles to get up onto his skinny, deer legs that kept slipping out from under him on our slick, dry straw. He is learning to walk, at least I can pretend to be indifferent to a scrotum. It isn’t his fault. It would be just as bad if I were an unconscious mother who described her son as capable, intelligent, courageous and charismatic while describing her daughter as thoughtful, sweet, nice and petite. In the cow world, gender appreciation is reversed — offerings are given to the Female Bovine Gods. Flower wreaths are placed upon udders of Cow Queens. Sperm is more expensive that promises vulvas and cervixes. The bovine reproductive system is a currency on rural roads.
There are four options for bull calves although the fourth option, hardly anyone will do:
1. You can sell them at a cattle auction for $1200 (maybe this is high). At the cattle auction, they will be raised for meat and treated poorly. They will be vaccinated and pumped full of antibiotics. They will become fearful of humans. They will learn to run in the opposite direction when humans approach them.
2. You can use them to breed lady cows, keeping their testicles intact and purposeful.
3. You can raise them for meat, castrating them and rendering them infertile but free to roam on green and bountiful pasture.
4. You can keep them as big, bull pets that live on your farm and are part of your herd.
Our farmhand says, “You ladies will never be able to kill that calf for meat”
Billie is blonde with almost blue eyes. I am used to boys with blonde hair and blue eyes. At once he is my brother and my son. He is my best friend. He is my confidante. He is my precious, strong, little boy. About thirty minutes into his life, I realize I am calling Billie, strong — my strong little boy. My big, strong little boy. And he is my big, strong boy but isn’t he also my beautiful angel? Isn't he also my precious oyster clam? Isn’t he also the most adorable, tiny cow with white spots on his head where his horns will grow. Or antlers. Or tusks. What is the right word for the cow bones that will grow out of the head? It’s horns. I’m pretty sure. Billie will have horns unless we cauterize them which we probably will do. Local farmers tell us it won’t hurt the calf.
I am quick to assume that Billie is strong and not beautiful — already placing him into the box of the bull he must become. Bulls have to be strong, they have to be confident and it is my words that help create that expectation. Heifer calves, little baby girl calves, can be beautiful and precious and wonderfully tender. They can even be feisty. As soon as I realize that I am putting Billie in the box where the restraints of gender are strong, I correct myself. I look around to see if Heathar has noticed that I am gendering our calf so obviously but I don’t think she has. I can still come across as the progressive cow mom and call my bull calf, beautiful before anyone realizes otherwise. Of course I call boys beautiful. It’s what I’ve always done. I’ve never thought to call them anything else.
Billie is born at 12:40am on October the 8th. Yes, I already pulled his astrology chart and I have never really seen so many oppositions and squares. I will tell you that Billie is a Sun in Libra, a Moon in Sagittarius and a Cancer rising. I think that is all he would want me to share right now. Like a true Cancer rising, he is slow to warm up to us and likes to sleep behind his mom so that when we walk into the barn we can’t even tell where he is. We have to walk up close to his mom and peer behind her mountain of a spine in order to find Billie sleeping with his head tucked into her back. It’s hard to imagine that one day, he will be 1,000 pounds of Cancer rising.
Heathar and I know that Laura is in labor early in the evening of October 7th. I have never seen a cow go into labor because when Rose had Ruth back in February, we had no idea she was pregnant and were not watching for the signs of labor. So this time, we are watching. Laura starts to flip her tail back and forth while standing in place. After she is done flipping, she holds her tail off to the side so that it isn’t directly covering her rectum and vaginal opening — her tail takes a pause, practicing for the real thing. After she is done practicing, she lets her tail relax again and fall back into place. She also starts lying down and pooping — a sure sign of labor. I only know this from my time apprenticing as a midwife. I have watched labor ensue as the downward pressure and momentum of the colon begins. Everything starts to come out. The colon cleans itself to make way for the body that will have to pass through the birth canal. Cows never poop lying down — unless they are injured or in labor.
Heathar and I check Laura again around 10pm before we go to bed. We walk down to the barn with two battery-operated lanterns that I charge for this very occasion. We find Laura pacing in the barnyard, swishing her tail and stretching out her long neck during a contraction. In between contractions, Laura eats grass and seems like her normal, uninspired self. We have no idea how long the labor will take. A quick Google search tells us to expect about eight hours of labor. Not wanting to stay up longer than we need to, Heathar and I walk back up to the house and set the alarm on our phone for 12:30am. I want to claim a little sleep that is rightfully mine. I remember why I gave up midwifery. I remember how much I hate to have my sleep interrupted. I remember that there is nothing more I love than the feeling of wool socks under my flannel sheets. I remember that I have to cut myself off from all feeling when I have to wake up in the middle of the night. If I let myself feel, I will fall completely apart, screaming and crying on the floor refusing to do the things that adults have to do. I have to go numb. I have to detach from my body. It’s an appropriate time to disassociate.
Heathar wakes up before the alarm and lightly rubs my back to wake me up. She does this in hopes that I won’t hiss at her but I still do, mostly to remind her that I am a cat person. I still hate every moment of being woken up but I don’t want to miss the birth. If Heathar walks down alone to the barn and sees the birth without me, I will never feel like we were part of the same family again — I will feel eternally betrayed even though I will have chosen the exact betrayal that turns me off. The desire to ward off the betrayal is enough to get me out of bed — that and the thought of a placental abruption.
As Heathar and I get close to the barn, we hear a hoarse mooing coming from Laura. Either these are the sounds of very active labor or these are her strained calf calls to her newborn. As we come upon Laura standing in the barnyard, we hold out lanterns high over our heads. The calf is here. He is already lying on the ground. Laura is vigorously licking him and mooing at the same time - sometimes missing her moos and replacing them with licks. Judging from the amount of amniotic fluid Laura still has left to lick off, we guess that Billie has been born moments before we get there and I check my watch to mark his time of birth. Alarmingly, he looks very similar to Ruth when she was born — a helpless puddle of snot with two eyes that don’t yet know how to focus. I run to Billie and kneel down beside him. I put my hand over his nose to make sure he is breathing and feel his little nostrils flare and push air out. He sputters like a bad car engine trying to start itself in a cold winter. He blows snot on me. Good boy. Good, big, strong boy.
There will be no sleeping tonight.
Billie starts to walk only 30 minutes after being born. It took Ruth 3 days to walk. Billie starts nursing and successfully latching onto his mother’s teats after 40 minutes of being born. It took Ruth ten days before she nursed from Rose on her own. Billie doesn’t really need anything from us other than to help him secure his mother’s teat in his mouth. After that, he sucks like he deserves it. I learn from a Google search that due to evolution, cows are shorter than they used to be and now, humans have to commonly help calves duck low enough under the udder so that they can latch and successfully nurse. This makes me concerned for the future evolution of cows, but I quickly accept that we have to help Billie nurse and try and forget why. Ruth needed everything form us when she was born. She needed us to scoop her up in our arms and carry her onto our kitchen floor. She needed hot water bottles and fresh, fluffed towels. She needed soft words and tiny syringes full of colostrum. She needed blankets by the wood stove and IV fluids inserted underneath her skin. She needed a dog jacket over her small, fragile body.
As the night progresses, Heathar and I move Laura and her son into the barn so we can get a better look at them. We have to wait for Laura to pass her placenta. In the birth world, they call this the third and final birth. Perhaps, even the most important birth as many things can go wrong with the placenta. If the placenta doesn’t come out, the mother can die. She can bleed to death. Or she can die of a quick-spreading infection. Sometimes it’s not helpful to know so much.
As Billie nurses, as Heathar as I line our lanterns around the hay bales in the barn, creating a soft light like a nursery — the cats join us. They have been there all along but now they have places to sit. They climb up on the hales bales and stare at us. They stare at Laura. The lighting is so pleasant that I want to curl up in the corner and read Billie a children’s book. I want to teach him how to sound out his words and what sounds a duck makes. Look Billie, the duck says QUACK! Laura rotates her body in the barn and all of us move out of the way at once, the cats dramatically leaping out of the way at the last moment. She has command of the room. We are just eager to stand by and watch if she will have us.
After about an hour of Billie nursing, Laura starts to pass her placenta. In three big contractions, the placenta comes out and is about the size of a large flatscreen television. The placenta is encased in a translucent membrane which makes it hard to bite into. It’s like trying to eat air. Piece by piece, Laura eats the whole thing. Every now and then she chokes on part of the membrane, hacking it back up so she can re-chew it. She leaves only a thin, blood-tinged residue on the hay floor. The cats dance around it and smell it. Birth was here.
I keep saying that I now realize we should have put Ruth down right when she was born. A calf like that never makes it. I say this in part to let people know that I understand what a sick calf looks like and that I understand what it looks like when a woman who doesn’t have a lot of experience with cattle thinks she can save them from infection and disease. I say it so people know how healthy Billie is. I say it to claim how far I’ve come as a farmer. I say it so no one else says it first.
When I say this, most people’s response is along the lines of, “But you never could have known. You can’t regret what you did for Ruth. That was love. People never regret loving something.”
It’s true that loving Ruth was beautiful and joyful. It’s also true that Heathar and I lost the month of May to injections and ceaseless worry. That for one month, we were consumed with cow forums and trying to get a hold of unavailable vets — one of whom died in June from a bad infection in his prosthetic leg, leaving us with ONE able-bodied vet for the entire region of Northern New Mexico. The month of May was a rowdy brawl of terror. I have never experienced clinging like that. I have never experienced grasping onto life like that. There would have been less suffering if we had let Ruth go sooner. When Ruth died, our bodies ached with the fatigue of bending down to force small drops of milk down her throat. We could only feel our bodies again once she was gone. We could only feel how much we had been resisting death and our forearms were sore from it.
Billie’s story and his birth are not separate from Ruth.
The first time I saw Billie pee, I held my breath, expecting him to have a urinary tract infection, expecting it to spread to his bladder and kidneys — expecting his first pee to ultimately be fatal. Ruth’s infection started in her umbilicus, spread to her urinary system and eventually, spread to her lungs causing her to slowly suffocate. Ruth’s umbilicus never closed. I feel Billie’s umbilicus constantly to make sure it has closed. I make sure his umbilicus is soft and flat against his body. I make sure he’s going to stay alive before I let myself fully fall into affectionate nicknames. But they have already come and there is no stopping them. I try not to love until its safe but it doesn’t seem that’s how love works.
