Historically I have not been a sentimental person. I never had a heart of stone, but I just wasn't that emotionally vulnerable. (Okay, one exception: tears were guaranteed if I was reading a book and the dog died.) But motherhood has me undone. You can easily imagine the topics that make me cry now, because they are all such cliches: stuff like child abuse, starving kids in Africa, abandoned babies, and (most effective of all) parents whose children die. (I read a story a few months ago in the New York Times written by a woman whose 5-year-old daughter died of an infection, and it made me weep for weeks afterward.)
And apparently I am extending my emotional sympathies to other species. When Isaac was a few days old, I was crushed when my father told me that a bat had gotten trapped in their house and had made its way to an open window up in their loft, where it died pressed up against the screen. I still feel sad when I imagine the poor creature able to smell the fresh night air through the screen as it starved to death. And recently I overheard Craig and Joel talking about a new culinary delicacy, lamb so young that its intestines still hold the undigested milk of its mother -- and that makes me sad as well.
It reminded me that animals have mothers, too, and even if the ewe doesn't exactly love the lamb, she nurtures it with her own body and certainly doesn't want it to die. We have something in common. When I think of it that way, eating animals seems so heartless. I wonder if I'm becoming a vegetarian ...
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