Why define Mother? Chicken Chronicles 2

In The Chicken Chronicles Alice Walker spends a lot of time meditating on family; who is family, what is their function? By sharing her experience of raising chickens with us Walker forms new definitions of family, and new understanding of her memories of her own family.

 Walker believes in the fluidity of family, that is to say you can make up your own and are not limited to include only your biological family in it. Walker addresses this in Chapter 16 Enough Mother, where she finds herself in a group of women who for one reason or another identify themselves as motherless. One woman in the group said, “if you collect seven women and form a circle together, enough Mother will automatically be created”(75). This woman taught Walker that whatever it is we expect to get from our biological mothers can be found in a group of people who are not her. One more example of Walker believing family is not limited to biological family would be when she talks to her chickens of “Grandfather Gandhi”, and defines grandparents by saying: “a grandfather, or grandmother, is someone who wants only your health and happiness and he or she doesn’t mind in the least being seen as a fool to see that these objectives are achieved” (114). By this definition anyone can fulfill this role.

The family member Walker spends the most time trying to define is Mother. She starts the book by sharing her observation of an “industrious and quick, focused and determined” Mother hen, who displays her motherly duties by providing for and protecting her chicks (1). Here her observations of the function of a Mother are pragmatic; Mothers are there to protect and provide. We see Walker take on this duty as a pragmatic Mother to these chickens she has decided to raise. She builds them a house, fences out predators, and feeds them. In return, the chickens help her discover and share deep insights, and find lost memories (102). From this we can conclude that Walker believes one function of the family is to teach, and learn from, each other. It’s important to note that it is Walker that is learning from the chickens and so it is not just parents who teach their children, but children have something to teach as well. Many times Walker acknowledges this exchange, (“What a gift you have given us!” (143), and “with your help” (154)) and thanks her chickens.

By the end of the book Walker comes to another realization about Mother; Nature is the real Mother of all beings. She says, “Mommies, especially human Mommies, can be wrong. And, there’s a very good reason for this... [they] are only surrogates. In fact, all creatures on the planet have the same parent… the real excitement for you comes when you are free to rush into your real mother’s bounty” (185). This is a significant insight that becomes even more significant when you couple it with the lesson learned about the nature of the relationship of children and parents; that the exchange of knowledge, lessons, gifts is not one-sided. I interpret this as Mother Earth needing her children to give to her as much as they need her to give to them.

This meditation on family is constant throughout the book and makes me wonder more about the author’s own family life. Descriptions of her family are sparse, and I found myself trying to put the pieces together to form her experience.   You get the sense that, as a child, Walker didn’t quite understand the way her parents showed her love. They fulfilled that more pragmatic role of providers, as evidenced in Mommy Is So Thankful To Have You Appear (151). I believe her family experience growing up left her wanting more:

when I was a little girl; members of my family were always leaving home and I did not understand why they wanted to go anywhere, especially if they loved me, as they seemed to. Nobody talked about “loving” anybody in those times. But you could still tell because love is that kind of emotion; where it exists, it’s all over the place.(77)

This was not helped by her accident that she alludes to, which seemed to cause her to close up: “Mommy believes this: that when small children are injured they do in fact leave their bodies…and terrible things are done, almost as if the human, who is now adult, is fast asleep” (152).

As an adult sitting with the angels who have returned with her memories, Walker is able to understand her own family more. This meditation on family is not just a way to understand the family of her childhood, but also the family she created as an adult (in the book she does not mention having children, but a quick googling uncovers a daughter from an ex-husband). I wanted to address this topic in my blog because I constantly found myself questioning what her relationship was like with her children if she had any.  Though I am not a Mother myself I’ve picked up on a common concern of parents. Many worry whether or not they’ve done a good job, and it seems important that their children know they did their best. With that in mind I wondered if Walker’s own daughter was on her mind when she was writing this story. The comforting thought of being able to create your own family, the idea that parents have as much to learn as their children, identifying Nature as our true Mother, sharing her scars from her childhood and how they made her close off some of the world, and the multiple ways in which she shows she strives to be a better person, all seem to me like an explanation to somebody more direct than just us anonymous readers. Maybe it’s a stretch, but it’s an idea I couldn’t stop thinking. An idea of inadequacy in parenting that Walker, like so many parents, may not be able to shake. An idea that urges me to end on this quote from the book: “whatever is learned can be considered, absorbed, and in the future (or the present) put to use on whatever or whoever is left behind. That is the prayer.” (139)