Nurture This
It’s sad to admit, but bearing and raising five kids has dampened my need to nurture living things other than the five kids, my husband Matt and our golden retriever Ruffie. I see this in contrast to our daughter Jenna who nurtures slugs, baby birds and used to coddle fallen green leaves and uneaten lunch components.
I once cared as she cares. I offered nightly prayers in third grade that God would protect all 18 newborn black mollies in my ten-gallon aquarium, and then cried over each three-millimeter ebony fry that got sucked down into the under-gravel filter, ultimately blaming God and prompting an early faith crisis.
I even defied my fisherman father by casually leaning over the aluminum boat’s edge and unclamping the hooks holding his day’s catch on the submerged stringer. I smiled in true World Wildlife Federation member defiance as each trout wriggled off the death-chain and swam away, my smile ruefully incriminating. Despite punishment, I later hoisted the five-gallon minnows bait bucket to the lake’s shore and dumped it, too.
Fish were just the beginning. I kept a Petco employee’s list of creatures and loved them all like offspring, so my eventual resistance to allow our younest kids–twin boys–to keep pets alarmed me. Were older kids’ pet mishaps to blame?
- Ball python Jaws escaped to defend a fugitive’s barricade in the baby’s room. An other-worldly, under-dresser hiss incited a high-stepping parental panic, but the real wonder was how an otherwise slow and docile Python transformed into a mythical, snake-on-a-plane predator, fierce in defense of his new lair as he coiled and struck.
- Hamster 007’s unintended liberty lasted four weeks and produced a starving Tasmanian devil that would dart out from closet shadows and bite the exposed skin of kids on the floor playing Nintendo–ironically 007 Nightfire. Post capture, 007 never neared my hand without bloodlust, like Monty Python’s white rabbit of Holy Grail fame.
- Bearded dragon Hannibal waged a hunger strike that required daily force-feeding for a week. Like prying open a squirming edamame pod that bites, force-feeding a dragon seemed outside my idea of reasonable mom responsibilities–as was racing to clean out full-grown Hannibal’s asphyxiatiting defecation. Who knew a diet of meal worms and crickets could produce such a deadly smell?
- Corn snake Darth Maul traumatized all of us by writhing his face and length all over each blind, baby rat’s body in an extended–almost perverted–orgy of massage before rearing up like a cobra and striking. Feeding time felt like rodent erotica-horror with far too much lead time before victim demise.
- Shelter pet adventures included a testosterone-saturated, cryptorchid wolf mix named Backjack whose anxiety disorder and Shere Khan-like aggression endangered neighbor kids; a hound named Yogi Bear whose separation fear prompted prolonged and ear-splitting Banshee yelps if I left the room, and a lovable boxer mix that promptly ran away.
- I also answered an add for kittens “well-handled by children.” At home I realized I had adopted a feral, flea-infested wild cat, when kitty’s adamantium claws shredded my arms and she dropped to the floor, arched and spit a hissing charge toward kids, a tabby demon.
With the birth of our twins, round-the-clock feeding schedules, biohazard diaper messes and surround-sound screaming officially precluded the introduction to our home of any additional life forms beyond neighbor kids and the occasional relative, until the twins turned twelve. Matt and I then lifted the pet moratorium, assuming that although it’s nearly impossible for kids to reliably dip into a 50-pound bag of Pedigree twice a day for Ruffie, somehow two green anoles (miniature velociraptors) could survive in the twins’ room.
Thankfully, our anoles Zika and Ebola have achieved a tameness so reliable that they lounge on hand, arm or face without escape attempts, and haven’t created a single smell in a year. It’s also nice to see people other than Jenna nurturing living things, as we’ve welcomed a Japanese Fighting Fish named Isis to our family, and kept Socrates the hermit crab for two weeks until the boys realized why the crab is called a hermit, not a celebrity. The boys believe Zika and Ebola love them, and while I’m pretty sure lizards just love the 98-degree warmth radiating from human skin like a basking stone, I’ll let the boys believe in reptile devotion.
jillwellock 