Alice & Motherhood

Ok guys I accidentally accidentally finished the book, but I have lots to talk about so I can make this last until y'all are done. So today I'll talk about Alice and the sad things she says about motherhood. No spoilers but looking back on these excerpts knowing what I know now, it all makes sense. So maybe putting this together will make it obvious. 

• "Second, the devastating; A female elephant whose baby wasn't a baby anymore by any means still returned with a fury when he was in distress. Once a mother, always a mother" (118).
• "In the wild, a mother and daughter stay together until one of them dies" (188). 
• "If you are a mother, you must have someone to take care of. If that someone is taken from you, whether it is a newborn or an individual old enough to have offspring of its own, can you still call yourself a mother? . . . Staring at Kagiso, I realized that she hadn't just lost her calf She had lost herself" (199). 

These are just a few examples because after a certain point in the book I stopped taking down page numbers and just read and was sad, but you guys can see the theme starting to build. Alice ties her identity as a mother to Jenna, and we can see after she is born how much she means to Alice. Alice calls herself a bad mother, thinks that she is not there for Jenna when she follows Maura around for days, which is true, but she doesn't giver herself enough credit. Everyone at the sanctuary, with their messed up relationships to each other and craziness takes care of Jenna for a while, which they call allomothering in elephant herds. In elephant herds, all the females will take care of an infant, but the strongest bond is between the birth mother and her child. The same is true with Jenna and Alice. Even though Alice is often busy and delegates childcare, she cares more about Jenna then everyone else and vice versa. Both of their identities and thoughts are tied to each other so tightly its a little spooky.