Summer is always over too fast, and this year was no exception. School begins for my children next week, and all my parenting-school-year-angst is about to kick into high gear. The backpacks have been washed, the sneakers sorted, pens and pencils collected. You do what you can. But the last week of summer still held a surprise for us.

My husband is a gardener, with several acres under cultivation, and my thirteen-year-old son helps him most afternoons. Andres is a boy growing up fast, with many friends and activities in a packed daily schedule that stretches him physically and mentally. Mom that I am, I often wish he could stay “small” longer. A tough exterior has become the modus operandi, and I sometimes find myself wondering where he’s hidden his soft heart.

A week ago, my husband came in at the end of the day and said, “Andres is bringing home some baby mice.”

Great, I thought, just what we need a week before school.

“They’re cute”, he said, reading my expression. “You’ll see. He tilled up the nest, the mother was killed, and he found these three babies. Their eyes are still shut.” I still muttered, and my husband asked me gently, “Would you rather he had killed them?”

No, I didn’t like the idea of my son wielding a hoe, killing baby animals.

Half an hour later, Andres came home, with a tin can and a book. In the bottom of the can were some soft cotton rags, and nestled in the rags were three baby mice, already furred in a warm, russet, orange-brown tint. They had incredibly long feet, and little round ears, hardly unfolded. We could see their white underbellies, and long tails curling around their bodies. One of the tails was obviously injured. “His tail got nicked by the tiller,” Andres said.

The book was from a friend, on how to care for orphaned wild animal babies. He seemed to know how to proceed, and asked me for an egg and some milk. Mixing the yolk with milk, he carefully filled a dropper, and took one of the tiny blind creatures in his hand. He nudged its mouth open with the dropper, and gently let it taste the new flavor.

Oh gosh, I thought, this is too much. It’s really cute. My vision suddenly blurred as I watched him kneeling in the middle of the floor, his shoulders curled protectively around the whole operation. There was so much compassion and sympathy in his posture, responses I hadn’t seen in a long time.

“I’m going to name them Asterix, Obelix, and Getafix. Getafix is the one with the hurt tail – see, he has to get it fixed. Asterix has pink on the end of his tail, and Obelix’s tail is all black. I have to feed them every three hours. Can I get up in the night?”

Sure enough, all the nights of the next week, I would hear his alarm ringing at 1:00, and he never missed a feeding. I subbed in for him once or twice during the day, but he took on the whole project, finding a terrarium with a screen cover, rigging up a heat lamp, keeping their food fresh, and trying to identify their species. His friends came by to see them. Often, he would sit holding one or the other, as it bumbled blindly around in his hands.

But small, orphaned wild animals don’t often thrive in domestic life, and time eventually ran out. After four days, Getafix died, and two days later, Obelix and Asterix on the same day. Andres wasn’t home when I found them, so I had to break the news.

“I’m a bit sad,” he said, quite bravely, “but also a bit relieved. They were a lot of work, but it was fun. I liked it.”

I want to remember this quality in him as he grows older, and welcome the opportunities for compassion, pity and tenderness that life provides, especially those that come in unexpected ways. It is so easy to lose the "child" in our children, to forget that our children’s hearts are, first and foremost, kind and good. That for parents, joys outweigh the troubles with young children and adolescents, and that growing boys sometimes need small, orphaned animals.

 

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Responses

Thank you, Carmen.  I read your story to my 13 yr old Patchen, and he enjoyed it, too.

Greetings, Cadmon