I’m thinking about that term I learned today: “brooding,” that period where a chicken absolutely has to nurture, even when there's nothing to nurture.

I've read about the need of a young animal to have a mother, and of “imprinting,” in which the young animal will come to see whoever raised it as their parent.  What I hadn't heard or read about is the idea of that working in reverse, of an animal so in need of something to nurture that it will latch on to anything as its offspring.

When you mentioned your chicken sitting on unfertilized eggs, it seemed like such a sad thing, this parent waiting in vain for offspring who would never come. I felt a surge of happiness when you told me about purchasing some motherless chicks and putting them with this mother who so badly needed a group of children to dote over. There was no blood relation between these creatures, yet they were now a family.

It reminded me of a plot thread in a show I’ve been watching where a character doesn't know if he is the biological father of his son. He gets a DNA test but then decides not to find out the results. To him, the issue of whether he shares the same genes with his child is no longer important; he has raised the child, lived through his growth, his illnesses, his ups, his downs, and is therefore that child's father.