Ay ay Mama
by Stephanie French

After my first child died unexpectedly in Namibia when she was 17 days old, it took me over a year to be ready to try to conceive again. I was living in Angola and saw danger in every room of the house, on every road and in every car, mosquito and especially in every ill-equipped emergency room. Somehow, eventually, I clawed my way back to a state where I felt confident enough to take a chance on life again.

My first ovulation after getting to this point coincided with a vacation in Brazil. My boss had selected me to do a short assignment in South America. On paper I fit the role–I spoke Spanish and Portuguese, and my job in Angola was not as demanding as that of my peers in neighboring southern African countries, who were managing budgets twenty times the size of mine. I still suspect that she gave me the gig at least a bit out of pity–or if not pity out of a manager’s sense that a struggling supervisee needed something exciting to regain some motivation. She wasn’t wrong. Getting to go to La Paz, Lima, Quito, Colombia, and Brazil? That will make me like work again.

My partner decided I did not get to have all the fun alone and took two weeks off work to join me for vacation after my assignment finished. We chose to meet in Brazil–since he spoke Portuguese and there were direct flights from Luanda. And because it’s Brazil. There, we got along like we had in the days before grief had overshadowed our every interaction. In Brazil, not only did sadness mostly stay away, happiness came for an extended stay. I was not watching myself trying very hard to be happy; I actually was happy.

Let’s be honest, one would have to work hard not to be happy while on vacation in Brazil. Freshwater snorkeling, watching macaws nest at sunset, driving over tiny bridges in the Pantanal while pointing at giant rodents and small crocodiles, drinking bad beer at Copacabana and Ipanema. Cristo Rei, Pão de Açucar. Eating rodizio and feijoada and drinking caipirinhas and caipivodkas near the water’s edge at sunset, learning quickly to ask for pouco açucar. What are you going to argue about—if you prefer your cocktail with cachaça or vodka?

We capped the trip off with a five-day kayaking trip in the Amazon. For a Namibian desert dweller, the sheer amount of water in the Amazon is a marvel bordering on the incomprehensible. My partner kept whispering, “so much water,” over and over again. Our guide was not an Indigenous Brazilian, or even Brazilian. He was a young guy from Guyana. Our secondary security—who stayed a discreet distance behind us in a motorboat to give us the illusion that we were actual adventurers—were Brazilian.

With our guide, we navigated mangroves and had barbecues on remote riverbanks. We spotted pink dolphins and dove off our kayaks to cool off, joking nervously about piranhas and jacaré attacks. Our guide took us deeper into the mangroves than he had ever been. Our last day, he showed us what is still the most spectacular thing I have ever seen. We came to a riverbank and he pointed up in a tree. We stared at the tree with binoculars, lowered the binoculars, squinted, looked at each other, shrugged, looked through the binoculars again. We only saw a tree. Our guide sat smiling, waiting patiently.

Finally, we saw it. There were two birds–a mother with her small chick nestled in front of her. They were potoo birds. Potoos are nocturnal insect hunters; our guide only found this pair the week before with a flashlight, when he was looking for jacarés, and his beam caught the mother’s eyes. Lucky for us, potoos perch in the same place day after day. They also lay one single egg in the hollowed top of a broken branch, which serves as a nest that is difficult for predators—think snakes and raptors—to detect. If you have never heard of potoo birds, I highly recommend checking out David Attenborough’s youtube video on them. Sir David, the always-reliable wielder of suspense, captures the magic I felt in that moment.

Potoo feathers match the bark of the tree and when they sense danger, like in the form of falcons or monkeys or curious tourists from Africa, they close their eyes and point their beaks up, so that they are mistaken for a broken branch. For the twenty near-silent minutes we watched them, they remained perfectly still, the tiny chick striking a pose identical to its mother’s. I marveled at how such a small baby learns that her life depends on not moving a muscle. And that her mother had managed to teach her so effectively. Her ability to physically protect her baby is limited, but she could teach her to protect herself. I recognize that chances are that the baby potoo has learned to freeze not just through teaching, but also through instinct, similar to the way birds learn to fly. And I have no clue if the baby bird understands what is at stake. I don’t know at what age baby birds develop fear. But I do know that birds feel fear, so I empathize with that mother bird and take no shame in my anthropomorphism.

As is often the case with rarely-spotted animals, potoos are birds of legends. The common potoo, which is the one we saw, has a call that sounds like “ayay mama.” The story of the potoo is like that of Hansel and Gretel–two small children who were abandoned in the forest; perhaps because their parents were too poor to care for them; perhaps because an evil stepmother did not want them. I prefer the evil stepmother version. In both, the forest hears them crying (In hunger? Sadness? Both?) and she takes pity on them and turns them into birds—presumably because as birds they can more easily care for and defend themselves. Yet their call remains, either looking for, or perhaps forever tormenting, the mother who abandoned them.

I did not learn about the legend of the potoo until years later, and for that I am glad. Had our guide told us, I likely would have crumbled right there in the river and had to be dragged in my kayak back to our camp. I am grateful that he allowed it not to be about failed motherhood but merely a moment of intimacy among three people in boats.

On our last day, we went back to Manaus, so that we could catch our early flight to São Paulo the next day. We took our guide out for dinner and drinks; he invited us to join him at a club. I could tell my partner really wanted to go. Partying in Brazil—it’s the stuff of legend. I also knew that I was ovulating and that we should have sex that night. Could we go out for just a little bit and get back in time to have sex? I doubted it, but we went out anyway. The order of events is blurry. Maybe we went to one club and it was dead, so we went to another. We got back to our hotel very drunk and only a few hours before our flight, in no condition to have sex.

Somehow, we crashed for a bit and woke up in time to catch our flight. We slept on the plane then drank some coffee. We had a few hours in São Paulo so we booked a day room and had sex. It was not my first time in a room booked by the hour, but it was by far the most respectable one I had been in, and it was the first (but not the last) time I would do it for conception purposes. Though hungover, we laughed and kissed and hugged and hoped for a baby. He got on his flight for Luanda, I went to my guest house in São Paulo close to where I would meet my colleague the next day and fly to Piaui for my last work trip.

Two weeks later, I got my period. Yet, I was not discouraged. Like the potoo, the rainforest had heard us too. Rather than turning us into something that would either freeze or cry for eternity, though, she guided us back to our path, wonder and laughter restored.

~

Stephanie French is a humanitarian aid worker who has lived in various African countries for the past 20 years. She’s writing a memoir exploring how growing up in a funeral home in Iowa shaped her approach to grief and death, including the death of her first child. Her work has been featured in The Keepthings, Hearth and Coffin, The Deadlands, and Months To Years.

Featured image: Common Potoo in Pichincha, Ecuador. Dan Henise, 2015.

Author’s note: This piece is an adaptation of a chapter in my memoir manuscript. As I grieved the death of my daughter, I found a sense of life in Brazil that I had doubted I would ever feel again. The awe I felt in the presence of two tiny potoo birds surrounded by the expanse of the Amazon basin still marks me 13 years later. To learn, upon my return home, that those birds are the source of a haunting legend of grief themselves, stands in contrast to the stoic strength and resilience I witnessed that day.