Mind Body Mama: Infested

Warning: Contains violent creature death.

“Welcome to the House of Vermin.”

When she greeted me with these words I knew Sweetiebabyhoneylicious was talking about the mice that have plagued this old house since September. The moths that ride in on my bulk goods from Whole Foods aren’t scheduled to return until July.

We’ve had three go-rounds with the mice in the past six months and I’ve lost every round. I favor the snap traps, especially after trying one of those new-fangled ones that looks like a chip-clip. It did a great job trapping a mouse but couldn’t quite close the deal. Thrashing desperately, the mouse was forced into a plastic bag and removed to an undisclosed location to be terminated in hand-to-paw combat. Small was mesmerized by the proceedings. We’re making double-deposits into her therapy fund right now.

Need I mention that it was not the black belt, ass-kicking mama who did the extermination?

The cycle went like this: find mouse droppings in some drawer with 5 gazillion cooking utensils in it. Wash everything with bleach. Find a temporary home for 5 gazillion things. Place mousetraps. Wait. Wait. Wait. Finally catch some mice. Discard dead mice. Clean area with bleach. Return cleaned items to cleaned area. Find mice droppings again, in the same or different location. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

I got some questionable advice from my friends, “How about a cat?” being most prevalent. The idiot feline who lives here didn’t get really excited about the mice until we caught one in a snap trap. He grabbed that sucker and ran through the house with it in his jaw, trap and all, Sweetiebabyhoneylicious limping behind him, Mama screaming in horror, Small transfixed with delight.

We are now accepting donations to the therapy fund.

Peppermint was suggested as a deterrent which yielded a very minty, mousey house. I can now attest to the aromatherapy effect of peppermint: I was dramatically more alert during my at-home work hours during the days of the Peppermint Offensive.

Someone recommended plugging up all holes larger than a pencil eraser, a Sisyphean undertaking in a place that is more holes than house.

I was also advised to find a way to live in harmony with the mice such as asking them during my morning meditation to stop pooping on my things. After all, I don’t poop on their things.

Nice to know: mice are immune to meditation.

It was also suggested that I poop on their things. Since they seem to think my things are their things, this advice just seemed mean.

Now I’ve declared all-out war on the mice. Instead of going drawer by drawer, I’ve removed most of the contents of my kitchen to the dining room and the porch. Boxes and bags of groceries, entire drawers pulled out of my kitchen cabinets. I’ve laid down baking soda throughout the cabinets to more easily track the signs of mouse activity and baited ten traps—including the one we had forgotten about from the last time, which lay gnawed and un-sprung in the back of a cabinet.

Good kitchen design is apparently based upon the triangle between the sink, refrigerator and stove. You should move efficiently between these three appliances and find all the essentials along the way. My triangle now detours into two other rooms and requires stacking and un-stacking towers of unreasonably heavy wooden drawers.

It’s not like I’ve had much cooking to do in the three weeks during which I’ve been awaiting the mouse apocalypse. Just a few church dinners for ten, a casserole for Birth Pie and Dr. Isaac when they flew back from Israel—and breakfast, lunch and dinner for the family every day.

The fat-hating fitness rags tell me that all this extra walking is a good thing. They call it “planned inefficiency”—working extra steps into your day to burn every calorie you can. If inefficiency was a weight loss method every mama alive would be thin as a rail and mamas with more than one kid would be in serious danger of wasting away. Nothing reduces your efficiency like a child.
In the words of my own mama, “It’s like eighteen years of constant interruption.”

Needless to say, the mice are nonplused by the assault. There’ s been no sign of them whatsoever since the contents of the kitchen were relocated. Small checked a favorite rodent hang-out the other morning; the vestigial built-in cutting board (circa 1945):

“Nobody’s pooping in here!” She chirped. “There’s a lot less mouse restrooms in our house than there used to be.”

In the absence of the mice two other infestations have taken over the homestead or more precisely, Small’s vivid and bizarre imagination.

Small cultivated the presence of fairies by establishing a fairy hotel in her bedroom closet. She posted a sign which went unread by human eyes until it fell into her hamper and I found it while doing the laundry:

Mide-niute to mid-niute 1 Farie 1 wish.

By the time I saw the sign I had been made aware of its presence and purpose.

“The fairies aren’t paying. They’re staying in the hotel and they’re not giving me any wishes.”

I’m not sure where Small gets this but when she’s indignant she’s a little bit unclear. Sweetiebabyhoneylicious and I are always calm and reasonable when we’re pissed off beyond belief, but Small sometimes doesn’t make complete sense when she’s angry. That must have been why I did not absorb the gravity of the situation. Or maybe I was just too committed to the rodent campaign to take on the Case of the Fly-By-Night Fairies.

It wasn’t until several more days of non-payment had occurred that we got to the bottom of things, and then only because Small staged a total melt-down at the door of the school when I dropped her off. She cried mercilessly and had to be pried off of my body so a teacher could drag her into the classroom. This is completely uncharacteristic behavior.

That was Friday morning. Friday is my day off. I had a massage scheduled. I was going to the grocery store with my I-pod to listen to Dick Gordon interview someone smart and fascinating and over 30 while filling my cart with non-talking items. If I played it right, no one would talk to me for several hours. I was a stay-at-home mom to the world’s wordiest child for five years. I could hear nothing but the sound of my own thoughts for the rest of my life and it would not erase the constant verbal contact of the last five years. So what if there was sobbing now? Silence was coming: beautiful, solitary silence.

A better mom would have been distressed to wrench her weeping child off her body at the schoolhouse door, but I frankly didn’t give it another thought. For one thing, I believe the teachers when they say the crying kids are fine the minute the (usually crying) mama is out of their sight. For another thing, I really trust Small’s teachers. They’ve got her number and they delight in kindergarteners. They are really much more qualified than I to figure out what the heck was going on.

Besides, I had that massage.

I stood at the end of the driveway chatting with Birth Pie about the trip to Israel and her kids’ precious mix of anxiety and resilience until it was time to go. When I went inside there was a message from Small’s teacher calling so I wouldn’t worry about the upset.

Me, worry?

In fifteen minutes Miss Chris had discovered the source of Small’s distress and the apparent cause of the fairies’ delinquency. Small was heartbroken that the fairies were not leaving wishes, but Miss Chris reasoned that it must be an infestation of Brownies that are interfering with the Fairy Hotel. The Brownies, known for their mischievous ways, are either stealing the wishes or tricking the Fairies into not paying.

So Small spent the weekend building a Brownie trap with its own seductive signage:

Broney Hotel. Wanny come inside? Broney speshel.

It’s not quite finished but the design calls for a row of clothespins disguised as beds that will snap those Brownies up so we can discard them in a far-away place.

She wants us to pick somewhere where we’re sure they will die.

Keep those checks coming, folks.