April 7, 2006

Silicon Valley Mom

Some animals eat their young … others just run away

By Dona Nichols
Special to the Times

During the years between courtship and parenthood, couples spend a lot of time fantasizing about their future children. They pick out names and talk about how smart their kids will be.

My husband, Ralph, and I discussed every aspect of parenting long before we became parents. Whenever we encountered a mother or a child having a meltdown in the grocery store, we’d talk about how we would have handled the situation differently and, of course, how we would never allow such misbehavior to occur in the first place.

Our children would be well behaved and compliant. The kids we were planning to raise would certainly be perfect and odor-free.

Ralph and I had a long courtship, which gave us a lot of time to work the kinks out of just about every parenting issue that could possibly arise.

One of those issues was pets. Ralph grew up with every type of animal imaginable and I grew up with a dog. We had to compromise on this one because Ralph wanted our future children to have rodents and snakes. I wanted to limit our pet choices to animals with necks. He agreed, figuring he’d wear me down.

From the moment our children were born they knew the “no neck” rule. It was so sweet watching them interact with different creatures at petting zoos. They’d waddle over and ask, “Mommy, does a gerbil have a neck?”

“No, it doesn’t honey,” was always my reply.

“Mommy, does a snake have a neck?” Dylan asked.

“It’s all neck,” said Cody who’s the oldest.

“That’s the funny thing about snakes,” I said. “They’re all tail and they have no neck.”

This “no neck” rule worked great.

I remember overhearing the kids talking about a menagerie of different pets over the years and inevitably Dylan would ask Alexis if it had a neck. This would be followed by them running to me to ask if turtles, ducks, rats, lizards, goats or chickens had necks. My answer was always the same and it always worked, until recently that is.

We were having our kitchen remodeled and in my menopausal insanity, I decided my dining room wall needed to be moved 12 inches to the west. When the carpenters tore down the wall they found a nest of seven newborn rats. They saw the mother rat scurry out of the house.

When my daughter, Alexis, saw this, she decided to become a surrogate mother rat and use this as her science fair project. All of this happened on a Monday, which is my long day at school.

Alexis told my neighbor, Sylvia, that she was going to keep the rats. Sylvia, being a good neighbor and friend, immediately told her that her mother wouldn’t be too happy with that. Alexis misunderstood Sylvia, thinking she meant the mother of the baby rats.

“She left and she’s never coming back,” Alexis told Sylvia.

“Why did she leave?” Sylvia asked.

“I don’t know,” Alexis said.

“You’re pulling my leg,” Sylvia said.

“Nope. She ran away and never looked back,” Alexis said.

“Your mom just left?” Sylvia asked.

“Not my mom, the rat mom,” Alexis said.

By the time I got home there was an incubator lined in baby blankets in my daughter’s room. There was a heat lamp, a little rat baby bottle, a pile of plastic gloves and even some cat milk, all of which had been purchased at the pet store.

“Ralph, what are you doing? You know we don’t allow pets without necks in this house,” I said.

“I know, don’t worry, they’re not staying,” said Ralph.

“They look like they’re staying,” I said as I pointed out all the baby rat stuff. “Either someone’s given an impromptu baby rat shower or you’ve been to the pet store.”

“By the way Mom, I talked to the pet store guy and he said that rats have necks,” said Alexis.

“You’ve allowed her mind to be poisoned by a pet store guy,” I said to Ralph.

“Don’t worry, they’re not staying,” Ralph said.

“I call this one Quasimodo because he has a hump on his back,” Alexis said. “And I call this one Bubbles because she bubbled milk out of her nose when I fed her.”

“She’s named them and you think they’re not staying?” I said to Ralph.

“They’re just visiting until her science fair project is due,” Ralph said.

I tried to talk some sense into my daughter, stressing the fact that these rodents were so disgusting that even their own mother abandoned them.

I was beside myself. It was just about the creepiest thing I had ever seen, all these little hairless things with their eyes closed, all cuddled up with one another under the heat lamp.

“They have to be fed every two hours,” Alexis said.

“Let’s see how she feels about these rats after the nighttime feedings,” I thought to myself.

With a little bit of Internet research I learned a lot about raising rats. I learned that the mother rat licks the babies’ anal glands to stimulate them. Alexis wasn’t willing to take it that far but she did manage to substitute with a cotton swab.

Alexis turned out to be such a good mama rat that she would have raised them into full-blown roof rats if I had let her. But neck, or no neck, I had to put my foot down. I was the bad guy. I found those baby rats a new “home” and just like the mama rat, I never looked back.

Dona Nichols teaches journalism at San Jose State University and does stand-up comedy on the side at the Improv in downtown San Jose. She lives in Evergreen with her husband and three children. Email her at: DonaNichols@gmail.com.