June 7, 2007

• Missing

  Ms. 6:  “Mommy?  Mommy, I don’t see the girl hamsters.”

  “Okay, okay, honey. 
  Just a minute.”

  Ms. 6 has been anal, verging on obsessed, with our dwarf
  hamsters since the day she discovered one sneaking out of a temporary box, and
  the other vanished.  Despite the salvage
  of both would-be escapees that time, she constantly checked on our burgeoning
  hamster brood, paralyzed that they’d escape. 
  I treated her compulsion with alternating kindness, concern, and irritation.  Recently I called all the
  pet stores, wanting to rid ourselves of this whole issue, but there’s a current local
  dwarf hamster overpopulation and donations are unwelcome.  I resigned myself to perennially assuring her
  that no, the hamsters were just fine. 
  They weren’t lost.

  Well, last night: 
  they were.  Four girl
  hamsters:  vanished, but for an
  undeniable pile of droppings, outside
  the cage.  My own initial denial,
  followed by irritated glancing under the bookshelves, followed by frantic
  floor-wide searching with flashlights, and a sleepless night leaping up to
  check every half hour to see whether the bait-food had drawn back the renegades,
  was all to no avail.  Twenty-four hours
  later, I did a final sweep, dreading an impending ‘is that a rotten mouse?’
  odor, and preparing the youngest. 
  “Honey, I made a terrible mistake. 
  But I think we just have to accept that it’s very likely we’ll either
  never find them, or they’ll be dead.  So
  we just need to get ready for that, honey. 
  Let me tell you about something called ‘lessons learned,’ okay?”

  This little period of Hamster Hell leads me to random
  thoughts.  How ‘missing’ always
  goes.  You’re ticked that you lost your
  keys.  You’re furious that they’re
  lost.  Five times, you search the place
  they ought to be.  You look wider.  Ten times, you search the place they ought to be.  You look in places they should never be.  You give up. 
  Then you find them someplace entirely unexpected.  Or never find them. 

  Of course there’s things more serious than keys, or even
  small rodent pets.  Your beloved family
  dog.  Your child, godforbid.  Those parents in Portugal, how one blanches to imagine
  their growing terror (regardless of one’s feelings about their parenting
  choices):  “She must be huddled in the
  covers.  Under the bed.  In the bathroom.  On the balcony.  Omigod, migod …. must be under the blankets…”

  There’s public kinds of ‘missing.’  Missing WMDs: a political nightmare from
  start to finish.  Missing in action – a
  phrase from my Vietnam-era childhood, recast into the modern mode.  The public face of private agony:
  aggrandized, politicized, made monstrously part of the national psyche.

  Ms. 6:  “Mommy?  I think I am
  broken-hearted about the hamsters.  But I
  think it’s the kind of broken-hearted where you can feel, little by little, the
  broken-heartedness going away, slowly.”

  Seeking the silver lining: 
  I’m glad we’ve begun with that kind of broken-hearted, if it has (as
  tragically it must), begin somewhere.

  • 12:17 am
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