My feet come right up off the floor as he spins me around.
He is eleven inches taller and outweighs me by ninety-seven pounds. Did my husband hear what I said? Is it even true? Can I take it back?Īnd then my husband is hugging me, not gently but commandingly, and you could even say triumphantly. Next I think about the way housekeeping is nothing more than a losing encounter with entropy. I start to think about mops and the way they never get anything truly clean. I notice the floor could use a good mopping. My husband is leaning on the counter with a beer in hand, and he’s been telling me about his day, in his usual upbeat tone, while punctuating his words with dazzling flashes of rational thinking. My stew is simmering on the stove and its vapors tint the air the color of dog-skin and I can barely see the truth of things. We’re in the kitchen in our Sacramento home when I tell my husband I’m pregnant.
It’s there when you sleep too much, and crawl too late, and when you bite when you aren’t supposed to bite, and shriek when you aren’t supposed to shriek and on the day that you are born-on the day when I first look down on your pinched-red, tiny-clawed, outraged little body lying naked and intubated in a box-I won’t have the slightest idea about who you are, or what I will become.īut there you will be, and you will be of me. It’s there when a first cell becomes two, four, eight. Your owlness is with you from the very beginning.
I, too, am astounded, because my owl-lover was a woman.Īs for you, owl-baby, let’s lay out the facts. You may wonder: How could such a thing come to pass between woman and owl? Two weeks later I learn that I’m pregnant. The next morning I see talon marks across my chest that trace the path of my owl-lover’s embrace.
I dream I’m making tender love with an owl. When she discovers that her husband is on an obsessive and increasingly dangerous quest to find a “cure” for their daughter, Tiny must decide whether Chouette should be raised to fit in or to be herself-and learn what it truly means to be a mother.Īrresting, darkly funny, and unsettling, Chouette is a brilliant exploration of ambition, sacrifice, perceptions of ability, and the ferocity of motherly love. Even in those times when Chouette’s behaviors grow violent and strange, Tiny’s loving commitment to her daughter is unwavering. Left on her own to care for a child who seems more predatory bird than baby, Tiny vows to raise Chouette to be her authentic self. When Chouette is born small and broken-winged, Tiny works around the clock to meet her daughter’s needs. “You think this baby is going to be like you, but it’s not like you at all,” she warns him. An exhilarating, provocative novel of motherhood in extremis
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