This was originally written on May 21, 2021.
“I’m becoming a farmer, Tom.” This was how I began the session. It was intentionally vague, I wanted to be provocative. “We bought some chicks yesterday.” I needed to say more, of course.
Two nights before, my daughter had fallen on her face and broken her nose. It was gruesome but hardly life-threatening; it looked much worse than it actually was. In any case, my mother came by the next evening to see and check in on her. When she got to our house she noticed the chickens, who live in the garage, and said to me, “don’t become a republican.”
It was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, a light ribbing that I’m used to. All of my immediate family pokes fun at one another, probably not an uncommon feature in families. But the joke rubbed me the wrong way. What I said to Tom was, “I knew it was a joke, but it got at something important. I’ve always thought of myself as a pretty far-left guy, and over the last several months that’s been changing. I haven’t swung so far as to be a republican now, but I’m less ‘fully automated luxury communism’ than I was before. So her joke obviously got at something. If that identity wasn’t in question then the joke would’ve rolled off my back, no harm no foul. But it bugged me a little because it got at this political question.”
“So it’s a question of your being.” We got into a little talk about the imaginary — identity being a largely imaginary construct — and its fickle nature, the way it ebbs and flows.
Another crucial part of my identity has been this aspect of being something of a “mama’s boy.” I’ll drop just about anything, or go to extreme lengths, if my mother requests to see me or my daughter. She’s a teacher, so when her school year ended I started bringing my daughter there some mornings while I worked, for example. At first blush it seems trivial, but my mother lives very close to the city while I live out in the rural suburbs, so to take my daughter there and then get back to work made for about a two hour commute, and I would have to do that twice.
So how did we end up with chickens? I’ve been fond of birds for a very long time. I used to keep parakeets but I ended up letting them go. So over the last year I’ve been working my wife over on the idea of getting a bird again. We happened to be at a store that sells baby chicks, and when my wife sees baby animals she melts. Knowing my fondness for birds and being in a state of gushing over the babies, she offered to let me get some, and I jumped on it.
We’re jumping all over the place here, but this will begin to tie things together: Tom said to me, “it was a question of who will be the woman in your life.” He was right; I hadn’t consciously been thinking about my mother’s interpretation of owning chickens, but if I had been asked I probably would have said that she’d find it odd. And to please myself (by owning chickens) and my wife, I would have to “harm” her in some way, an act anathema to my ideal of being a mama’s boy. “You already said it,” Tom told me, “no harm, no fowl.”
How do you begin to extract yourself from these long-held investments in people very close to you? Well this is part of the work: examining the investments, turning them over, working through them, speaking them, even if it means dragging yourself through some mud. No harm, no fowl.