i love girls with no ‘maternal warmth’. girls who are affectionate in awkward ways. girls who are not ‘caregivers’ so much as care needers. girls who mean well but come across as assholes. girls who don’t mean well. girls who cry a lot but it isn’t ‘cute’ it’s just annoying. girls who aren’t always the most beautiful one in the room. girls who are obnoxious. girls who kind of suck but u can’t help but love them bc they really are just trying,
It’s 2008. I’m in O'Hare (Chicago airport) around Christmas time, absolutely tired from a 36+ hours of travel from Lithuania. My flight to North Dakota has just been cancelled by a region-wide snowstorm. My cell phone and credit cards aren’t working because I haven’t called to have them turned back on/authorized for the US. I’m so tired and a little delirious, and coming down with a cold. I just want to get home and see my family. I shuffle into the line for the airline to see what can be done about my flight, but the line is long and I am already defeated. Tears leak from my eyes intermittently from tiredness, helplessness, and self pity.
A business woman in the line turns around. She introduces herself, frowning a little because this is so against whatever code she lives her life by. She explains she’s a pharmaceutical exec from New Jersey and that she is visiting some distant relative in North Dakota, and was on the same (now cancelled) flight as me. She hands me an apple and protein bar and says something like ‘I have no maternal instinct. I do not have children and I do not want them. But you are so clearly out of your depth here I feel compelled to help you in some way.’ She helps me book a room in the airport hotel and trusts I will pay her back when I get home (which I do). She pays for a meal we have together, in which she mostly talks about how she climbed the ladder at her corporate job.
The whole incident now seems like a fever dream because I truly was sleep deprived and loony. This woman emphasized many times how she was not a caretaker, she was not a warm person. Indeed she was not gregarious or solicitous. But she also very very much was deeply kind to me, much to her own surprise I think. 0 percent maternal, but my extreme patheticness really drew out something she didn’t know was in her.
I hope she has continued to have a great child-free life.
I have been a sheep caretaker for like two days and already I’m like. Wow. I get it.
I get why these were some of the earliest mammals to ever be domesticated. They look up to humans with this sort of dumb but all at once innocent and pure and trusting expression. They’re happy to see you. They follow you around. They like to be rubbed under their chins. Maybe its just some latent Scottish highland shepherd DNA I still have in me but I look at my sheep charges and suddenly I see why the love of God for humanity is so often described as a shepherd and his sheep. I’d fight a wolf for these guys. I’d go way the Hell out of my way for them. I’d carry their young for miles on my own back.
Clara trusts me enough to show me different parts of her body like her belly. show me her mouth and allow me to touch all of those teeth. —right? can you turn and show them all of your teeth? good job!— So we work really hard on being able to look over their entire bodies, and progress those behaviors to things like voluntary blood draws, ultrasounds, teeth brushing, and radiographing. —right? yeah!— But the biggest thing is we find what they find reenforcing and they show us that. and that includes hugs. —right?— And Clara has shown us that she really seems to enjoy tactile, so I give her this hand signal and she will show me what part of her body she wants rubbed. So, right now she wants a big noogie —right? good.— and sometimes what I will do is I’ll make her head a little pancake. or then I’ll rub her side and then she snuggles right in. —huh? huh! good girl thats very nice, good.— And then like I said, she would climb right on my lap and allow me to continue giving her tactile.
“What were astronauts like when they first returned from outer space? Nurse Dee O'Hara: ‘They have something, a sort of wild look, I would say, as if they had fallen in love with a mystery up there, sort of as if they haven’t got their feet back on the ground, as if they regret having come back to us… a rage at having come back to earth. As if up there they’re not only freed from weight, from the force of gravity, but from desires, affections, passions, ambitions, from the body. Did you know that for months John [Glenn] and Wally [Schirra] and Scott [Carpenter] went around looking at the sky? You could speak to them and they didn’t answer, you could touch them on the shoulder and they didn’t notice; their only contact with the world was a dazed, absent, happy smile. They smiled at everything and everybody, and they were always tripping over things. They kept tripping over things because they never had their eyes on the ground.’”
— Craig Nelson, Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon (via m-l-rio)
im just crying while scrolling through the mfa’s digitized 18th century drawings which include a really soft and loving drawing of a baby snoozing thats titled “the artist’s daughter” thats just radiating love, and also some very weird German birth certificates from a town in Pennsylvania that a man in 1771 painted mermaids and flowers and lions on
there’s just something about these acts of love through art, man… they’re really getting me tonight.
i can’t explain specifically what about this drawing is making me so emotional, im just having a moment thinking about the fact that this man was another living breathing human like me and 250-ish years ago in france, he sat drawing his tiny baby while she slept, and he is communicating that to me across centuries and an ocean with this image he made, and I can feel the love in my heart that he felt right then.
“The typical coastal Huskies of the aboriginal Chukotka” or Chukchi people, and “Volʹnica of the village of Lawrence. 1990. Photo B. Wide” is some of the translation. Posted on Facebook by Борис Широкий
Doesn’t the one up top look like my Siberian husky/sheltie Kai? That’s what caught my eye.
The Chukchi indigenous sled dogs are what modern Siberian huskies descend from, and are much more varied in appearance and purpose. It is only through Western breeding that they have become a single-purpose working dog with a very distinctive breed type. I’ve found some historical text references that Chukchi dogs, like most laika types from other areas, were used not only for sled-pulling but also for camp guarding, for reindeer herding, and for hunting.
Nenets herding laika –> Samoyed is another transition from a diverse, multipurpose Indigenous working breed to a drastically narrowed gene pool, appearance, and instincts via Western breeding practices. I’ll dig up some pictures and resources and make another post.
