I can think of no more poignant depiction of parenting than The March of the Penguins. The breathtaking documentary film and companion volume tell of emperor penguins “dwarfed by the blue-white world of Antarctic ice as they trek for miles from the sea to breeding grounds” culminating in a “monogamous pairing…a meticulous life or death exchange of the egg.” After much practice the penguin pair collaboratively transfer the egg. The male tenderly rolls the egg onto his feet, to be warmed by his incubating pouch while the female, utterly depleted by hatching the egg, can return to the sea to feed. While the females make their perilous journey, the males huddle together in formation “making a ramparts of their bodies against the blizzards and extreme cold.” Singularly focused on protecting the eggs that will hatch while the females are gone, the fathers themselves though starving, “regurgitate a milky substance stored especially for the chick” to sustain the offspring for a few more days.
Both parents press themselves against the most dire and demanding of circumstance to preserve the fragile new life they have created.
Those of you who are parents know something about this, though hopefully your experience contains conditions far less punishing and perilous than the brutal ice and cold of the Antarctic.
But parenthood is not always heroic, or even noble, sadly. The recent and much acclaimed movie, Precious and the novel upon which it is based, entitled Push show another side of parenting far more distressing in that the brutality of climate is replaced with the brutality of parents themselves endowed it seems only with ignorance and self-gratification. Anti-penguins as it were. While March of the Penguins illustrates the unmatchable precision and wisdom of instinct and nature attuned to environment, Push and Precious, though fictional accounts portray a realistic glimpse into need gone terribly awry. Instead of the dedicated protection by parents the emperor penguins model, the parents of Precious perpetuate a relentless and predatory cycle of abuse. Her father impregnates her twice, at twelve and sixteen, and her mother, threatened by his wavering attention, preys on Precious as well.
As easy as it is to demonize such depictions as monstrous and unfair, they serve as a chilling reminder that the capacity to conceive and bear young—in our species—is not always accompanied by the instructive instinct to nurture. While the body may still contain triggered responses: breast milk that lets down at the sound of an infant’s cry, there are women and men, and sadly, girls and boys unequipped to parent despite their capacity to fertilize and gestate.
If the emperor penguins teach us about parental sacrifice and tenderness for the sake of the children despite harrowing odds, the brave and horrifying fictional world of Precious teaches us too, that seemingly insurmountable odds can yield to purpose and creativity.
The title of Sapphire’s book upon which the film is based, comes from Precious’ experience of labor as an EMT tells her to push, and push she does, into a world that neither welcomes or wants her or her incestuously produced young. Precious eventually pushes against her own ignorance, the crushing ignorance of her parents and the ignorance of the world that ignores at best and crushes at worst poor fat black illiterate teenage girls before and after they become HIV positive. At the end of the novel, in a section entitled “Life Stories: Our Class Book,” Precious writes:
"first I don’t unnerstan it
but now I do
CONCREET JUNGLE
it’s a prison days
we live in
at least me
I’m not really free
baby, Mama, HIV
where I wanna be? Where I wanna be?
Not where I AM
on the 102
down lex avenue
I do have
lungs take in air
I can see I
can read
nobody can see now but I might be a poet, rapper, I got my
water colors
my child is smart
my CHILDREN is alive
some girls in
forin countries
babies dead.
Look up sometimes
and the birds is like dancers
or like programmed
by computer
how they fly
tear up
your heart
bus moving
PLAY THE HAND YOU GOT
housemother say.
HOLD FAST TO DREAMS
Langston say.
GET UP OFF YOUR KNEES
Farrakhan say.
CHANGE
Alice Walker
Say.
Rain fall down
wheels turn round
DON’T ALWAYS RHYME
Ms. Rain say
walk on go into the poem
the heart of it
beating
like
a clock
a virus
tick
tock."
Amidst conditions as perilous as the penguins face, Precious endures, at least for the moment, marching into the heart of the poem, her own life beating for its sake, for the sake of the children.
Parenthood be it of actual offspring, be it of chosen children, be it of oneself; be it of a calling, a vocation meant in some way to mother the world, to father the egg incubating in a pouch—parenthood as I understand it, is that state of being that transforms us into givers and protectors of life; channels of creativity, worshippers of possibility.
Parenthood for emperor penguins entails the “absolute unmixed attention” French philosopher Simone Weil called a form of prayer. For Precious, parenthood conjures both the serrated edge of brokenness from which she emerges and the stark and surprising existence in which she labors. For one of you, it means:
• Being in the center of a relationship triangle, with your children, your
mother, and your partner's mother making up the corners.
• Always trying to live up to someone's expectations, including your own, and
frequently hearing that you're doing it all wrong.
• Playing many different roles over and over: teacher, comforter, entertainer,
doctor, judge, chauffeur, detective, psychiatrist, coach, good cop, bad
cop. Sometimes you get a standing ovation. Sometimes you get boo’ed.
• Being able to make macaroni and cheese in your sleep. (If you get to sleep.)
• Being awakened at 2am with words such as “I had a bad dream.” “I threw
up.” “I'm hungry.” “I wet my bed.” or the ominous “Mom, I need to talk to you.”
• Being challenges and rewarded, but not always in equal measure and never in
the ways you expected.
This morning I invite you to ponder your relationship to parenthood whether you have children or not. If you, like me, know of parenthood via having parents or parenting a life of purpose, you might reflect on what about literal parenthood inspires, baffles, awes you. In the brief time I wholeheartedly tried to step-parent I heard my mother’s admonishment that try though I might, I would never really be the parent of the children I sought to help raise. I understood what my mother meant especially after the relationship with the children’s mother ended and contact ceased from their end as well. But I recall as clearly the two children proudly proclaiming that everything I knew about kids they taught me. Mostly that is true. Those two children and those two years of my life instructed me vastly and deeply not just about children, but about myself and especially my father who I came to understand in a much fuller way. I referred to my role as “daddy penguin.” I came to appreciate far more deeply the complex and unending commitment required by anyone choosing parenthood. As my own experience and the penguins and Precious reveal, what makes parenthood real is walking into the poem of parenthood, into the heart and ice of it, feeling the beating like a virus, like a clock.
What in your life do you travel to the center of and stay? What awakens you at two a.m.? What jostles you from the sleep of your days? The whimsical artist Brian Andreas tells us “there are angels whose only job is to make sure we don’t get too comfortable and fall asleep and miss our lives.” Sometimes those angels are our children. Sometimes our dogs, or cats or partners or other passions. Sometimes, the icebergs breathtakingly blue reminding us beauty and obstacle co-exist.
What places you in the center of expectations you cannot fully meet? What instructs you in the necessity of self-care as a precondition of caring for someone or something else?
What provides the repetitive opportunity to master a skill? To stretch your patience like taffy to amazing lengths?
What draws you into multiple roles with its multiple demands?
What develops your capacity to endure the web of relationships we all encounter?
The answer to the queries may be for some, a form of parenthood outside the realm of children: a figurative nurturing, a relationship predicated on care and sustained by love. I suspect though it is merely conjecture, that duty alone does not a parent make. The poet H.D. wrote of being drawn to what she loved “with no thought of duty or pity.” I think of what compels us to nurture, not simply to tend, but to nourish from the wellsprings of our own being—and it almost certainly involves love.
The creators of March of the Penguins write of the epic journey as a story about love. To the human observer, especially the film crew who endured such punishing conditions to document the story, it is impossible to witness such painful determination, such existential sacrifice, such abiding parenthood without attributing it in part to love.
Thus parenthood cannot simply be sacrifice; it must involve choice. The penguins do not give up. They muster on.
For Precious, whose mother and father choose nothing of parenthood perhaps because they know nothing of it, parenting her own children and her own child-self demands choosing to push, again and again.
For those among us this Mother’s Day who parent children young or grown, the parenting never stops. The challenges and rewards come not in equal measure and not as expected.
For those of us who parent in metaphorical ways, we too choose to keep marching, to keep pushing, to keep placing ourselves in the environs of vulnerability that dependably offer challenge and reward.
I grew up hearing my mother say, “Choice is not sacrifice.” I am coming to understand what that means. I still hold possible the ways choice can feel sacrificial; in fact, the penguins and many parents choose what amounts to sacrifice. If in the choosing there is love—there can be satisfaction.
In the incubating pouch of male and female emperor penguins, in the beating heart of a poem, in the interrupted stillness of the night, parenthood emerges as a choice to affirm and protect, nurture and relish the immense burden and preciousness of life. Amen.
