what isn’t ours to hold

This morning I cupped my hand over the incubator. A chick inside was jumping, restless. Textbook “adjusting to life,” I could have said, and walked away.

But something in me named it anxiety. And even if I was wrong, isn’t the risk of extra tenderness always worth it?

I covered the corner with my palm. They nestled instantly, asleep. I stepped away—awake. Back again—out cold. We rehearsed this for ten minutes, me learning the rhythm of being mistaken for a hen—and loving it.

Their sibling in the brooder called back when they chirped. Exactly when did they first connect? I worried they might jostle the unhatched two, so—breathing and somehow holding my breath too—I moved them. I caught a video to show Maria when she wakes: the newest born meeting their sibling in the brooder. Tenderness, only tenderness. Like they’ve always known.

I shifted the other eggs toward center. One vibrated under my hum. When I stopped, the newborn—Pop—kept demanding, louder than their sibling Pip. Social, insistent, announcing themselves to the world.

Without a hen’s breast, they struggle, even if we’ve built tech to help. My voice steadies them, somehow. So I write and speak, like a mom does.

All this is because Suni. The mystery chick we didn’t order—a Jersey Giant, broody at six months. The eggs they sat weren’t theirs. I believe they were Luna’s, their companion. Probably all of them. From day one of Ramos Vamos chick life, Suni has guarded Luna, sprinting sideways through the garden at the first hint of distance.

And now: Pip, Pop, another jostling, and a fourth likely on the way.

This wasn’t the writing I planned for the morning. Then again—what grand plans am I exactly breaking?

The work is not invention but witness: cupping your hand, humming into a shell, stewarding what isn’t yours but still insists on living through you.

Like a mom does.

And maybe that’s the scandal of compassion: you don’t need permission slips, only the nerve to mother what the world would rather leave unheld.