All Reproductive Cycles Are Created Equal
Since our calf Ruth died in May of this year, since Ruth stopped nursing, Rose began to ovulate. Rose restarted her monthly cycle. Her body gave in to the demands of reproduction and like an engine, she gave way to starting in the cold. She turned over, her gasoline making it into her carburetor and setting in motion the churning of something that bears repeating. Ready to give life. Ready again.
According to some vets, and by some vets I mean our particular vet, it is within the industry standard to get a dairy cow pregnant again at three months postpartum. This seems quick to me but that is, of course, from my very human perspective. I would need at least five years before having another child if I were a going to have one child and then a second child. We could have gotten Rose pregnant again in May or June, July or August. September, even. But figuring out how to best inseminate your Jersey cow without using a bull, is something that takes some calculating and planning, mostly around the vet’s schedule. When Rose ovulated in August, the vet was out of town and when she ovulated in September, it was on a weekend, after vet business hours. Rose’s October ovulation fell on a holiday and so, November became the ovulation window of fate. Fate and an opening in the very busy schedule of our vet.
After you buy expensive Jersey cow sperm that promises an 80% chance of giving you a heifer calf (a baby girl calf), then you have to actually go about inseminating your Jersey cow. Conventional vets recommend a ten day protocol of hormone injections to successfully land a growing fetus in your cow. This insures that your cow will be “ovulating” when the vet comes to inseminate your cow. And by “ovulating”, I mean the injected hormones force the cow’s body to conjure up an egg and release it completely and totally against its own timing. The cow will release an egg. Ovulation will happen. But at what cost? Perhaps no one considers the cost to cows.
If we’re going to advocate for the reproductive rights of women, why not for cows too?
As Holly Grigg-Spall writes in Sweetening the Pill, “Female is not good, female is not something you want, female needs to be controlled, influenced, changed and organized into something neater, easier and less frightening to you and those around you.”
I say, free the ovulatory cycles of cows and human women will start to come back to life too.
All reproductive cycles are created equal.
It took us three months to convince our vet that we could predict Rose’s ovulation cycles and that we did not need to shoot her full of hormones to force ovulation to happen in her body. I finally wrote him a text, abdicating him of all responsibility in case the natural insemination did not work. Perhaps if we took full responsibility for the impregnation of our cow, he would let us do it in our own way — our witchy ways. Maybe even our hippie ways or the ways of the modern millennial farmer. Witchy now means you are capable of walking out to your barn and noticing when your cow stands in a corner and waits for an invisible bull to mount her. I guess we are pretty witchy. These are ancient ways.
My text to our vet read:
Are you willing to try and inseminate Rose without the use of hormones, on her natural ovulation date? If that doesn’t work, we will bring in a bull to do the job.
The plea of women. The polite asking from knowledgeable women. The soft and willing bending of women who know what they want but even better, they know how to get it. Smart women. Intelligent women. Hands on the ground women.
Our vet agreed. He also wanted to get rid of the semen he was storing for us in his cryogenic tank. Apparently, two semen straws take up a lot of space. We set the insemination date for November 13th, Rose’s next ovulation. We circled the date on our calendar in red — the calendar hanging on the wall in our milk room. The calendar with Frida’s face on it. What would Frida do? Frida would probably ride a bull into the barn while drinking a bottle of tequila and then fall off of the bull, laughing and snorting — watching the bull and the cow launch into their erotic, mooing foreplay. Frida would not order two straws of Jersey bull semen at $250 a piece. She would let the bull have its way. As nature and bulls intended it.
When Rose first came to our farm, on November 20th of last year, we didn’t think to look for signs of ovulation or menstruation when we wondered if she was pregnant. We didn’t think to look for the signs of a bleeding, cycling mammal. Our vet didn’t think to look for those signs either. When we asked our vet (who has since passed on to the great beyond due to a very bad leg infection that turned into sepsis) if he thought Rose was pregnant, he said he didn’t think so. He did a blood test that came back negative. He never once asked if we saw signs of ovulation or her period. But I didn’t think to look for those signs either. Neither did my wife. Us! Women who have been bleeding for three decades. The period escaped us. All my previous knowledge about the reproductive cycle was conveniently dislodged.
I went to midwifery school when I was twenty-five. I went because I was scared how little I knew about my body. I didn’t know how we get pregnant, I didn’t know what our cervix looks like or feels like, I didn’t know where our ovaries sit in our bodies and I didn’t know what kind of herbs we could take to help ourselves miscarry if we needed to. I wanted access to this knowledge. I wanted to lay down in the ground and be covered with this knowledge, like being buried in the sand at a cloudy beach. Tight. Compacted. Tucked into this knowledge — not able to escape it.
I got fired from my midwifery apprenticeship after six months of working with a midwife in Santa Fe. I got fired for several reasons. I got fired because I started dating my client’s sister, who is now my wife. I got fired because the midwife didn’t think I called her early enough so that she could make it to the birth on time (which happened to be the birth of my nephew) and ended up doing the birth alone, with my then girlfriend and her sister. (By the way, the midwife got lost on her way to the birth and couldn’t find the house we had visited three times before.) I got fired because that birth went amazingly smooth but after the birth, my sister-in-law passed out from blood loss and the midwife did not catch that either. But mostly, I got fired because the midwife just didn’t like me. We didn’t fit.
After I got fired from that midwifery apprenticeship, I didn’t quit the birth world. I stayed with my vocation a little while longer. I taught birthing classes and become a doula for women in Santa Fe. I went to a lot of hospital births and felt weary of trying to come up with hopeful answers for women when they looked up at me in-between contractions and asked, “Why isn’t this working?” I had the heavy, weighted suspicion that their body actually didn’t know how to do what they were doing and we had all been sold a new age lie that told us chanting and breathing would get us through the hardest parts of labor. Something was wrong. It wasn’t working.
The more women I watched give birth, the more I learned that something was very wrong with our bodies. Our pelvis’ were small, our backs were twisted and our tolerance for pain was gone. We had forgotten what pain was and it was only through childbirth that we began to remember but by then, it was too late. We couldn’t tolerate it. It was not the right ground for practicing pain. Everything we needed for practice had been erased — carrying water uphill, picking weeds, shoveling manure, plucking chickens of their feathers, riding a horse, chopping wood and building fires. We had no relationship with physical pain, our bodies did not know physical labor and so the contractions surprised us, they took us down, they hollowed us out in ways that we were not prepared for. I began to backup from birth, feeling betrayed by it. Women needed time to prepare something primal, something made of fire, but there was no kindling. Perhaps I felt, very unconsciously and in the back corner of my own pelvis, that birth and farming were intrinsically linked. That you would not have one without the other.
This is not to say that I have never seen a woman give birth and have it go profoundly well. I have been lucky enough to see that. When my niece was born, I was also in the room. In between contractions, all of us who were present slid our backs down against the walls and shut our eyes. The birth would have been meditative even if it hadn’t of been the middle of the night. There were no words at this birth— low grunts and soft moans. There was the opening and closing of eyes, the slow and steady breathing of patient witnesses.
I have seen births that come with contractions that move something down and out. I have seen births that come with a hopeful progression. I have seen births with joy and love and a TV on in the background. But I have seen more births that don’t come at all. More births that are delayed and stopped and cease before they begin. I have seen more mounds of belly get wheeled into surgical rooms, where I slip gowns over my jeans and tiny booties over my sneakers and hold the mother’s hand in front of the curtain while they slice her belly open, then her uterus and hand her a baby while she is numb and groggy, feeling no strength in her arms to hold her child. Skin to skin! They tell her. But she cannot feel her skin. She is skinless.
And yet, I have become a midwife again. I can feel her in my back. I can feel her standing in my spine. I can feel her at the ready. Going over shoulder dystocia in my head. Going over the feeling of the sack of waters and the nubs of the slippery, purple umbilicus. I can feel her standing ready — a relative who came over on a boat long ago. I remember. I remember. I remember. There are some jobs that we try and learn, try and become, that we study for, certify ourselves to be and work to be good at, and then there is the work that lives in us, that just is.
If there is a birth in front of me, I will slip into it like driving the streets of the city I grew up in. It is known and old. Ancient and timeless. It will always be this way. A left turn here. A stop sign there. Two miles between Indian School and McDowell.
I remember birth. I remember kneeling on the wooden floor. I remember pots of boiling waters and I remember the middle of the night. I remember the knife under the bed to cut the pain in two but more than that, my hands remember where to go and what to feel. But these are not my memories. I cannot explain these memories.
We were not 100% sure Rose was ovulating when our vet came over yesterday. We hadn’t seen any thick, gelatinous ovulation fluid and she had not started bellowing yet, like she usually does. We were also completely unsure how Rose would react to a man sticking his entire arm up her vaginal canal and into her cervix. The restraint we put Rose into — her milking stanchion — could easily be pulled apart by her 800 pounds. She could kick the vet and fracture a lung, maybe even kill him. She could run off with the stanchion around her neck, tripping and falling, wounding herself and breaking her own legs. But nothing dangerous happened. As Heathar and I held our breath, as I continuously fed Rose a mixture of oats and sunflower seeds with some warm molasses on top, as Heathar brushed Rose’s back hind quarters and as I whispered — good cow, good mama cow — to Rose, the vet stuck his entire arm up her vaginal canal and into her cervix. While he worked, Rose looked back at her rear end a couple of times. She seemed to consider doing something about the intrusion — perhaps a small protest, stamping a hoof — but she lost interest in the idea. She seemed to decide that the vet was not bothering her and perhaps, she even welcomed the insemination. As if she was thanking us for finally obeying the great demands of her milking body. And perhaps, most importantly, maybe it just felt good.
As Rose underwent her insemination, Billie sat next to her, tied to the barn fence with a small lead rope. He laid down and let the sun hit his growing, rotund belly full of fresh milk. He watched while lazily blinking his eyes and occasionally running his slick, pink tongue up and over his round, bulbous nose. When the vet withdrew the second straw of semen, he told us he saw ovulation fluid. Heathar and I smiled at one another, secret smiles. Smiles between women. We acted surprised. As if we didn’t know he would find the fertile fluid inside of Rose. We had told him all along but of course, we kept our gloating for the writing we would do about the insemination afterwards. I was already thinking about this essay. A woman’s way to gloat. In her mind. In her stories. On the page. With her pen name.
As the vet unveiled his arm from the long plastic sleeve and crumpled it into a ball of trash, as we all stepped back from Rose astonished at the ease which she had allowed the insemination, as I went to release Billie from his rope, we heard a strange calling from the sky — like coins raining down on us. The three of us looked up, and perhaps Billie did too, to see a flock of Sandhill cranes flying above us, well on their way south for the winter.
The cranes called, like gobbling turkeys and we let our mouths fall open. Heathar and I have never heard Sandhill cranes on our property before, even though they are common here in northern New Mexico. It is the first time we have ever seen them above our farm. Heathar and I looked at each other again, smiling — recognizing the magic in what others might only brush away as mundane. We catch the signs of blessings, as if they are feathers floating through the air. We hunt them like our cats stalk squirrels and birds, brining them back and placing them on our front porches, leaving only a few feathers as proof that something was claimed and killed. We open ourselves to the unexpected signs that we are heading in the right direction because without them, we would wonder why we let our bodies get so tired. We will take the nod from the Sandhill cranes, we will take the cackling applause from the migrant birds and maybe, just maybe, Rose is also pregnant.
