One Thing They Aren’t: Maternal Analysis

                One Thing They Aren’t: Maternal is an article by Natalie Angier about the different ways that animals take care of their young.  Angier’s article is challenging to decipher. The article’s original purpose seems to be something informative and fun at the same time, but it has an underlying theme to it. It starts by praising mothers, the article speaks of how great mothers are and the praise that they deserve, but from there she almost seems to refute her claims. She moves on to talk about the way in which so many other species of animals are not very motherly. For instance pandas are not as cute and cuddly as we might like to think; the majority of the time a panda mother gives birth to two babies and then only takes care of one using the other as a backup in case the favored child gets sick, damaged, or dies. Facts like these are very interesting and are useful tools that the author uses to keep her reader engaged, but why does the author contradict herself taking it the complete opposite direction from mothers are to be worshipped to they are awful creatures? The thing that we must pay attention to is this, the author never once mentions the human mother except in the first paragraph when she is praising them and while she still ends on the bad note of rabbit mothers who barely spend any time with their young it is still a significant occurrence. The author wants us to appreciate our own mothers because our mothers never left us in a dark nest to only see the light for two minutes every day and our mothers never pitted us against our siblings for a fight to the death. She wants to stress the importance of our own mothers by comparing them to truly terrible ones so that we know just how lucky we are to have the mothers that we do. Angier’s article is engaging and informative, but ultimately teaches us of the importance of our own mother and makes us see just how lucky we are.