Our kids have nagged us for years to get a
pet. Dog, cat, bird, goldfish. They don't
care.
I keep trying to tell them I can barely
handle the responsibility of three kids, let alone another creature
in the house and all the demands it will bring.
Blank stares. That's what I get from them.
Our eldest got a Fur Real friend one
Christmas. This thing is a kind of robot cat. It has life-like fur and
it responds when you pat it. It cranes its mechanized neck to look
you in the eye and meow or purr. Leave it on and it will be silent
for hours, meowing only when you walk by or come into the room.
Eerie as fuck.
The next pets we had were Zhu Zhu
pets—colorful toy hamsters which zoom around erratically, bump up
against walls, chirp, sigh, and make silly noises. They have little
toy motorcycles or carriages or strollers with even tinier baby hamsters in diapers to push around.
But as all toy pets are, Zhu Zhu pets
were mildly depressing. At the time the robot cat came into our home--about two years ago--we had a nanny who told
me it was a sin to build fake cats and hamsters. Mind you, as a kid back home in Morocco,
she once hung a cat by its leg on her clothesline—but that was all in good fun.
Anyway, I started to understand her
reasoning—about the fake cat being a sin, not about stringing up
real cats.
Mother Nature really is best at
constructing creatures. For one thing, she
doesn't build them wearing tiny motorcycle helmets or diapers. Maybe it was time for a real pet.
Then, serendipity. While at a friend's
one night, I met a woman who was trying to get rid of her kids'
hamster cage.
“You can have it,” she said, “for
free!” I swear there was a wild gleam in her eye.
I'd
probably had a few too many glasses of wine. A hamster seemed like a
great idea.
She was so excited to pass on this cage
that she drove it to me all the way from the East end of town.
The kids too, were excited. They jumped
up and down, discussed names. It was around Christmas time. We all
piled into PetSmart together, and the kids chose their hamster. A
caramel colored one with white spots.
“$12.99,” said my husband when he
saw the price tag. “No vet bills.” We all left smiling.
It was a girl hamster. They called her Butterscotch.
Butterscotch was pretty cute, even I
had to admit. Until she just about bit off the top of our 5-year-old daughter's finger.
"I never want to see her again!" screamed my daughter, blood from her finger dripping onto the bathroom floor. This was a week after bringing her home.
But soon enough, the kids all forgave her and loved her again. Mostly they pinned dress-up fantasies on her. "Wouldn't she look cute in a wedding dress?" one kid said. "Imagine if they made tiny bicycles for hamsters," said another.
A hamster's life is a pretty sad state.
Those things are stuck in a cage that isn't always as clean as it
should be, with only a precious hour or two outside each day. They
gotta use that little wheel for exercise. Same food day after day. As
a housewife, I felt a certain kinship with her.
Butterscotch figured out how to escape
from her cage. The first couple of times it was kind of fun trying to
find her, like a treasure hunt.
After one of her wild nights of freedom, we found her in a corner of the basement bathroom. She was curled up in a ball in her adorable, makeshift nest of
granola bar crumbs, a couple of Cheerios, a cherry pit, some bits of
cellophane, dryer lint, and a tiny plastic Kinder Toy. Yeah, you
could say our basement was in need of a good vacuuming.
We put a twist-tie on her door to lock
her in. She figured out how to chew through the twist-tie, and she
has been gone for two days now.
We saw her once or twice, a quick
little ball of fluff skittering by. Who knows where she is. In the
wall, in the couch, under the fridge. My hope is that she escaped out
into the great beyond of back yard, and will live out a rich and fulfilling 48 hours
before a cat spots her.
Still, it's a little sad when our
four-year-old son asks, “Mom, when's Butterscotch coming home?”
A friend of mine, consoling me over Facebook in his tough-love way, said it best:
Butterscotch will come home when Butterscotch feels like
it.
