SYNDEY MORNING HERALD - The sight of that baby humpback whale nuzzling and sucking at the keel of a yacht, watched by a group of helpless adults, stirred up old deep and familiar anxieties that used to assail me when my children were babies. What if I had a car accident and couldn't feed them? What if someone stole them out of the stroller? What if, in other words, we were separated by some unforseen circumstance and I couldn't get to them and they were alone and hungry crying for me?
As I watched the news I became mother whale, and the baby whale desperate for his milk and his mother became my baby. Even writing about it now is making my stomach lurch.
How weird. It was only a baby whale after all, not a human baby. Maybe the whale calf was not distraught, puzzled and grief-stricken for his mother but just hungry. How do I know that this tragedy was not about a set of unavoidable circumstances but because his mother deliberately abandoned him for her own good reasons?
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