Arts Every Baby Animal Needs a Mother
This article by Natalie Angier (author of that book Woman: An Intimate Geography—you know, the one with the stupid line drawing of thighs on the cover) is about cannibal mommas; and callous, twin-bearing, one-child-raising panda mommas; and momma birds that stand by while one chick pecks the other to death. Ah, Mother Nature.
I often wonder if there might not be a deep-seated sense of sibling culling fear in the anxieties that build up around sibling rivalry. The culture we live in would have us believe that nothing could be further from a mother's mind, but perhaps at a deep level, they really want to kill us, mother's that is.
Maybe good ol' oedipal daddy is really mommy as killer/culler, and Freud was just too much the chauvanist to realize that fathers don't enter into the picture. Maybe all that anxiety over being culled causes us to cathect said anxiety on dear ol' dad cause mommy dearest would never do that to us.