“…roosters can be mean…I couldn’t resist keeping him because he was so good-looking, but then he started attacking the chickens, the cats, and me,”

Last week I wrote about some differences that I believe Lucy Ellmann was highlighting between the lioness and our narrator. This week’s reading, however, pulls some strong parallels between the two mothers. These similarities are particularly apparent this week because the interlude concerning the lioness immediately follows the narrator’s trip to the grocery store with her kids. Both mothers set about finding food for their offspring; both find it a struggle because a lot is needed to nourish their respective broods, and moreover, both mothers face threats from predatory males during their quests for food.

The lioness discovers the scent of her cubs’ father and decides to move them to another den three miles away for safety. While the narrator must maneuver her children out of the seemingly innocuous grocery store against a set of unexpected barriers. First, Ben gets stuck in the midst of a gaggle of noisy mothers with kids in strollers, “chattering away,” not noticing that “they’d kidnapped my son…they were just gabbing away while my son was getting crushed, by them and their stuff,” until Ben is finally able to “squeeze out of his mom prison by himself.”

Less “tongue in cheek” is another obstacle that stands in the way of the narrator in her effort to shepherd the kids and food back home. At the grocery exit the narrator sees a girl, about Stacey’s age, who is too frightened to leave the store because a big snarly dog and its big snarly owner, wearing a MAGA cap, is standing just outside the exit. Our narrator goes up to him and asks if he could move aside so that the frightened girl can feel safe enough to leave the store.

“…that seemed to make him mad…he rounded on me and said “Go jump in a lake,”

These incidents of the two mothers highlight Ellmann’s theme of male predation, a topic that comes up time and again in thinking about the prevalence of gun violence perpetrated by men and incidence of domestic violence. It even finds purchase in the narrator’s thoughts about her beloved chickens:

“…roosters can be mean, the fact that if it wasn’t so hard to sex chicks, nobody would keep the roosters, the fact that Nebuchadnezzar was an accident, and then I couldn’t resist keeping him because he was so good-looking, but then he started attacking the chickens, the cats, and me, the fact that six months with a rooster is my record,”

The narrator generally finds adult males, other than Leo, threatening. As does the lioness, who, “had no desire to meet male lions in the woods now; if anything, she feared them. Her life was constrained by this new intimacy with her cubs.”

What does it do to the narrator’s psyche to maneuver her family through this predation, a United States where notions of humanity, kindness, and charity, are given such little consideration? That survival means a mother must resort to the law of the jungle?