The Sheep by Calley Marotta
Part One
Each night, I teach my daughter to love me. I call our nightly play sessions, “special mommy time” –fifteen minutes when I say yes to my two-year-old, follow her lead, and narrate her movements aloud. It’s harder than it sounds. I walk behind her while she rummages through blocks. “You’re picking up the block” I say. “Now you’re putting it down.” I listen intently for the timer to ding and signal a small success, a small miracle. But, today, at the seven-minute mark, she screams the words I have been dreading to hear: “I want Daddy.” She grips his leg. Andrew untangles her, takes her hand, and calmly walks her back to me. She wears the effort on her face while I stand outside of myself and take in the scene. I feel sorry for that woman waiting on the floor. I want to hold her. But I also want to shake her and ask, “what is wrong with you?” As I come back into my body and see Cora’s expression, I feel a new desperation. I say a silent prayer: “stay, please stay.” When I sense she’s about to take off again, I let my body lead: I drop to my hands and knees, shake my tail, and release a loud “baaaaa.” I am no longer myself. I am a baby sheep. And no one is more surprised than me.
I am not a silly person. I am a realist who, even while dreaming, tells myself, “This is probably a dream.” A researcher and essayist by trade, I know better than to make an argument without evidence or stake claims without empirical data. Normally, I rely on data to analyze, sort, and control the messiness of human experience. I alchemize the mess into solid form so that I can hold it in my mouth, my hands. But, at this moment, my daughter’s rejection feels so absurd that becoming a baby sheep feels more real. It feels less absurd than pretending I know what to do. Dropping to my knees feels honest. I let out a loud, “baaaaa” and release my sorrow into the air. My head drops and I feel a sudden lightness. I feel, dare I say, more free. Then the strangest thing happens. I hear Cora’s feet stop suddenly, and she turns to face me. “Stay here, Sheepy,” she whispers and lovingly strokes my back. I am too shocked and grateful to question it. I lean into her weight and allow myself to be loved.
Part Two
Children’s games so often have an underlying current of danger. In 14th century Europe, to “play bo peep” was a form of public humiliation. The tortured put their heads and hands through a wooden board on a post where they would be exposed to public insult.1 But by the 16th century, Bo Peep was a children’s game of peek a boo. The fool warned King Lear it was not appropriate to engage in such folly. 2
I sit in an office filled with plastic bins while our therapist explains that Cora has an anxiety disorder marked by dysregulation and attachment strain. “Although this type of disorder often occurs when children have experienced trauma,” she explains, “sometimes it just happens.” I scan Cora’s body for evidence. I look for residue on her shoes, her shoulders, tangled in her hair. I retrace my steps: I sang to my stomach. I rubbed her foot through my skin. I wore a belt that played regular rhythms to comfort her. I refused medication. I breastfed with inverted nipples—one side so badly torn that I nursed and pumped simultaneously until the OB used glue to paste my nipple back together. (The glue did not hold, but I kept going.) I stayed with her for three months, writing tiny check marks next to bodily functions on a printed table. I loved her. The therapist goes on, “It is common for a child with anxiety to over-attach to one parent.” I hear her words and immediately grieve the obvious and unspoken. I am not the one. I am the other, the under-attached, the straining. I look up when she adds, “It’s harder for moms because they feel so guilty.” I nod and am silent for a moment—choked by my own endless capacity for humiliation.
I never doubted my child would love me. I trusted her love would form automatically. It would spontaneously emerge like the umbilical cord that connected our bodies. I never thought that her love would need to be earned—that she would not soften into my body. But now, listening to the therapist, my limbs feel stiff, and I realize that I don’t know what to do with my hands. They are sticky from sunscreen, broken pouches, and sweat. I grip them tightly in my lap and lean forward as I whisper the magical loophole: “When I act like a baby sheep…it’s like Cora sees me for the first time. It’s like she loves me.” Our therapist nods. I go on, “But is our sheep game okay? Is it, like, disturbing that Cora needs me to morph into a different creature to hug me?”
I don’t remember a time when Cora wasn’t over-attached to her father. Even at six months, she scrambled out of my arms to reach for him. She leaned into his neck, closed her eyes, and smiled in relief. On some level, that preference always made sense to me. He is a problem-solver and meticulous observer. These characteristics helped him with Cora, while I was shocked to find I couldn’t see and understand what Cora needed. When she turned one, Cora began to call both Andrew and me “mom.” I tried to laugh and appreciate their unique relationship. But I was clumsy and confused when Cora refused my warmth. I had absorbed a story over the course of my life: mothers know their child’s smell, their sound, even their thoughts; mothers rock away the pain. That story lives in my body. My veins, my limbs reach for it greedily, expectantly–so much so that I recoil when Ella pushes away my touch. The unknowable-ness of why makes me dizzy. I search frantically for reasons. Aren’t you also? Aren’t you parsing these words to find the blame, searching for my defect?
At two, Cora’s rejection was physical. My neck was too hot, my breath too sour. My body, which had grown her fingers and toes, was incapable of comforting her in the outside world. I began to wince every time she uttered the word “Dad” in its many variations. She yelled “Daaaaad” desperately–fearing he had ceased to exist outside of her gaze. She said it eagerly when she wanted to show him something: a crayon drawing, a toy truck, the socks she had pulled over her toes. We lived in “dad’s house,” slept in “dad’s room,” and drove “dad’s car.” But such exclusions didn’t keep me from loving her intensely. Like a love-struck teenager, I doodled her name in notebooks. I gazed upon her eyes, her nose, her toes with wonder. No matter how rejected, I still longed for my unrequited love.
Unrequited lovers turned to potions throughout history. They gathered nightshade, Spanish fly, lizard necks, flowers, mashed worms, sacramental bread, human hair, glandular excretions, skin and blood.3 They risked overdose or death. Addiction and love can light up similar sections of the brain. “…addicts going into withdrawal are not unlike love-struck people craving the company of someone they cannot see.” 4
My love made me desperate. As Cora refused me at the car seat, the kitchen table, the bedside, I faced both the devastation and the inconvenience. So I tried harder. I strained—to be funny, to be animated, to be calm–to be someone she wanted. I was begging. I threw blankets over my head and puppets on my hands. Still, she looked at me with disdain. She knew I was trying, desperately, to distract her from her feelings for me. Each wave of my hand and bounce of my knee screamed “remember, I’m fun, I’m safe, you love me, you love me, you love me.” I felt pathetic. But I couldn’t stop. I saw no alternative. I was her mother.
While I struggled to manage Cora’s attachment privately, I could not bear a public gaze. I found myself confessing to strangers in anticipation of their awkward glances. I fished for a reassuring story that never came. But I couldn’t complain to Andrew. We were both exhausted–him from being incessantly needed and me from not being needed at all. We found books and articles and blogs about over-attachment, but when my eyes scanned hungrily for the mention of fathers, they always came up empty. In many ways, I had assumed a role more typical of a father. I sat with dads on playground benches while Andrew chatted with mothers and caught Cora at the bottom of the slide. It would have been an interesting study, I thought, if it wasn’t happening to me. And when a grandmother kneeled to say, “Well isn’t he just wonderful with her?” I felt exposed, helpless, a dull sense of rage. I balked at the double standards. It was unnatural for a child not to want their mother. A chorus of voices shouted at me: something was terribly wrong. Or maybe no one said anything at all. Maybe no one noticed or cared. The chorus was inside me, their fingers pointing to another piece of data—evidence to make the case that was already clear—the thing that was wrong was me.
Researchers have found that even adopted children can form attachments to their new caregivers within seven to nine months. 5
I tried to accept my role in the background by fetching sippy cups and blankets and doing what I could to support my family. I became the supply manager–a knight whose armor was knit with apple slices, band-aids, baby Tylenols, and onesies. I used these objects as silent gestures of love. They allowed me to give Cora space while giving me something to do with my hands. I was relieved that this role kept me from standing awkwardly, looking on as Andrew parented; instead, I could rummage and gather and tend to her things. I scolded myself when I forgot the striped socks. I welcomed the heaviness on my back. The weight steadied me and gave me purpose.
This armor, however, could not protect me from daycare pickups. After a long day without my child, I stifled my impulse to reach for her. Cora’s eyes looked past and through me. Her vision fixed on Andrew and she ran into his arms. I stood there watching, hesitantly reaching out to touch her back. And on one particular day I arrived at daycare without Andrew. In my outer vision, I caught sight of tiny legs and arms around their mothers. My hands shook, but I told myself today might be different. It wasn’t. Cora saw me and screamed. She threw her body down, and kicked the floor, the doormat, my ankles. I took a step back and sank into the doorway. I scolded myself for not knowing what to do—for being incapable of soothing my own child. “You’ll be with daddy soon,” I heard Cora’s daycare provider say gently. I cradled my stomach where Cora’s foot once kicked. A human foot is made of 26 bones, more than 100 muscles, and 7,000 nerves. 6 It was on the doorstep then, thinking of her foot, that I heard her scream: “No Mommy.”
No one is really sure how people began counting sheep to sleep. The idea had already been a part of Islamic culture for centuries when shepherds counted their flock a final time before dozing. 7 To protect themselves from predators, sheep themselves only sleep four hours a day, and they can sleep standing up. 8
Cora was too young to count sheep when she stopped sleeping. All at once, she began waking four, five, six times a night. When she called out, it all happened quickly. I sat up, felt the floor, and ran into her room without thinking or planning for her predictable refusal. But surprisingly, when I kneeled on the shag carpeting, she didn’t refuse me. She asked me to rub her back. I pulled her blanket up to her chin. In the darkness, our movements were dull, soft. Our anxious thoughts melted beneath our bleary eyes. I did not need to strain. In these stolen moments, she let me love her. And so, I took on the sleepless nights. I was exhausted, but grateful for the opportunity to work off my shame—to do the caregiving tasks I craved, to contribute.
But any illusion I might have cradled in those midnight hours dissipated in the morning. The sun came harshly through the blinds, and I woke to the sound of “Daaaaaad!” Sometimes she stepped on me as she ran out the door. I watched her body move relentlessly from side to side—moving and moving but going nowhere. I, too, shifted my body frantically beside her and tried to will myself to sleep while she dozed. I waited for the inevitable morning—what I knew and feared the new day would bring. Grief began to steal my sleep.
No research taught me how to mourn my reality. For once, I didn’t even know what to look up. I could not even pinpoint what I was grieving: the love that did not appear, the child I did not have, or the mother I could not be. My daughter was right in front of me. I could still see the tiny hairs on her arms. I could still reach out to touch her. And yet I could not rock her. I could not hold her hand. I thought of my teacher in graduate school who, around a seminar table, said that a good theory immediately brings examples to mind. Remembering this made me feel sad. I knew of no other examples. As field notes, I carefully observed each time a child called for, reached for, held their mother. I calculated every way I deviated from the norm. I read with an eye to how I could be better, different. And still, I had no name for this kind of grief. I longed to wrap my lips around syllables, to pack the grief up neatly, practically, to fold and smooth the edges as a good mother would. But I was not that mother.
Part Three
The rhyme, “Mary had a Little Lamb” may be based in some truth. After raising a lamb in the 1800’s, Mary Elizabeth Sawyer, the young Mary from the rhyme, reported the sheep did indeed follow her to school and home again. 9
I follow. I practice quieting the chorus in my head. I practice paying attention. I revel in tiny gestures of affection—a grasp of my hand across the table or an invitation into a family embrace. I notice when Cora leans her weight into my body on the couch. Feeding myself to her in micro-doses, I teach her body to accept mine. She uses her words to tell me: “I’m getting used to you, Mom,” in awe of her own accomplishment. I still ache in my lower abdomen. I still cry that we need to work so hard—all of us. I still fantasize that, one day, Cora will move effortlessly between Andrew and my arms. But for now, I follow. I follow Cora’s lead and watch closely as she teaches me what she needs. I learn to be grateful—not that Cora is learning to love me, but that she is teaching me exactly how to love her. In a world where love so often goes unexplained, Cora’s gift is that she never learned to fake it.
Back in the room with plastic containers, I tell the therapist about our sheep game and her expression stays stable. She is not shocked or horrified. She says these games are relatively common for children with anxiety. “Children like to role-play and pretend they are taking care of small animals. It helps them gain a sense of control.” “Keep up the special play,” she says. Then—ever eager to mark progress—I ask, “How will I know if it’s getting better?” She pauses and looks up at me, “Maybe Ella will want to be a sheep one day too.
1 Salzman. English Industries of the Middle Ages. London: Constable & Co., Ltd. p.188, 1913.
2 Cameron, Lloyd. King Lear, William Shakespeare. Pascal Press. p. 49, 2001.
3 “Spanish Fly, Holy Bread, and Mashed Worms: History’s Weirdest Aphrodisiacs and Love Potions.” BBC History Extra, Immediate Media Company. https://www.historyextra.com/period/ancient-history/love-potions-aphrodisiacs-facts-spanish-fly/
4 Wu, Katherine. “Love Actually: The Science Behind Lust, Attraction, and Companionship.” The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Blog, Harvard University. Feb 14, 2017. https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/love-actually-science-behind-lust-attraction-companionship/
5 Raby, Lee K and Mary Dozier. “Attachment Across the Lifespan: Insights from Adoptive Families.” Curr Opin Psychol, vol. 25, February, 2019, pp.81–85. doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.03.011.
6 “Understanding Your Feel.” Midwest Orthopedic Specialty Hospital Blog. May 9, 2023. https://www.mymosh.com/orthopedics/foot-problems-caused-by-shoes/#:~:text=The%20human%20foot%20has%2026,stability%2C%20temperature%2C%20and%20slope.
7 Gibson, Brittany. “Here’s Why People Started Counting Sheep to Fall Asleep.” Reader’s Digest. Dec 7, 2017. https://www.rd.com/article/counting-sheep/
8 “Sheep Welfare.” RSPCA, 2023, https://www.rspca.org.uk/adviceandwelfare/farm/sheep
9 “Mary Had a Little Lamb—Yes There Was a Mary and She Did Have A Little Lamb.” New England Historical Society. https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/samuel-huntington-elected-presidentof-united-states/
Calley Marotta is a teacher, writer, mother, and friend living in Denver, Colorado. She teaches composition at the University of Denver. Her writing and research focus on the role of literacy and justice in service and care work. She thanks teachers, family, friends, and students who encourage her to write.
7 November 2024
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