A Broken Wing
From the back of our house, the garden runs down to a pond. Closer to the water there are pine trees, crepe myrtles and oak trees, but nearer to the house it’s just grass. Breakfast and lunch, as well as dinner now the days are getting longer, these meals are almost always eaten looking out over the view. Now Spring is on its way, it’s a time of flowers and new green leaves; our two tall Bradford Pears were in blossom for a fortnight, and the Dogwoods will be the next to bloom.
However, my attention is on the birds. Some are striking, to say the least. The stunning wings of the Bluebirds, bright red Cardinals, the almost regal blue, grey and black of the Jays, and the startling yellow of the (American) Goldfinch. The Red-bellied Woodpecker is around, a Scarlet Tanager is attacking his reflection in our windows, and soon the Ruby-throated Hummingbirds will return. I can hear a Cardinal’s mating call, and a Mockingbird in full flood nearby.
And then there are the Canada Geese. This year, our lawn (grass!) seems to be a major attraction for the Canada Geese. They march up from the pond two or three times a day, to nibble at green shots and poop. Those birds are prodigious poopers. With their frequent deposits left all around the back garden and on the path, avoiding poop is a major and annoying requirement. Despite that frustration, I am fascinated by these big birds and watch them every day.
A few weeks back they were mating, pairing up (or probably pairing back up, as I read they pair for life). At this time of the year, a flock on the ground quickly breaks up into clusters of two. Exploring our lawn, I can see the males, heads up high, looking for trouble (the major source of trouble is me, trying to chase them off). This is when tensions rise, and the male of one pair can be seen racing, neck outstretched, to hiss at any unwary other bird wandering too close; at other times they’re just neck waggling and squawking! Yet in other ways they are like sheep: if one decides to go to a neighbours’ garden or the pond, within a couple of minutes they’ve all left.
However, there is one exception. A single solitary Canada Goose is often in view. I think he lost his mate a couple of years ago, or even before then. More to the point, he has a damaged wing. Most likely he was attacked by the snapping turtle in the pond: they are vicious creatures, and could easily crush wing bones if they grabbed a bird. When he tries to fly, flapping hard, up on tiptoes, (or more accurately up on webbed feet), he almost gets airborne, but not quite. Then he settles down again. I don’t chase Broken-wing off the grass any longer: when I used to do so, he had to race back down to the pond, while the others could fly if I got too close. In fact, I’ve become rather fond of him (I’m guessing it’s a ‘him’, but I’m not certain).
Watching Broken-wing, I wonder what his life is like. Many of the Canada Geese we see are passing through, and will fly on after a while (going north in the summer, and further south in the winter). Usually two or three pairs will stay longer. Broken-wing stays stuck on the ground, watching the flights depart; physically disabled, his life centred on our pond and the life around it. How does he feel? Is he upset as he tries to fly? Is he lonely? No mate, no opportunity to leave and find one. Is he bored? Is he angry about his fate? In my fantasies about his life, I move between seeing him as the local overlord, keeping an eye on temporary visitors or, at the other extreme, to regarding him as a tragic figure, locked into a narrow and unhappy life.
Watching Broken-wing makes me think about disability more generally, the physical disabilities such as damaged limbs, and the other kinds of disadvantage people suffer. Even further, I think about those disabilities that are not inherent in the person so much as ascribed to them by others. Are they still disabilities? Certainly, we can limit behaviour and opportunity for other people by the way we choose to see them. To use a no longer favoured term, we can handicap others.
At the broadest level, we categorise whole populations as alien: Mexican, African-American, Aboriginal, Immigrant. We conflate irrelevant distinctions with something more sinister. “They aren’t like us.” That difference runs all the way from racist rhetoric – “Mexican immigrants are rapists and murderers” according to our President – to somewhat more sneaky distinctions: “women can’t read maps” or, “women make poor scientists”. We are well aware of these horrible, pervasive forms of discrimination, creating a world of ‘us and them’, demeaning the people around us by sustaining and reinforcing imagined differences and disabilities.
I do know that the distinction between ‘us and them’ is deep rooted, some kind of atavistic fear about outsiders. However, working for a few years in ethnic affairs, I noticed one other and rather discouraging feature of antagonism from one group to another. As in many countries, there is an underlying level of racism in Australia. However, I noticed it was often the case those recently arrived in the country were more racist than those who’d been in the country for decades. The newest arrivals tended to stick together, and as that happened, the more likely the ones who had arrived just before the ‘newcomers’ saw these latecomers in negative terms.
However, there are other issues that watching Broken-wing elicits for me. A broken wing can be seen as a metaphor for all kinds of damage. Apart from the challenges of physical damage, there are so many other ways in which individuals can be handicapped, often the result of how we behave, even towards those close to us, without paying much attention to what we are doing. Beyond the stereotyping of ‘us and them’, these distinctions may be subtle and unintended, but yet lead us to treat these we have distinguished differently. No visible broken wing, but still separate. There are also ways where damage is more insidious, as differences are internalised, changing how an individual sees him or herself, and the interactions had with others.
One powerful example of that can be seen in families. To be the first child, or today the only child, can have interesting consequences. Past the first few years, these children experience family through an adult lens. It’s a double-edged sword. In part, a single child’s situation tends to ensure many quickly become adult-centric, able to speak more confidently with older people, zipping past a short period of childish talk and a child’s games. Grown up before their time, perhaps. On the other hand, some miss out on the opportunity to enjoy the world of fantasy, games and children’s fun, having been channeled into more serious endeavours. None of this is deliberate, of course, and parents are often proud of their precocious children. Like Little Lord Fauntleroy, these children can become wise beyond their years.
We all know another example, the middle child. Here the one in the middle may neither be treated as an adult early on (already done!) nor treated like the last, (either the spoilt one, or alternatively ignored, as the others have taken up all the oxygen). The so-called middle child syndrome is a term to cover those middle born who feel excluded. They don’t get the privileges and responsibilities offered to the oldest, nor the cuddles and indulgences for the youngest as they are no longer the baby in the family. Some feel ‘left out’. An older child can exacerbate all that, dominating the one in the middle while complaining that he or she was the one to break the rules (like winning the fight to be allowed out late), from which the next child can benefit. Both left out and regarded by a sibling as the ungrateful beneficiary of another’s hard work!
Research on birth order effects remains inconsistent and indicative. What was it Tolstoy said at the beginning of Anna Karenina? “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. Birth order can have an impact, but there are so many other factors affecting children, as it is only one way in which children can be disadvantaged. In the 21st Century we have improved on that simple stuff! One new way we can subtly damage children comes from looking after them excessively, or, as it is sometimes described, ‘helicoptering’. Parents hover over their children, saving them from unpleasantness and harm (a process that now continues on to the university world of trigger warnings and safe spaces I have discussed elsewhere).
Children need care. Compared to almost every other member of the animal kingdom, our youngsters are dependent and vulnerable for a long time. The trick is in how we do it. Protect, but not too protective: hiss, like the Canada Goose, when there’s evidence of a real threat. Keep an eye on things, but don’t micro-manage. Ask an elementary school teacher about this. They see the overly nurtured children in school, less resilient, tentative, looking for help, and it takes time to get them to be more confident, to learn by their mistakes and not just through successes.
There’s more. Recent research suggests that autoimmune systems in young children are often not as robust as they could be. They’ve not been playing in the dirt! I liked the way in which one website, Wellness Mama, explained this: “We don’t actually need to make an effort to consume dirt to get the benefits of soil based organisms and nutrients in soil, we just need to make an effort to come in contact with it and to have our babies and children come in contact with it.” She goes on to recommend kids “play outside barefoot in the dirt as long as I know it is an area that hasn’t been sprayed with chemicals or contaminated in some other way. I garden and walk outside barefoot … I let my older kids help my in the garden, let them play in the dirt, make mud pies and otherwise get dirty. If they’ve been playing in clean dirt, I also let them eat outside without washing their hands so they can transfer small amounts of these soil based organisms to their digestive systems.” [i]
Excellent advice at a time when many younger people are facing a rise in immune deficiency diseases. However, it’s hard not to keep on protecting, and even more difficult to find the right balance. The same website goes on to recommend that children (and adults) consume probiotic rich foods and other fermented foods “to make sure we are exposed to a wide variety of naturally occurring beneficial bacteria … supplement[ed] with a high-quality probiotic/prebiotic blend.” As greater understanding of the internal human biome suggests other ways to boost systems, the next step might be fecal microbiota transplants. Dear me, where to stop? On top of this, advertising plays on parents’ guilt, encouraging them to buy more forms of entertainment, from iPhones to console gaming systems, while also enrolling their children in after-school activities and extra coaching. Leaving them to experience without direction, just playing outside, would be good. It’s time to get down and dirty; oops, sorry, I think that refers to something else!
Looking after your children is a challenging task, especially if you want to ensure they grow up to be self-reliant and confident. Doing everything for them is clearly a good way to disable their capacity for autonomy. Nowhere is that better illustrated than in the current drama in the US over ‘snow-ploughing’. I am sure you have read about the ‘college admissions scandal’. A recent article summarised the story well: “Some affluent mothers and fathers now are more like snow ploughs: machines chugging ahead, clearing any obstacles in their child’s path to success, so they don’t have to encounter failure, frustration or lost opportunities. Taken to its criminal extreme, that means bribing SAT proctors and paying off college coaches to get children in to elite colleges – and then going to great lengths to make sure they never face the humiliation of knowing how they got there.” [ii]
All done with the best of intentions? I am sure many of the parents involved were simply doing what they could to ensure the success of their children, while slipping past ethical behaviour into unethical and eventually illegal acts. Clearing the way for their children, they were also subtly handicapping them, creating a belief they were better than they were, instead of learning the hard lessons of experience. A belief in exceptional capability can be as much a handicap as a missing leg. When asked about going to university, my suggestion is not to worry about a place, but to encourage children to take a year off, to work or live overseas, to learn to live by themselves.
I guess this has all been said before. Philip Larkin put it well, if a little harshly, in ‘This be the Verse’:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.[iii]
Broken-wing is disabled, but not excluded. While he is without a partner (as far as I can tell) he is certainly accepted within the larger group of birds. Rather touchingly, among the several Muscovy Ducks on the pond, there are three also with damage to one or both wings, and they tend to be there with Broken-wing. As he marches up our garden, so they shuffle along behind. Occasionally, all four will settle down on the grass for an afternoon nap in the sun. Damaged they may be, but they seem to accept each other and enjoy warmth and company on a leisurely afternoon with the other birds in our garden. Enjoy life, Broken-win. I hope he does.
[i] https://wellnessmama.com/12908/kids-need-dirt/
[ii] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/snowplough-parenting-helicopter-felicity-huffman-lori-loughlin-college-admissions-scam-a8828631.html
[iii] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48419/this-be-the-verse
