peevish mama

Last year, Thanksgiving brought us Tom the Nut Pecker. It also brought us Tartare, Meester Panqueques and Lil’ Salami from Seattle. By contrast, this Thanksgiving was shaping up to be uneventful, mellow even. In the wake of the South American feast (which was lovely and super fun and, I think, had the intended effect of leaving our guests with full bellies, happy taste buds and dizzy heads), Mama was feeling tired. And maybe it was my general fatigue combined with my general inability to say no to Saint James that landed me smack in the middle of Petco on Tuesday evening, trying not to touch anything and gagging a little at the smell. What can I say? All he has to do is play the tremulously hopeful card and I’m butter. $47.96 later we were fully equipped for the arrival of . . . drumroll please . . . a crayfish. I can just see Dolly and Soul Daddy’s eyebrows shooting up into their hairlines because down in St. Louis, they eat these suckers by the thousands every spring at their big crayfish bonanza and the only money they would consider throwing after a crayfish would be for some cold beers to chase them down with. But here in the upper midwest, we are asses who think glorified shrimps can be pets.

So on Wednesday afternoon, I sat in my minivan, watching the drizzle hit my windshield, waiting for Saint James to emerge from school with the creature, thinking I can’t fucking believe we are going down this road again. Our family’s success rate with classroom animal cast-offs is dismal, and the brooding sky and my uneasy gut portended more of the same. The look on Saint James’ face, however, was enough to chase away my misgivings. Excited and proud, he carried the thing like a new born baby, were said baby floating in a plastic tub, looking like a nasty tiny lobster. And so, in a deja-vu like trance, I drove home, careful not to slosh the newest addition to the familia, letting myself get caught up, just a little, in the joy of naming him. By the time we pulled into our driveway, Bubbles had been christened and I watched in wonder as Supergirl acted super helpful and carried Saint James’ backpack for him so he could deliver Bubbles to his tricked out new pad, complete with realistic pebble bottom, faux seaweed and Tiki guy. 

Folks, I think you know how this is going to end. At around ten o’clock on Thanksgiving morning, I was up to my elbows in turkey giving him the butter massage  of his life when I heard a heart broken wail from the basement. Saint James ran up the stairs, fear and sadness stamped on his flushed and puffy face and cried that Bubbles was dying. What? What? Already? How do you know? I sputtered, my arms held aloft like a scrubbed-in surgeon. He’s on his baaaaaack, screamed Saint James, and his claw fell ooooooffffffff. And that is when my heart broke into little pieces. I didn’t even get to feed hiiiiiimmmmm. And then the little pieces of my heart broke into even littler pieces, which I had no hope of collecting, so slick were my hands with turkey guts and butter.

The rest of the day went by in a fugue of fretting about the turkey and fretting about my son. Up and down the basement stairs he went, over and over, to check on freakin’ Bubbles, at first emerging wracked by a fresh batch of sobs and finally too weary to cry, passing through the kitchen in silence. Doctor Dash whispered that maybe he had too much water in his aquarium, so we went down to check, not that we would know too much water if we saw it. Saint James had moved Bubbles to a smaller bowl where he had put him on top of a piece of cat kibble (incidentally, I’m really glad I paid $16 for a bag of cat food, of which exactly one niblet was used). Bubbles appeared to be clinging to the nugget for dear life and all those little pieces of my heart on the kitchen floor jumped up and broke into even tinier pieces, approximately the size of Nerds. Oh man, that’s so sad, said Doctor Dash, it’s like putting a steak over the face of a dead man. And it was. It was exactly like putting a steak over the face of a dead man.

And it was St. James’ desperate act of tenderness that made me vow NO MORE PETS. Never, ever, ever. Not ever again. Ever. Never.

That is, until Bubbles really died.

And with my boy limp and weeping, his sobs resonating through my chest like thunder, the words tumbled out before I could catch them. We’ll get a fish, sweetie, hush now, we’ll get a fish.