MAMA BEAR, MOTHER GOOSE by Nina McConigley
There once was a man who owned a wonderful goose. Every morning, the goose laid for him a big, beautiful egg – an egg made of pure, shiny, solid gold. Every morning, the man collected golden eggs.
I wanted it all.
The first doctor tells me it only takes one egg. The last doctor will tell me my eggs are no good. If you sliced me open, there would be nothing inside. Month after month on a screen in a wood- paneled office, I see the honeycomb inside my ovaries, the dark holes of my resting follicles. But filled with bad eggs. I tell myself it only takes one. One golden egg. But my animal body cannot make one good one.
I take the medicine. I prick my subcutaneous fat with fine needles filled with things to trick my body. I buy a pill organizer the color of the rainbow and each day down herbs, powders, and pills. A potion? I would have taken it. A magic tree? I would have climbed it. A promise? I would have made it. Told an imp I could guess his name. Planted barleycorn to see what grew. But still you did not come.
I try to relax. “It’s when you stop trying, it happens!” “Why don’t you just adopt?” “My sister’s friend got pregnant the minute she started IVF!”
I cut out dairy. I cut out gluten. I pee on sticks and eat the cores of pineapples. I drink large cups of bone broth and drink pomegranate juice the color of blood. I see a psychic who tells me she sees a young boy calling out to me. “It’s your son!” she tells me.
I do not get pregnant the minute I start IVF.
I make an altar in my room. On it is a piece of bison fur, a flicker feather, a piece of calcite, a sprig of juniper and sagebrush, and because I cannot think of what else to put on it, a hard- boiled egg. I hold the egg in my hand and repeat affirmations: my body is strong, my body can carry a baby, I can do this.
Years pass.
And little by little, egg by egg, he began to grow rich. But the man wanted more. “My goose has all those golden eggs inside her,” he kept thinking. “Why not get them all at once?”
I do not know the animal that made you. She comes to me as a number, Donor #09-XX. I study the thumbnail photos and note the shape of her face, the bend of her eyebrows, the texture of her hair. Her smile. There are two baby pictures. Blurry, as even though she is much younger than me, a whole other generation, cameras were not as crisp in her childhood. In both photos, she is outside. Both are taken in front of tall palms. She has dark hair. She is not smiling in either picture.
She does not want to know us, and we do not meet her. I just have the few photographs and her answers to some basic questions. Her favorite book, what age she was when she first menstruated, that she liked to dance as a hobby. But I think she looks kind. Your father tells me how she looks is not important. But it feels important. It is something about mirrors, and wanting to see my own face hanging in the glass before me, but seeing hers. I study her smile again. I read the book that is her favorite.
She lives in another state, and I hold my breath that she won’t back out. But she travels and takes the same pills and herbs. She injects herself with all the things to make the eggs fat and healthy. I am the Queen in Snow White, full of envy at someone younger, stronger, 166 and my fate is bound to hers in ways I don’t understand. She does not need one lucky egg. She has, I hear, over two dozen in a single take. The morning of her egg retrieval, I will wait alone in a gray waiting room with framed pictures of forests. I am in the woods. When the embryologist calls me to tell me your Day 5 report, she tells me, “Congratulations, you are a mother to six genetically healthy embryos. All girls!” I wonder about the boy a psychic told me she could see. And I think of you both, frozen. Snowbabies. Both of you are a perfect fist of cells and zona pellucida. Blastocysts.
“Good job,” she says.
“I had nothing to do with it.”
“No, these are yours. You are their mother. You will make them in your body. They are your babies.”
When I don’t answer, she reiterates what our counselor had told us months before. “She’s not the mother, she’s a donor. She gave you one cell.”
A friend repeats this to me as I cannot let go of the smile, the nosmile in front of the palms.
“Think of it like a kidney! She gave it to you, but it’s your body doing the work!”
Later, at transfer, I will see you as a shooting star – blasting across a screen of my magnified uterus. I hold a teddy bear while the procedure is happening. The nurse will bring me a warm blanket and a Valium to relax my uterus. In my blissed- out state, I will myself to be a mama bear. I pray a baby will hibernate in me for nine months. I say the same things over and over: my body is strong, my body can carry a baby, I can do this. I am a bear.
And oh, I wanted it. All the eggs, all the gold, all the happy endings.
I wanted to have a career.
I wanted the wedding.
I wanted the house, the garden, the circles of friends.
I wanted to be a mother.
I wanted it all.
I will tell you about despair, says Mary Oliver. I will tell you about geese.
It is a poem I have known a long, long time.
I have always loved Canada geese. The black of their head, the white chinstrap. When I first began birding as a teenager, the first bird I checked off my Life List was a Canada goose. It will take months 167 before my eyes can differentiate a finch from a warbler. But you know a goose when you see one. You see the V in the sky and hear their song.
Geese are pests. Their poop, the way they linger in roads, their noise, their aggression. Outside the campus where I teach, I commonly see a gaggle of them near the parking lot. They honk in their little packs, stumbling around the asphalt. Their tube- like poop is on everything. Wyoming and Colorado are on the flyway for migratory birds, and every park is full of them. But across America, cities have literature on how to manage the nuisance.
To control them, humans oil the eggs.
The hen, the female goose, will build their nests and lay an egg every day and a half until their clutch is complete. Departments of Natural Resources and official city documents on the management of geese will advise you to not destroy the nest. The mother goose will just build another one. But if you oil their eggs, if you put foodgrade corn oil on each one, essentially asphyxiating the embryo, the goose will continue to sit on her eggs, incubating them till her nesting instinct is satisfied. Oiling is a win for cities. They control the population, and the mother goose still thinks she is going to have babies.
She will not know she has bad eggs. She does not know there will be no goslings. Everyone is happy.
You arrive early. Months early. The only flying is me, in an emergency medical helicopter, across state lines, to give birth. To give you a chance. When you come out, you are three pounds, and your body stays curled. You ball up on my bare chest, wires and tubes coming out of you like tentacles. Your body is covered in fine hair, lanugo that has kept you warm as you grew in my belly. You seem like a baby bird, your mouth opening and closing. You are on a feeding tube. A thin NG tube that is taped to your face and winds down into your stomach. I pump milk and a nurse draws it into a syringe that hooks up to a machine. It doles you out little bits of milk, a milliliter at a time.
Every few hours, a nurse comes in and says, “It’s time to gavage.” And they take my milk and begin the process again. My milk, syringe, machine.
“Gavage? Like a goose?” When your father and I started dating, we went to a fancy meal at a restaurant in California. Away from Wyoming, we wanted to eat food in the shapes of flowers, food with foam bubbling like geysers on top of mousses and vegetables cut like origami. But we do not order foie gras. The only time I have 168 heard of gavage is on cooking shows and to talk about an inhumane process.
“Goose. She’s our little goose.” your dada says. And the name sticks. Goose. NICU black comedy. The nurse doesn’t get it. None of them do. The nurses think we call you goose because you are small and cute and covered in light down – and across the street from the hospital, urban Canada geese flock.
We call you Goose as you are two months early, and the name we picked out doesn’t seem quite right. This was not what we expected. And we don’t know if you will make it. We call you Goose as I don’t know you. I don’t know how to name you. To name you is to have power over you. I think of the imp again – Rumpelstiltskin. The queen can keep her child if she can guess his name.
You won’t latch. Your mouth continues to open and close. I am so very tired.
One day he couldn’t wait any longer. He grabbed the goose and killed her. But there were no eggs inside her! “Why did I do that?” the man cried! “Now there will be no more golden eggs.”
Those who have plenty want more and so lose all they have. Greed overreaches itself. I wanted it all.
And most of all, I wanted you. I wanted to be a mama bear.
I am no bear.
Look at me. Listen to me. I am Mother Goose.
I think the donor, my darling, is the bear.
A shy animal that has no desire to interact with humans.
An animal to be feared and awed.
An animal that people stop to look at pictures of.
An animal not in everyday life. A creature to be viewed from a distance, but never known. A creature who needed money, who wanted to help a couple in need. We don’t get to know her story; not even I do.
The bear in me, however, is dead. Or, I’m Asian, so say it’s the tiger. The tiger in me is dead. Or I never had a tiger inside me. No Mama Bear, no Tiger Mother. No, I am the goose with no golden eggs, and yet when I push and push, willing it with feathers and fur and herbs and stone, there you are, my golden one.
A goose mother is a pest. Aggressive and tenacious. A goose mother will strike at anyone who comes at her, at you. A goose mother adapts to any environment. She can make a parking lot her home. She can accept the world she’s in and raise her young in it. A goose mother stays in the winter and does not migrate; a goose mother will 169 stay. A goose mother will always rebuild the nest. A goose mother sits on an empty egg and has something I found reserves of as I found my way to you: all the magic.
All of it.
NOTES
The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs, American Museum of Natural History
www.amnh.org/content/download/173919/2737219/file/silkroadfables.pdf.
Oliver, Mary. Dream Work. Grove Press, 1994.
Nina McConigley is the author of Cowboys and East Indians (Curtis Brown Unlimited, 2015). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, O, The Oprah Magazine, Parents, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, and The Asian American Literary Review. Her essay collection, Township and Range, will be published by the University of Georgia Press in 2025.