The God’s cows are medium size bugs red with black stripes. They are not dangerous or particularly beautiful r ugly. They just are! I never thought intensely about this very common insect in Romania, I didnt’ like or dislike them. I ignored them, until one day when my mom dragged to the Children’s Hospital where she worked and ordered me to play around the hospital, like a good girl. Around the building, there were crawling a lot of vaca Domnului bugs and fascinated I found a large jar, place leaves in it and crumbs of bread as I didnt’t know their diet, and picked about ten of them and placed them in my jar to observe their life. They were very active and as I was wondering what was their real purpose in life, they started to lay white transparent larva on the leaves I place in my scientific jar. The old Vaca Domnului seem to be good parents. They were tending to the larvae’ needs as they grew rapidly. They, the larva, started to move around and to my horror, when the babies became alive, the parents immediately died. Their mission was done. Their purpose in life was to procreate and then die.
I shed tears as I had to take them out from the jar of life to protect the new generation from being crowded. I always wondered why? This was not parenting. Why did the God of the God’s cows allowed this unfair, premature death, May be the old generations could have told the new ones how to protect themselves better, how to evolve. It seemed everyone was happy with the system and my thoughts were out-of-place. Perhaps they were, but the theme obsessed me through my life and it made me think many times that perhaps once we birth our children we should disappear, as it seems most of our children don’t need guidance in their lives which are so different from what we knew once upon a time.
Yes, those God’s cows, if they only knew, how they stirred deep psychological questions in my young, already confused mind. But they didnt’ and kept on dying on me until I ran out of tears and heart-broken I released the content of the jar near a river, so they could have water. I prayed for every one of them by name and I begged them to keep the parents alive at least for a while, to lay the good foundation for the young generation of God’s cows. so that they may improve!
After all didn’t they feel a responsibility they brought lives into this world?
The Nude Truth by Rodica Mihalis 