Mothers and Fathers, Both Human and Not

Father’s Day got me thinking about parenting. I grew up in a stable family where I knew my parents loved me but I know this is not always the case.

When I was a child, my uncle liked to tell me jokes and parables. One that I remember was about a monkey during monsoon season in India. She had a baby. As the rains came pouring down, the place she lived was getting flooded. As the water levels rose, she raised her baby above her head. Then she stood on tip toe. But eventually, the only way she could survive was by standing on her baby, which, of course, drowned.

This is not the case just with animals — sometimes people have sacrificed their children to save themselves. There are two old movies I remember which show this — Quigley Down Under and Secondhand Lions.

In the first, Cora, who is from Texas, related how she was hiding from the Commanches in a root cellar with her baby, who refused to stop crying. Fearing for her life as well as his, she covered his mouth. He ended up dying. She moves to Australia.

In the second, it’s not physical death but a violation of a child’s trust. Walter is constantly being abandoned and lied to by his mother. She takes on a stream of lovers who abuse her and her child. Finally, she drops him off at his bachelor uncles’ house in Texas.

I thought both of these movies were great, and also had stories of redemption.

In Australia, Cora is once again put in a situation where if a baby cries, they could be killed. At first she tries to hush him as she did before. Then she stops herself, and she tells the baby to go ahead and cry, to cry as loud as it wants to.

In Texas, Walter is happy and feels secure and loved with his uncles, who are helping to teach him how to be an honorable man. When his mother shows up again with an abuser to take him from his uncles, he tells her to “do something that’s best for me”. Her face changes. She really seems to see him, and she acts unselfishly towards him for perhaps the first time in her life.

Both of these pivotal scenes show that we can learn and grow from our mistakes.

However, there are also many stories where mothers (and fathers) die to save their children. The Texas Tribune reports on one where both parents covered their 2 month old baby with their bodies to save its life when a mass murderer shot more than 20 people.

There are also movies where mothers sacrifice themselves for their child. Based on a true story, the movie Not Without My Daughter stars Sally Field as Betty. It is a gripping story about a mother who risks her life to escape what is essentially imprisonment in Iran where she is abused by her husband and where her daughter could be forced to marry at the age of 9. Betty would be allowed to leave Iran by her husband, but would not be able to take her child. Instead of escaping by herself, she does whatever she has to in order to also rescue her child.

Other stories of mothers saving their children involve animals. There is this video that tells the story of a mother cat in Brooklyn who repeatedly ran into a burning building to save her 5 kittens. She suffered burns but she kept going back to rescue her babies.

Then there is this story of a mother dog in India who saves her puppies isntead of herself. During the monsoons in Kerala, she covered her babies with her own body to protect them from the floods, which buried her alive in the mud. She could have run at the first sign of flooding and left her puppies behind, but instead she chose to risk her own life for their sake.

Animal fathers are more complex. Lions will protect their own cubs, but will kill the cubs of other lions. Lionesses will risk their lives to save their cubs from predatory males. However, injured cubs may be left to die by the pride.

Polar bears are another species that has predatory males, who are known to murder cubs, even their own. Mother polar bears are sometimes forced to sacrifice one of their cubs to save the other (they typically have two cubs).

Other species, however, are protective of all the youngsters in the group.

Among Texas Longhorn cattle — the entire herd of adults, male and female, will protect the calves. At night, while the babies sleep, the adults use their sharp horns to drive away and even kill maurading coyotes, wild pigs, and other predators.

Among dolphins, adults will attack a shark as a pack to protect their young. They use their superior speed and agility as well as their tough noses to kill these lone predators.

In Japan, all the adults keep an eye on children crossing the street and will help them. In the immigrant neighborhood I grew up in, all the mothers socialized while keeping a protective eye on their children. If any child needed help, they all got involved.

From these examples, both real and fictional, we can see how mothers (and fathers) are often willing to lay down their lives to protect their child and sometimes even the children of others. But other times they actually hurt the young.

Both people and animals are complex, and while some parents in both cases will sacrifice everything for their children, others are either abusive or situationally protective.

Also, both among people and animals — fathers are sometimes just as protective as mothers. And sometimes they are not.

An old Italian proverb states that while the death of a father is a misfortune, the death of a mother is a tragedy. Yet I have known many families where the father is more loving and protective of his children than the mother. Again, humanity is complex.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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From The Good Men Project on Medium

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