Emergence Unexpected, or What a Big Hairy Fly Taught Me About Unconditional Love
When I first kept a bright green chrysalis in a jar, what developed was not at all what I expected. I had grown up bringing caterpillars home and watching them eat (a lot) and poop (a lot), but ultimately I always had to release the caterpillars back into the trees or garden, probably because my mother was overwhelmed with how much frass they generated. I knew the story, of course: caterpillar hangs upside down, slowly turns into a chrysalis in which it completely transforms, emerging as an entirely different insect, one with beautiful scaly wings and long delicate antennae. I had certainly seen films of the process, and as a biology professor I taught about it in my classes. But it wasn’t until I was 47 years old and had a child of my own that I actually watched it happen.
On the day this story begins, I found a monarch butterfly caterpillar on a milkweed plant near the building where I worked. Thin stripes of black, yellow, and white banded its soft body, and two black, curved antennae stuck up from its head, bouncing as the mandibles moved back and forth, methodically chewing strips off the edge of the hole in the leaf. And for some reason, I decided it was time to pay attention. I also thought my 8-year-old, Leo, might get a kick out of watching the transformation.
So I got a big half-gallon jar from home, put a stick and a bunch of milkweed leaves inside, and placed the caterpillar on them. With a big nail and a hammer—whack!—my son enthusiastically punched holes in the lid for air, and screwed it on. We placed the whole thing on the kitchen table next to the dishes still lingering from lunch, so Leo and I could watch the drama unfold.
I watched as this caterpillar held on to the edge of a leaf with legs on either side, sideways mandibles reaching out and up along the edge of a leaf, then chomp-chomp-chomping down as far as the caterpillar could reach below its belly, then stretching out and up again and chewing off another layer, returning like a typewriter swinging back for a new line of text. Leo quickly decided he had seen it all and moved on to something else. This was not going to be much entertainment for this kid with a short attention span and a longing for fast, dramatic adventure; turns out, it was mostly for me.
For days, I stopped now and then to watch the caterpillar sometimes feeding, sometimes sitting still, growing daily. The freckles of little black frass accumulated in the bottom of the jar and so each day, I removed the caterpillar and stick, cleaned out the jar, tossed out the old leaves and brought in fresh ones. I wondered why it ate when it did, and more curiously, why it didn’t eat when it didn’t. Was it sleeping? Resting? Pondering the meaning of existence? Listening to the music of the cosmos?
And then, one day, I looked in and it was hanging upside down from the lid in a little J, head down and curled up just a bit, and very still. When I came back later, it wasn’t a caterpillar anymore, but a bright green chrysalis, with shiny golden dots around the upper rim. Tossed aside like an old coat, the flimsy wisp of an exoskeleton lay at the bottom of the jar under the upside-down comma of the chrysalis.
I couldn’t believe it was happening, this unimaginable change of form. No matter that I’d known this story for decades. No matter that ordinary kids watch this process in ordinary classrooms all over the country every year. No matter that I teach college students about incomplete and complete metamorphosis on a regular basis. I don’t think I had much confidence that it would really happen in my kitchen; it seemed too magical. But there it was, exactly as it should be.
I went about doing laundry, grading papers, shuffling my reluctant kid off to bed. The chrysalis hung there for days, still and seemingly dormant to my outsider eyes, though I knew that what was going on inside was anything but static: the caterpillar was dissolving into a soup of cells and reassembling into something utterly different.
Typically after eight or nine days, a monarch chrysalis should change from that Kermit-the-Frog green to a transparent shell through which you can see the black and orange patterns of the butterfly wings within. So when mine started turning a darker color, I got excited: this was it! But then, nothing happened, and when I looked carefully, it didn’t look right: there were no clean, clear stripes of orange inside, but instead just a dull, dark, cloudy charcoal gray. Days went by, and nothing came out.
And then, something did emerge: a big, hairy tachinid fly. Instead of the story I knew by heart, I got a story I didn’t know at all.
Tachinids are parasites of the monarch, laying their eggs on the caterpillars so that their larvae can live in the body of the caterpillar and then within the metamorphosis inside the chrysalis, feeding on it and turning that matter instead into fly rather than butterfly. Instead of a monarch, I released from my jar a big, hairy parasitic fly. It was the stuff of nightmares and horror movies, an alien monster coming out of the dream of something beautiful and delicate.
I had wanted to be a mother in part—maybe in large part—because my childhood was such a happy, peaceful, creative, lovely time. My mother speaks of my early childhood with a kind of bliss in her voice that matches my own memories of that time. We were deeply connected; I adored her, and she created for me a magical world in which to dwell, a world straight out of story books: of baking fragrant cookies, singing merry songs, playing with colorful toys, splashing in puddles in the rain, gathering acorns into buckets. Recently, she and I talked about what time in our lives we would go back to, if we were able to travel back and relive something. As it turns out, we both would choose that sweet, gentle time together.
I can’t go back in time, and so I wanted to relive that experience from the other side, to have a child of my own and be that kind of mother and create that kind of a world for us both. My life had been focused for so long on education and career-finding, and in my early thirties, I finally had settled into life as a professor at a small college in the mountains. I was ready to welcome a child into my life, but that road proved far more complicated and rocky than I was prepared for.
For a while, being a mother gave me the joy I had anticipated. I spent long days with Leo tucked in a sling on my chest, curled up napping against my belly in bed, waving arms and legs on the couch beside me while I worked. I made homemade baby food from organic produce, read piles of books to him as we laid on our backs by the fireplace, knitted sweaters from soft cotton. I sang to him about a ladybug picnic, danced with him to music from around the world, showed him the stars. I was so happy.
But somewhere along the line, my child came into himself and parenting became something I had not anticipated. This child, so deeply beloved and achingly embedded in my heart, has never been easy. Our life together has been one full of monsters: of strong wills pitted against one another, of anger, hurt, frustration, desperation. No one told me that I might have a child who would hurt me not only with words but with fists and teeth and strong, kicking legs. Who would throw things across the house at me that would break into a thousand shards of glass around my feet. Who would grab a knife and hold it against me when he didn’t get what he wanted. I never expected to have a child that I would learn to fear. I never expected to feel so desperate as a mother wanting to help my child feel okay inside and having absolutely no idea how.
The monarch butterfly I had put into my jar disappeared and left me with something unexpected and a little scary. As a scientist, I was still fascinated by the transformation, even though it didn’t have the expected ending. The fly in the jar sparked my curiosity, sent me learning about a parasite I hadn’t known, and reminded me that any resource in the biological world—even a toxic caterpillar—will have something else ready to exploit it, use it, harness it for its own growth, reproduction, and passing on of genes.
If I’m honest, though, I am not immune to aesthetic and emotional responses. This was not the beautiful, delicate, graceful insect I was hoping for. It was fascinating intellectually, and I could appreciate its clever strategy, its hairy dark complexity, its success and flourishing. But emotionally, I was taken aback, even bruised from the experience, much like I have been by parenting.
I scooped the fly into a petri dish and placed it, wiggling, under a dissecting microscope, and really looked at it, making myself face up to what biology had wrought. Looking carefully and with an open heart and mind, I appreciated the fly’s own grace. Its eyes were the rich deep color of mahogany, each glistening complex orb constructed of over seven hundred tiny lenses, all working together to give the fly a view of its world. The delicate wings were filmy like gossamer and bore a precise map of veins intersecting, bending, curving just so in ways unique to its species, and with ghosts of tinier veins running like rivulets across the membranes.
What seemed at first glance like a chaotic mess of bristles under the microscope fell into patterns: intricate hairs lined up just so along the edges of the body segments, along the ridges of the legs, paired atop the back, even running in tiny rows along the wing veins. And though from a distance the fly just looked black, up close I could see a sporty striping of gray along the thorax and an abdomen with a reddish ombre that fashion designers might covet.
As a conservation biologist, I have a deep belief in the intrinsic value of all life, even that which we find hard to instinctively love. That instinct runs thick through us, though; we recoil against something bristly and bug-eyed while our hearts reach out to those with soft fur and faces we recognize as cute and familiar.
To heal this world reeling from climate change, habitat loss, and environmental devastation, we have to work against that instinct, to look deeper and closer and recognize our kin in the flies, the worms, the molds and parasites and all those things we do not find easy to love. To heal my family, I have to work against the fear and pain and frustration, to hold tight to the profound sea of motherly love that is still there in my gut even when my child lashes out at me. I know him far more intimately than I do that fly: I know that there are threads of incredible generosity and vulnerability, of sweetness and compassion, of creativity and brilliance running through this child. I even understand that my child’s tenaciousness, strong will, and resistance with which I so often struggle will someday emerge as strengths that may help him through hard times or allow him to bring positive change to the world.
When faced with painful, angry reactions, I need to remember that microscopic view and somehow see the sweet beauty and miraculousness of this young person that I know underneath. All our lives depend on holding each other in love when it isn’t easy.
About the Author
Amy Boyd is an adoptive mama and a professor of botany, ecology, and evolutionary biology at Warren Wilson College. Scientist by training, educator by profession, and artist by nature, she lives in Swannanoa, North Carolina.
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