Melinda Morley

A pet tale. 

As a mother I worry. It’s my job to worry and I’m good at it. I worry about little things, if my kids are clean and fed well. I worry if their teachers are nice. I worry about their music practice and if they are really brushing their well and are they really flossing. Do they say their prayers and really mean it? I worry about big things: pornography, national debt and war. Mostly I worry that I won’t be able to teach them everything they need to know before they leave home: about life, love, and happiness.

Modern times are a blessing and a curse, though I would no sooner give up my lap top and internet connection than the next guy. I realize that our life style leaves much to be desired. I want my kids to learn to work hard and appreciate what they have and understand the value of hard earned dollar. Kids now-a-days are for the most part not raised on farms. They no longer work around animals. They are deprived of learning the facts of life and death as the ebb and flow of life and are now surrounded with sterilized situations manipulated by PBS. We lived in the city and had a garden and even a few fruit trees, but I knew my kids needed something more. Perhaps they were old enough for hands on experience in life. Maybe now was the time for a…pet.
 Not that we hadn’t had a pet before. Sarah brought a gold fish home as a party favor from a birthday party. Now the wisdom in giving live pets to ten seven year old little girls is beyond me. The mother of the birthday girl received numerous calls after several fish didn’t survive the first week in their new homes. They were even requested to babysit a few goldfish while the families went on vacation.
 We, however, were lucky to receive a tenacious little fellow who sat on our counter and swam around his pickle jar. He seemed to particularly enjoy life and would show his exuberance by doing little jumps out of the water and heartily splashing back in. We would often hear him from the other room and check on him only to find drops of water on the counter. We sometimes wondered if he was secretly adventurous and lived a double life exploring the kitchen and who knows what else.
 One day while cleaning the fish’s giant pickle jar, my husband accidentally dumped the fish down the drain. Fortunately, he got stuck on the cross section of the stopper. We tried to pull him out but his gills had opened a little under the bars resulting in a stuck fish with a shredded tail. Amid the chaos of shrieks and the wringing of hands, my husband realized there was only one thing to do. Take the drain apart. Amid the kids running too and from the kitchen filled with disgust and curiosity, he grabbed an empty ice cream bucket and some tools and quickly dismantled the pea trap and pushed the poor fish through. It plopped in the bucket and limped a half float, half swam. His gills were raw and damaged. We thought he was a goner. After we put him back in the clean pickle jar, he just sort of floated and swirled. I anxiously wondered if maybe we should show mercy and flush him, but I didn’t have the heart.
 The next morning I entered the kitchen with the dread of finding our little friend belly up. To our surprise he was swimming just as well as he had ever done, shredded tail and all.
 Life’s lesson was learned a Sunday afternoon a few months after his first birthday, when we came home from church and found him lifeless on the counter. He had jumped. Some speculate that it was suicide, but they didn’t know that little fish like we did. He loved life too much to have jumped on purpose. Can we just put him back? Sarah had asked with tears streaming down her cheeks. I let her try. A few minutes later I heard the toilet flush and her bedroom door slam. She cried for a long time over that goldfish. Life is hard sometimes. Especially for little girls, who love goldfish.
 After that experience I wasn’t anxious to get another pet. They just die. Well the kids saved their money and Emelie had her sixth birthday so the older two kids talked her into spending her birthday money on a hamster. I reasoned that hamsters were cuter than mice. I hate mice. And well, truth be known life isn’t like it used to be and my kids needed to learn more about the nature of life. Little did I know what a series of lessons we were in for.
 On a Saturday shortly after Emelie’s birthday we loaded the kids in the suburban and headed for Bird World. It had all kinds of pets though, not just birds. Anyway, we found the hamster cage and two cute little hamsters snuggled together. My kids were ecstatic. Couldn’t we get two? We don’t want to leave one all alone. They had a point. I felt sorry for the little guy and we bought them both. Mistake number one: Hamsters are in reality solitary creatures.
 We bought a glass cage, bedding, a running wheel, water bottle, chew toy and food.  At the checkout counter I asked the woman how to tell if they were male or female. Oh, they’re too young to tell yet, she assured me. Mistake number two: Never assume that just because someone works at a pet shop, they know anything about hamsters.
 If it was too early for humans to tell these furry little creatures apart, it wasn’t too early for the hamsters themselves. Within the week, I am not exaggerating here, within the week, my daughter came running to me and declared that Brownie was on top of Ghosty, they were named for their color, and was biting her neck. I hesitated and went to inspect. Sure enough it was what I expected.
“Well, honey, they’re mating.”
“What’s that?”
“They’re making baby hamsters.”
Her large brown eyes grew even larger. At least we knew now that one was a boy and one was a girl. We quickly googled hamster on the internet. I had a sinking feeling we were getting in way over our heads.
16 days gestation. Ghostie, the female, almost killed Brownie. I thing she would have eaten him if we didn’t get them separated. My sister’s hamsters turned cannibal. They were the offspring of Brownie and Ghosty, but I’m getting ahead of myself now.  Back to the pet store to buy another cage, running wheel and water bottle.  We followed all the guidelines. High protein foods. Extra soft padding so that she could nest. She was very young for a mother and we read that young hamsters sometimes feel overwhelmed and eat their own babies. This was a little too real life and not something I wanted to witness or explain to my children.
As the due date neared, we could be found with our noses pressed to the glass watching our now fat, little hamster. Then one day Emelie, age 6, ran from her room screaming a nearly hysterical oooh! There was something gross like worms in Ghostie’s cage. We clamored over each other to get to the cage first and oogled over a pile of giant red and purple termites. It was a huge pile. I told the kids that yes, this is what a baby hamster looks like. It took a few days before we could count them all. Seven. We were now outnumbered by hamsters. I had read that if hamsters feel distress they may put their babies in their pouches to protect them, only to have them suffocate and die. We tried to create a peaceful serene atmosphere for this mother to nurture her pile.
We watched in awe as the first baby began to grow a dark fur stripe down his back. We knew it was a boy because you can tell from birth what gender a hamster is simply by the fact that males have a gland on their bellies that looks like a naval. Easy enough there pet shop worker. Soon the babies began to explore their world. Ghostie would pick them up in her mouth and put them back in the nest. The big dark striped one was the first to make it around the cage. He became our favorite. There was also a cute little runt, only half the size of the others.
One day we were surprised to find one of the hamsters dead. A little white one. She had some dreamy little name like cloudy. It was fitting. There had been no sign of a struggle. She had mysteriously died. On their own accord the kids emptied a crayon box and scooped out her hard cold body and placed it in it a bedding of toilet paper. They buried it under the peach tree with a solemn but short ceremony.
Things started to get exciting after that. The mother became aggressive toward her children and we had to separate them. We found and ice cream bucket with a lid. I didn’t know if they were old enough to be weaned but some how they made it. Then the group ganged up on the runt. We found an empty plastic aquarium for that little guy. We had to keep separating out the hamsters until only two sisters were left in the cage.

The girls’ room was a hamster zoo. And it smelled like it too. We asked everyone we knew if they wanted a hamster and we gave away three. That still left us with five.

Sometimes one would get out and I would end up jumping on the bed squealing until my husband found his leather gloves and we cornered it. In a moment of fright he threw the scared little hamster right on my pillow. He finally got it back in its bucket. By December I couldn’t take it anymore. I declared my: these hamsters better be gone by… or else speech. Ken bundled the kids and took the remaining hamsters down to the grocery store. They stood in the freezing cold and called “free hamsters” to any and all passersby.
It worked. We kept two, the male adult, Brownie and his son, Houndy.  Things settled down after that. No more hamster fights and escapees. We kept the gentlest ones that had never bitten.  Spencer was responsible for Hound. He enjoyed him until he got sick and started to smell horribly. He seemed to get better and then he was dead. Spencer didn’t know how many days he had been dead. Sarah loved Brownie and cared for him for 1 ½ years longer until he died in his sleep one night. She cried and cried and buried him under the pine tree. She took flowers to his grave every day for weeks. Her heart began to heal when her cousin gave her another hamster. She had tried to give it away several times but people kept giving it back to her. He was quite old and died, too. It was not as sad as the loss of Brownie.

 And now we have Smokey. And a few experiences in life.