Essay: If God Gives a Bunny

Author: Arina Boyko, Northern Arizona University

We were standing outside Taco Bell under powder-light Christmas snow––me and Valya––waiting for the third from our pack to come back. Someone came out of the glass doors and Valya pulled her leash to come as close to the person holding a purple bag as she could. She was aiming to sniff and she succeeded. I called her in my dog voice but she didn’t react. Those people said she was a cute puppy; they said she had pretty blue eyes. They said go back to your mommy. I pulled the leash slightly, she turned her head to me letting them go.
            I saw a reel on Instagram the other day––a woman in a robe rocking a corgi in her arms with the voiceover: “I don’t care what you say, my dog is my child, I literally gave birth to him.” I couldn't relate to that. For me, motherhood was a dark matter, pregnancy––a fear. The dog, in the beginning, was the opposite of that. But I pressed the heart button under the  story of my friend who shared it.
            A picture, this time from Twitter: my parents at the age 29 “Let’s have a baby” vs. me at the age 29 “I think I will get a cat”. It’s known that millennials can barely afford their own rent and food, let alone a family. The cat becomes a substitute for a child, a parenthood compromise for the unlucky generation, whose career and financial emergence fell on the years of global economic crisis. 
            In her book Reproductive Justice: An Introduction Loretta J. Ross writes:  “Historically, questions about ‘legitimate’ motherhood have begun with challenges regarding fitness: which persons, which women do politicians and ordinary people define as fit to be mothers?”[1]. At first glance, there is no other person that fits better than me ––white, young, female-presenting, and always carrying a first aid kit in her purse. Still, I didn’t register that those people at Taco Bell were referring to me.     
            There is a saying in Russian: if God gives a bunny, it will give a lawn. Bunny being a symbol of fertility, a lawn – of prosperity. In Russian, unlike in my poor English translation, it rhymes: Dal boh zaiku, dast i luzhaiku. Repeat it until you believe it. Like a spell.
                                                                        –
            Before we got Valya, I spent weeks learning her language through books, YouTube videos, TikToks, and my friends, a lesbian couple, who have been living with a dog, a cat, and a child.
            In the picture on the adoption site––a Tinder for rescue pets––Valya’s tongue sticks out of her mouth––a sign of over-excitement––and her whole black-and-white figure is blurry.
            “This dog is going to be trouble. Look at her, she can’t even sit still for a second,” I said to my then-girlfriend, who picked her on dog’s Tinder.
             In Putin's speech from September 30 of 2022, he mentioned that in western countries they don’t use “mother” and “father” categories in the personal documents anymore. Instead, they put “parent-1” and “parent-2”. “Do we want the same to happen here, in Russia? Did they lose their minds?”[2]
            I love how Valya turns her head when I talk to her in my dog voice. I know that she doesn’t understand what I am saying, she just recognizes familiar sounds. She is not very vocal, but sometimes she barks in her sleep or yodels when she stretches. If I yodel back at her, her tail starts wagging and she runs to me. I wonder what I am saying.
            The Ombudswoman of the Republic of Tatarstan suggested banning outdoor advertisements for pet shelters, stating that “people from the younger generation tend to get dogs instead of having children.”
            On a zoom call with the lesbian couple, my friend tells me that her girlfriend’s son’s recent hobby is journaling. He has different sections in his journal like “Curse Words” and “Black List”. Once she accidentally read the latter, where among his enemies from school and video game villains she saw the word “Mom” written twice. Later, she asked him about that. He replied that Mom number 1 is her girlfriend, and Mom number 2 is her.
            “We are Putin's nightmare,” she adds, peeling a grapefruit on my phone’s screen.
                                                                        –
            When I was a sophomore, my friend from high school got married and had a baby. The marriage was awful, but the baby was beautiful. The husband disappeared during the fifth month of the pregnancy, leaving my friend with no money but his last name. My mother asked about the friend periodically, her voice sounded more judgy than genuinely worried.
            I didn't have sex until I was eighteen. Even though the desire was turning my cheeks red as I was laying on my first boyfriend’s bed, watching the bubbles screensaver animation on the convex computer screen, with his hand in my pants. Even though it was, of course, a “cool” thing to do. I knew better than to risk it all. What if they won’t allow me to have an abortion without my parent’s permission since I’m underage? In the country where pregnant people requesting an abortion are sent home by a doctor to think about it for a second time (“week of silence”)––a restriction like this seems possible. Later I read Annie Ernaux's novel Happening where she describes her accidental pregnancy at twenty three and the threat of keeping a child as a social and class failure: “Yet neither my baccalauréat nor my B.A. in liberal arts had waived that inescapable fatality of the working-class–– the legacy of poverty ––embodied by both the pregnant girl and the alcoholic.”[3] Finally, the right words to describe my fear.

At the same age––eighteen––I bought my first Plan B. This, already, felt like a menace. I learned about the pill from the Internet. It said you need to take it no later than seventy two hours after the intercourse. There was no time to rehearse how I will ask for it at the pharmacy. I just stopped by it on the way home after my classes. I got lucky. There were no other customers there, only two pharmacists, both women. They didn’t ask questions, just told me to read the instructions carefully.
            Years later, post-Covid, in another Moscow pharmacy I saw a non-white young man in front of the plastic check out screen asking for the pill. I was eyeing the vitamin aisle, which because of the cost of what’s inside was kept closest to the register.
            “Are you aware of the side effects?” A woman pharmacist asks in the voice of a mother who is convinced she is always right. The man is unsure, mumbling something about reading about the pill online.
            “It can cause severe damage to a woman’s body. Do you know that?” The pharmacist persists.
             He pauses, then replies that the girl asked him to get it for her.
            “I am not selling you that because you don’t have a prescription and because it's practically a murder.” The pharmacist raises her voice, almost yelling.
             I wanted to come up to the register and start yelling back at her. I wanted to grab the man by the sleeve of his coat and tell him to not listen to her, tell him the addresses of other local pharmacies, whose stuff might be more professional.
             Instead I watched the man leave and stepped towards the plastic-protected counter to pay for my vitamins. When I googled if that’s true about the prescription: the pill’s official website states that it’s available over-the-counter, while the pharmacy’s website says “prescription only”.

At eighteen I came home to my then-boyfriend with my newly acquired Plan B pill. He was sitting on my bed with his laptop, where he had been all day. I was renting a room at the apartment on the first floor. He came to Moscow from abroad – his family emigrated several years before our Internet meeting, and the following love affair. We met every two months, taking turns visiting each other. The visa that he managed to get me through his older relatives got me accustomed to cheap flights with inconvenient layovers, and I preferred those flights to the feeling of having to entertain him here and worrying about disturbing my roomate, also an undergrad student, with his presence.

“I bought something,” I told him as I threw the package at him.

“Do you think you need it?” he asked, taking a look at it lasting no longer than a second.

“I will take it just in case,” I replied and we forever changed the topic of conversation.
                                                                        –
            Valya’s favorite game is a game of nibbling. Every day she wakes up and chooses violence. She clenches the blanket between her teeth, pricks her ears, and looks me in the eyes––get me, she says. I accept the challenge by looking back at her and slapping the blanket as if it is a silent drum. She hunts for my hand but catches the fabric of my shirt instead. I mimic her language until she forgets herself and starts closing her jaw too tight, too close to my skin. The next day I found yellow bruises from her teeth on my arms. Like all the love bites I ever got from my lovers––I don’t want these ones to fade. 
            I blame other people for things they are only semi-responsible for all the time. The last time I failed my driving test I blamed it on the pedestrians who were crossing the road in both directions. They will never realize their faults, I will never actually accuse them. That’s how I have been dealing with guilt before Valya––I led it to a dead end. But I can never blame the dog for anything, instead, I turn it on myself. I should have known better, I say to myself until I believe it. “This is what motherhood feels like to me,”  I tell my therapist.
                                                                        –
             I didn’t know that men have tokophobia too until I met my writer ex. It was at orientation a few days before the beginning of my graduate program. I felt a desire for him before we even talked. He was considered one of the “talented” in the cohort: was already published in major literary journals––almost too cool for school. He moved to Moscow from another big city five hours away by train; didn’t study writing or literature before, but was well-read and had a certain intellectual imprint on his pale face.
            We started dating. Every time I reported that I got my period it was like a national holiday. Having someone that gets your anxieties and doesn’t skimp on fancy condoms felt liberating at first. But after a while I started to think: no, it’s not. For him, it’s like making a bet with another envelope full of cash under his pillow, and for me it was going for broke.
              In the last semester of the program, when we were still together, I got a job at a children’s press. My work was to write Instagram posts about books that had very few words. I constantly needed to come up with new adjectives to describe those books. Amazing, cute, fun. I could never fully immerse myself in the fairy tale narratives I had to digest every day. Instead I dived into the world of mom’s Instagram blogs.
            I could look through the pages of women making content out of their babies for hours. After all––it was technically a part of my job too: to check what people write about our books online, like their posts, if they liked our books and reply to them, preferably with emojis. They wrote about their toddlers’ books, habits, food, and clothes. They reclaimed their motherhood as a turning point by putting the names and the dates of birth of their children on their Instagram bios. I scrolled their profiles years down: was there a life before that? Did they have a lawn prior to having a bunny?
            I was jealous. Especially to the ones who were my age. I wanted what they had: a reliable partner, financial stability and the guts to go through labor. And yet I was scared of it now more than ever in my life: a child is something so non-precarious it carried a threat to the very nature of my living.           
            I considered pranking my writer boyfriend by sending him a picture of a positive pregnancy test that I would download from the Internet. I imagined the horrified look in his eyes, the three dots on the corner of the screen, him typing a reply:
            “What do you want to do with it?”
            Or maybe:
            “Are you sure it’s not false?”
            I would laugh at my own joke, holding an ace up my sleeve. If you pull a dog’s leash too hard, the dog pulls away even more. I am the same way.
                                                                        –
            Early in the new year I woke up in tears: Valya’s mom number 2 is going out of town for the weekend. Even though the trip was planned in advance, I felt abandoned. My crying is non-human, hysterical. I learned to cry like this in the past year after the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. While my closest friends fled the country with suitcases packed in a rush, my then-girlfriend, an American citizen, felt more foreign to me than ever: she didn’t want to leave, succumbing to an illusion of everything around us staying the same, unbothered in her privilege.
            Every time I hear the words “queer liberation” I think about having sex with her. Careless. Free from the fear of getting pregnant. Where has it been for this whole time? Despite other kinds of non-physical pain those relationships brought with themselves, I felt like the only right thing to do was to keep them going. It doesn’t matter how much tears it will cost me: tears might be the only currency in which I am rich.
            At the beginning of our relationship, she came over every other day to stay the night at my place. My full-sized bed that took up half of the room I rented out at that time fit two people tightly, but that was exactly what both of us needed (me––after the lonely lockdown; her––after the loss of a family member). When it was time for her to go, we would stand on the doormat for hours, chatting about nothing, unable to say goodbye. Once the topic of children was brought up: who between us should give birth to our future children? I volunteered, arguing that I suited that role better. That upset her and I tried to make amends by saying that it’s only because I can potentially survive without coffee and I didn’t have a chain smoking era. The truth was: I wanted those children to be fully mine.
            In these relationships I grew resentful of the lives of other couples I saw on Instagram. It didn’t matter if they were straight or queer. I felt the need to constantly compare myself and her to the people, friends and strangers, whose pictures were reverberating on my phone screen, unknowingly engaging me in the competition: are you as happy as we are? At first, I felt embarrassed about taking pictures of the mundane things we shared together––be it reading before bed or having a charcuterie board for dinner, but I still did it sneakily. The dog gave me permission to take as many pictures of our life as I wanted. Still sometimes she would ask me when she saw me holding my phone like a camera: “What are you doing?”
             In the novel Wound by Oksana Vasyakina, I read that a woman is not just a body, she is also a space around her. Therefore, the mother's body is also a house. Vasyakina writes about her mother who got sick with cancer and how the apartment started to decline with her.  
            Since we broke up the apartment where we lived has been acting out of control: the sink in the bathroom is clogged, the dishes return from the washer dirtier than they were before, and the only wool blanket is eaten on the edges. We continued to live together for three more months.
                                                                        –
            In May of 2023 the Russian Ministry of Public Health announced the recommendation for the  pre-abortion medical consulting. Among those recommendations there are certain “speech modules”––phrases that are recommended for doctors to say to pregnant women, who are seeking an abortion.
            The phrases vary depending on the age of a woman––to a woman younger than 18 doctors are supposed to say: “The career can wait, but it’s better to give birth in young age” while to a woman who already has children they tell that “kids won’t necessarily distract you from housework, they will be busy playing with each other”[4] .
            This is what doctors are recommended to say about the abortion and its aftermath: “Every termination of pregnancy is harmful to health and carries risks of complication development. Abortion is a common reason for future infertility.”[5]
            Ross writes: “...mothering becomes an act of survival, a life-affirming radical resistance to forces that deny our humanity, our interdependence, and even our existence. Radical mothers withstand oppression to create spaces for life that offer a compelling vision of the future.”[6]
            Even though I literally gave birth to Valya, I was told that I can’t offer her a compelling vision of her dog's future. I was told keeping her is a bad idea. I am not a permanent resident in the U.S. and taking the dog on a plane is an unnecessary risk. 
            “Are you comfortable with the thought of her dying on the plane?” my ex asked during one of the multiple, soul-sucking conversations about Valya’s future. The dog is walking around, sniffing the carpet floor of the living room for the thousandth time in her life. She knows the smell of the tears and two people fighting, she knows that if the bedroom door is shut she has to lay outside the door on her mat and wait.
            I started fantasizing the scene: Valya in the middle of the room with the two of us standing in the opposite corners of the room, and letting her choose one of us. She runs towards me, I come to my knees to pet her, crying happy tears and we stay together forever. In reality, I still have dreams in which a newborn, or multiple toddlers are taken from me. In those dreams I don’t fight back––I watch that happening until I wake up alone on a cheap memory foam mattress.
            During Valya’s first week in the house, my ex and her accompanied me on my walk to class. Our route included the pine woods where we walked Valya every day. When we reached the end of the trail I continued towards the road and the two of them stayed on the edge of the woods, Valya sniffing grass. I hoped to sneak away unnoticed to her, but a few steps later I turned around to see Valya staring at me, frozen, refusing to go back. I smiled to myself and sped up. To make a dog move or follow you, you have to release the dog’s leash.
This is what motherhood feels like, too.

[1] Ross, L. (2017). Reproductive Justice: An Introduction by Loretta Ross, University of California Press, 171 p.

[2]“Разве мы хотим, чтобы у нас здесь, в нашей стране, в России, вместо "мамы" и "папы" был "родитель номер 1, номер 2, номер 3"? Совсем спятили уже?” – TASS. Putin: It’s unacceptable for Russia that children are imposed perversity. September 30, 2022:

 https://tass.ru/politika/15921455

[3] Ernaux, Annie (2000). Happening; translated from French by Tanya Leslie, A Seven Stories Press, 24-25 pp.

[4]  Cherta Media. “Babies are born, where there is no special military operation”: Why the pre-abortion consulting is traumatizing for women [“Детей рожают, когда граждане не спецоперируют”: почему доабортное консультирование в России — травма для женщин], May 23, 2023. Published online:

https://cherta.media/story/zapret-abortov/

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ross, L. (2017). Reproductive Justice: An Introduction by Loretta Ross, University of California Press, 185 p.