Run Free, Little Mouse

Tonight, I almost achieved what had started to feel like an unobtainable fantasy. I was going to take a leisurely shower, complete with hair mask and the chill to actually comb my hair out afterwards. Smelling Lush and feeling fresh, I was going to light a bunch of candles on the terrace, and do yoga with the soft evening breeze caressing my skin. And after all that physical self-love, I was going to engage in some much-needed mental masturbation – I was finally going to sit down in a comfortable position, in a tidy corner of the house set up to calm and inspire, and write. Write all the things I have kept on the backburner for the past three months. Or at least one of the things. Like I said, this time, I almost made it.

It’s not what you think. This time it wasn’t mama moments and chores that kept me from fingering my keyboard with great gusto, squirting adult words that have gotten lost in the day-to-day conversations with my five-month-old onto the page. Well, there were some of them – an unexpected boobing demand and a full-body spit-up closely followed by horizontal peeing over rather than into the potty and onto the floor. You know, the usual. No, this time it was a baby of a different species that threw our entire evening out of whack. This time, all our silent hopes were put to rest and all my mama-motions went on to full alert, when the husband rescued a tiny little mouse from the claws of our most savage cat, the Chimichanga.

I had just gotten the daughter to sleep on the boob and already saw myself having a Herbal Essence kind of experience in the shower, when I heard all types of commotion out on the terrace. I carefully retracted the nipple from the grips of my daughter’s toothless jaws and sat up in bed to look out of the window. Just then, I saw this teeny mouse straight out of a Janosch book hop across the terrace. It made for the bright yellow palette atop which we built the daughter her very own baby spa consisting of a little plastic tub and some wall decorations – cause you know a baby gotta live it up right. The mouse too seemed to recognize the serenity of this set-up, because it crawled underneath to seek refuge. The husband used this opportunity to grab the Chimichanga and bring her inside, but she was obsessed, unable to leave the deed undone.

Once the husband had taken the raging cat to the other extreme of the house, from where it would take her at least ten minutes to make her way back to the terrace, we swapped roles. He went to lay with the daughter, I went to lay belly-down on the terrace floor, trying to catch a glimpse of the mouse under the palette. It was huddled in the furthest corner, its hair ruffled and still punkishly styled with cat saliva. It was clearly shell shocked, its eyes closed, its minuscule frame rapidly moving under its panicked breath. Suddenly, I had images of Mama Mouse searching the surrounding scrubs and bushes for him and, worse yet – scenes of the evil Chimichanga viciously ripping it from its nest and other siblings. And those thoughts seriously fucked with my fourth-trimester head. So, without a real plan but a whole lot of love, I carefully moved the palette, and waited for its reaction.

To my surprise, the little fella, whom I had christened “Gus” by now – Cinderella fans ya’ll feel me – mustered all his strength and courage and started wonkily trotting along our terrace wall towards the flowerbed. I admired his perseverance but I could already hear the Chimichanga rustling in the shrubs, making her way back, and there was no way Gus would be able to outrun her. Eyeing the daughter’s miniature beach tools consisting of a bucket, a spade and some kind of fork-spoon hybrid thing, I opted for the latter to scoop the wee dude up just as the Chimichanga jumped back onto the terrace, pupils dilated, tail charged, her mind on the kill. As I moved toward him with the bright yellow contraption, he literally backed up against the wall, held his sweet paws up in front of his body and squeaked, absolutely terrified. And my heart broke out of my chest and spilled onto the floor into ten thousand puzzle pieces holding each and every emotion that has invaded my mind, body and soul since I became a mother.

As ridiculous as it may sound, in that moment, I felt and saw everything through the eyes of Gus’s mother. I could not separate the thoughts and feelings coursing through me in this situation, from so many of the things I feel and worry about, when it comes to the daughter. My daughter. My world. I scooped him up and mustered him up close – he had retreated back into his world of denial, gone back to his strategy of closing his eyes and pretending all this simply wasn’t happening. He looked so bewildered and innocent, and I imagined this wonderful mouse-life he had ahead of him, one he was obviously willing to fight for, even though now he clearly needed some rest to recharge before he could resume his odyssey. I set him down on the table and considered my next move – which moved me ever closer to the realities of parenthood.

I was fully aware that I was attempting to outsmart nature, here. For all I knew, this wasn’t just a mere moment of weakness Gus was experiencing after such a traumatic encounter with the Chimichanga and, subsequently, a weirdo beach tool. For all I knew, he had already been seriously hurt, and no amount of rest was going to prepare him for the wild world again. For all I knew, by coddling him, I was setting him up for guaranteed failure. If the Chimichanga didn’t get him, some other cat would, and there was nothing I could do to prevent that from happening. As I weighed my options as to where I could release him, I already knew that there was no such place as a safe haven for him. Not in the urbanisation’s garden complex, not in the nearby campo, not in the woods just a five-minute drive from home. The Chimichangas of this world lurked everywhere, and just like his Mama Mouse, there wasn’t much I could do about it – as much as I wanted to.

Moments like these, make me want to “Pubba” – a codeword I adopted from the series Sweet Tooth. Whenever I feel overwhelmed by the world and the people in it, whenever I am hit with the reality of what it means to be a mother who can only do so much to protect her child, I look to the husband and simply mumble Pubba (though in my head it sounds more like a siren going off). Pubba refers to the father of the series’ protagonist, who, when the world was hit by a pandemic – sound familiar anyone? – packed up his kid and all his belongings and built a life in the forest, far from civilization, to ensure the very best life for his son. I honestly can’t tell you how many times a week I feel like pulling a Pubba. I am fully aware that, it may be an idealistic but not necessarily realistic urge, and yet, at times, it is almost irresistibly strong.

Coming to terms with the fact that all I can do is guide the daughter and hold her hand through all the heartache, injustice, pain and confusion she is bound to encounter throughout her lifetime is no easy feat. It’s almost impossible. The love I feel for her is so visceral, the need to shield her from all things bad in this world is so fierce, it is beyond overpowering, it’s stronger than anything I have ever felt before. The umbilical cord may have been cut almost six months ago, literally, yes; but spiritually, soulfully, this connection cannot ever be severed. I already know this to be true now. Hence, my natural instinct when seeing her in any kind of discomfort or mama-perceived danger, is to scoop her up, just like little Gus, and stick her into my proverbial kangaroo pouch – i.e. my arms or her monkey bag – close to my heart and enveloped in my strength, for safekeeping. Always.

Don’t get me wrong – the last thing I want is to turn her into a bubble girl. I am all about encouraging her curiosity, humouring her current oral phase that sees her testing everything with her mouth unless I deem it a real health hazard, letting her get up to her cheeky business and letting her guide me in knowing when to merely dust her off and let her try again, and when to kiss it all better when things go wrong. That’s the easy part. The hard part, is the real-world-shit. How do I keep her safe from a global pandemic, the climate crises, psychologically damaging social trends and media content, predators and your basic assholes without going full on Pubba?  How do I build her up with the courage to grab life by the cojones and find her own way but, in the words of Cat Stevens, remind her to “just remember there’s a lot of bad everywhere”? And all that without giving myself a coronary and her a serious complex…

I looked down at Gus still catching his breath, his eyes shut, whiskers vibrating, mapping out his surroundings for imminent emergency measures. I figured the best I could do for him on this traumatic, scorching hot evening, was to offer him a rest stop of sorts – a quiet space to recuperate with a bottle-top of water and a few crumbs of bread. Emptying a basket of clothespins, I got to work, then picked him up in what I had now dubbed the Gus-mobile, and carefully set him down inside, his non-alcoholic liquid courage and sustenance all set up for him to feast on. Once he looked settled, I set him down on the living room coffee table and covered the basket with a piece of cardboard. I figured I’d let him do his thing while I took a shower and washed my locks of dread, then take him to a nice place for his release party.

You’d think someone who spent the best part of her teens secretly keeping mice and rats as pets would have remembered just how agile they are. But I didn’t. So, when I came out of the shower and resumed sitting guard on the bed with the daughter while I towelled off, the husband went upstairs to check on Gus – only to find the crumbs eaten, the water half-finished and the basket empty. Gus had escaped. Under the fridge, to be exact, to start his – and the husband’s –  second big adventure of the day. The husband’s stomping around the kitchen and living room trying to catch him naturally woke the daughter up, so I only just managed to dry my body, while my hair was still dripping wet. It didn’t take long, but a whole bunch of experimental contrivances for the husband to catch Gus again in a gentle manner.

Once I’d gotten the daughter back to sleep with three rounds of La Le Lu, two renditions of Mercedes Benz and five-hundred encores of our own made-up song for her, the time had come (to put all hopes of still getting a yoga session in, to bed). I tied my soaking hair into a ball of sad, sodden ringlets, threw on the first thing I could find, grabbed the cardboard box with its Pollack-style airhole design and headed out the door, ready to release our surprise guest of the day back into the wild. It was almost midnight by then, so the options as to where to take him where limited – streetlights aren’t a priority in many areas of our neighbourhood, especially those close to the campo, so that was pretty much a no-go. Instead, I decided to take him past our urbanisation’s pool area, where there is a little playground of sorts surrounded by bushes and plant life. I figured that would be a pretty cool place for Gus to start anew. Perhaps, I fantasized, there was already a whole community of other mice living there, taking advantage of children’s messy eating habits and guaranteed crumb-dropping.

At this point I did actually get a little bit of yoga in, as I crouched down into my best squat to carefully open the cardboard box. I had expected Gus to immediately jump out and make a run for it which, in hindsight, would have been quite uncharacteristic of him based on how he had behaved all day. I should have known he was going to take his time. I just wasn’t prepared for how much time and, above all, reassurance, he was going to need. It took a lot of coaxing to get him out of the box and, once his paws touched the tarmac, it took another good five minutes of gentle encouragement to get him to move – into any direction. I remained squatted to see where he would go, whether he would gain momentum or keep dilly dallying around the way he had been. He had been strolling towards the grassy bit of the playground when, to my surprise, he turned around and headed for my sandaled feet, more self-assured than he had been all day. I repositioned myself a bit, urging him to go back to the lawn and the surrounding bushes, but he kept on returning to my feet. Remember, I had just showered. There was nothing remotely cheesy about them. Ha.

Once again, I found myself overpowered by a tsunami of emotions that had as much to do with Gus and the current situation, as it did with the daughter and all the similar challenges I would face with her in the future. This is what I imagined the daughter’s first day of Kindergarten to be like. Two tentative steps forward, one panicked dive back into mama’s lap. Or perhaps it would be the opposite. Perhaps, unlike Gus, she would be ready and dive into a cool crowd of kids, leaving mama behind resisting the urge to cry into her lap. Either way, the fact that my heart will glow nuclear red with logic contradicting emotion and emotion challenging logic – a new game I have come to know so well by now – is undeniable. Motivating Gus and offering him a guiding, supportive foot to nudge him in the right direction was – relatively – easy. Doing the same thing for the daughter often turned into a day-long (week-long when the task in question is particularly Pubba-inducing) sci-fi period drama in my head.

It wasn’t too soul-destroying assuming that, what he really wanted was for me to scoop him back up in his Gus-mobile, because I knew that, in his case, babying him too much and allowing him to come back for more time and again, really would lessen his chances in life. Applying this logic to the daughter, on the other hand, was a whole different story. Yes, I know that I can’t always stay in the background ready to catch her fall or whoop the asses of all the Chimichangas that are bound to cross her path. I know it and accept it – celebrate this circle of life, even – but that doesn’t make it one bit easier getting used to the idea of gently working towards reassuring my own little baby mouse to run free one day.

And as much as the parallels between Gus’s story and trials and tribulations of parenthood upset me that day, they highlighted a certain growth in me. Because this time, the droplets bespeckling the tarmac beneath my feet and Gus’s tiny paws weren’t born from the tears I was eager to cry. They were just another sign of the selfless sacrifices we gladly make for our children, graciously clearing space for them to grow. In this case, shampooed freshness running in rivulets down my body and onto the night’s playground of sentiments.

I know I can’t keep our girl in our nest forever, and when the time comes for her to have her own adventures, I will watch her go with equal measures of pride and pain. But no matter where on earth she roams, no matter who she’s roaming with, I will forever be on standby with my arms wide open, ready to scoop her up.