Preface: On December 1, 1990– thirty-two years ago— I went into labor. My son was born the next day. There is a saying that women forget childbirth pain, otherwise no one would have more than one. I never forgot. I never had more. It was the worst day of my life, which is really saying something. My son very nearly died that day.
Because I live with breeding animals, I witness a lot of birth. As with my own story, it does not always go seamlessly. Below is an excerpt of the book I gave birth to this past summer. I warn you it is a rough read. But it is also very true to the life I lead now as a rancher. I’m still not sure if I want to release the whole book as it is so heavy and we already live in such heavy times. But at least I can share this.
ASS
Shortly after the leak about the imminent overturning of Roe v. Wade, one of my ranch guests went into labor. For forty-eight hours she suffered. That she was a mini-donkey made no matter to me. She was under my care, her welfare my responsibility.
I was in my tiny cabin as this most unblessed journey began. Looking out my window I saw her out by the big lean-to shed, and something seemed off about her. My eyes at first could not discern anything more than this. I went out to investigate. A clear sack, somewhere between a golf ball and a tennis ball, protruded from her sizable vagina. Until that moment, I’d never— not once in my life—thought, “One day I shall spend hours upon hours staring at a donkey vagina.” But life really is full of surprises.
As with more than a few of the animals I have rescued over the years, this animal arrived in a state of withheld information. A few days prior I’d gotten a call from a woman who knew that a) I own a ranch and b) I am the world’s biggest sucker. She poured out the story, she was far away, her herd of mini-donkeys had escaped. The sheriff grabbed them. Now they were in custody and needed a new home fast.
She needn’t have desperatized her situation. She had me at “mini-donkey.” I agreed immediately to take them all. And then, not for the first time, only upon leaving did she message to say that, oh, by the way, one is an intact male, partner to the elder Jenny and father to the rest. And also that donkeys don’t stop and think about genetic disasters before they fuck. They just run around raping any Jenny they can mount.
With this news, I learned that at least one and possibly two of the Jennys were knocked up prior to arrival. To be fair, this didn’t terribly upset me. I’d had two cows—one a longhorn— drop babies in the field before and then go on grazing. I knew it was possible for a large animal to deliver a forty pound hooved creature without my assistance. I looked forward to the forthcoming baby mini-donkeys, mini-minis.
This labor, though, was not easy or smooth. I alternated sitting on the ground in the mud and the hay and the shit, urging her on through night’s growing darkness, and going inside to research donkey midwifing. I wondered if my presence might be part of the problem—donkeys, it turns out, give birth at night in the shadows and have the ability to slow labor if they are worried. Had I worried her? Or had my soothing words gotten through?
I knew before I would admit to myself the foal had died inside of her. The cloud of flies blanketing that big vagina was proof I continued to ignore. My mind spirited away, and despite willing myself to be present for her, I began to spin out.
I watched her rest and writhe, rest and writhe. The nearest hospital willing to take her was 90 miles away. I didn’t bother. Because I have a loose rule around animals. The circle of life is real. We live. We die. I am not a fan of big interventions.
And besides, how was I going to lift a distressed, 150 pound mini donkey into the bed of my truck? Would a hard-laboring Jenny make it all that way? And if so, what would happen? A donkey c-section? At what cost?
To be fair, I do my best to apply this circle of life rule to myself. I am old now. I might see a doctor once every five years or so for a checkup. In my younger days, I had many surgeries—knee surgery, foot surgery, malignant tumor removal, hysterectomy, cataracts (always an overachiever, I managed to develop the cataracts of a seventy-year-old in my forties). If I experience pain enough to revisit a doctor, and if the doctor tells me I am dying quite soon, I like to think I would accept that verdict, go home, get things in order, and head on down the road.
It’s entirely possible, I know, that I would cry out, demand all interventions possible to keep me alive longer. Cry out for my life. I don’t think so, though. Which doesn’t exactly make letting the animals die when they are dying easy, but it makes it less worse, striving to not create a false hierarchy in which I deserve treatment and they do not.
I have the super power of dissociation, one of many bizarre traits connected to my PTSD. My mind/body connection is quite good at separating in emergencies without any effort on my part. But having the condition for eons, I also can flip the switch to Emotionally Off as needed. (At least with the animals, though I’ve been far less successful at this in the company of brutal men.) Emotion creeped in as I watched her thrash and rest, thrash and rest. I willed myself to stoicism, at least outwardly. She was panicked enough and needed no assistance in that department from me.
By now I’d googled enough to know that not only was she dying for certain, but the very thing killing her was the same condition that had nearly killed my son during his both. Dystocia is a condition in which the fetus/foal is too broad to pass the pelvis. My dissociation gave way now to time travel as I, against my will, found myself returning to the bedroom in that crack neighborhood in St. Louis where I labored for seventeen hours, sans drugs, only to be told by the midwife if I did not get my child out on the next push, he would either die or be severely brain damaged.
Not exactly the cheerful coaching one might hope for from a midwife, but needs must and her words worked. I got him out, no clue how. And while he was critically ill in NICU for nearly a week, he made it.
This, I knew, was not going to be the case for the little Jenny.
I heard a door slam and in my peripheral saw a truck. “Frank?!” I shouted to the ranch foreman, thinking he’d come by to check. Instead, Edgar called out. Edgar, one of brother ranch hands Frank had brought in, magnificent, kind, respectful young men.
Edgar took in the scene. Me, haggard and wild from being so close to death for so many hours. Me enraged at the government and its control over women’s bodies. Me watching this adolescent girl, raped by her father, dying as a result. None of this felt hyperbolic. As I mentioned, I don’t differentiate much between one sentient being and another.
I explained the situation—no traveling vet available to put her down. My sorrow at watching her suffer. My helplessness.
Edgar extracted his phone from his pocket and tapped a few buttons. His father, Mexican and the son of a rancher, appeared on a video call. They spoke softly in Spanish as Edgar scaled the horse panel keeping Jenny safe from the other animals. He stepped behind her and held the phone up to that vagina. His father examined the Jenny said something beyond my pathetically limited grasp of Spanish. Edgar thanked him and disconnected. Then he turned to me.
“There is no hope,” he said, sorrowfully.
I called Frank. “I need you. Bring your gun.”
I have guns. I shoot guns. I believe that if it really ever comes down to it, if I am truly the only available party, I will shoot a dying animal. So far I have not had to do this, for which I am grateful. In this moment though, my guns were stored away safely and I had no interest in doing the deed.
Jenny continued to thrash, now banging her head on the water trough, her wild eyes rolling back. Frank was thirty minutes out. This is when the adrenaline kicked in. I scaled the rusty iron panel like an agile 12 year-old gymnast, a feat for which my pulled muscles would pay for all of the following week. In the moment, I felt no pain, only blinding white determination.
I knelt down beside her and apologized. And then I clamped down on her nostrils and held on as best I could, the absence of oxygen panicking the donkey further, my will to end her misery only barely stronger than her ill-placed imperative to breathe. This might have lasted two seconds or twenty minutes. Surely somewhere in the middle. Again, the soft voice of Edgar, convincing me to stop.
A bullet would be better.
It is rare for me to take advice, at least in the moment it is being doled out. I am as defiant as a dying donkey and I am aware of this. If the advice giver is male, then I am definitely not interested in listening. So for Edgar’s words to penetrate me so clearly and deeply and immediately was a strange sensation. Shakily, I climbed back over the fence panel and retreated to my cabin, waiting for Frank to finish what I could not.
By the time he arrived, she was gone. I like to think my actions somehow slowed her respiration down enough to let her slip away without the assistance of being pierced in the brain, one final trauma before going.
They carried her in the front loader of the John Deere far back to the edge of the horse pasture, nourishment for the vultures who thrive in these parts. I imagined them leaving two perfect skeletons, like Russian nesting dolls, one tiny skeleton still curled up inside the other.
Nature doesn’t work like that though. The vultures care nothing for the visual poetry I create to console myself. They made short work of the dead mother and everything inside, scattering bones and bits of fur wide across the back pasture.
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Y’all, there’s a LOT going on at the ranch. You can camp out here. You can enjoy the Tiny Chapel of Kindness. In fact on Saturday December 3, 2022 I am hosting an open house. Please come and leave a note about a kindness you have experienced. There’s a cool natural dyeing workshop in mid-January and a free grief writing workshop late in January. Info is at TinyTRanch.com Also, on January 10, 2023 I am putting on a little birthday show at the Hyde Park Theatre called: Shitville and Other Shit Shows, featuring a number of my Dick Monologues cast mates. I’m releasing the tickets tomorrow morning. The only way to get one is to stay tuned to my IG page @spike.gillespie. They will sell out fast. Thanks for reading.
PS Please invite your friends to subscribe if you like this substack. If you are not a paying subscriber, I hope you’ll consider it. No pressure. But I do have a shit ton of animals to feed and all donations go toward keeping everyone fed and keeping the lights on. Thanks.