In tonight’s installment of “Not Our Finest Moment” I will share this with you so that you may all feel better about your parenting. (You’re welcome, in advance).
So, after taking almost a year off of hamsters because…well…they die in our home… Kaya decided that she had love in her heart to try again. We adopted Bonouie, the sweetest, cutest, funniest hamster ever (and we should know, we’ve had them all). He was a delight. He was alert and active and super playful. Until Friday morning when I went to check on him and he was dead.
Kaya had already left for school when I found him. He was curled in his cage and he looked so peaceful. My heart broke. Just absolutely broke. Kaya was in “A Christmas Carol” as Fezziwig daughter number “whatever” and her only job was to walk across the stage laughing and smiling. I knew that knowing that her beloved hammie that she had only had for three weeks had died would break her. In that moment I just couldn’t. I couldn’t.
So I did what I’d imagine any sane parent would swear they’d never do. I pulled a “Black Mirror”, a “Pet Cemetery”. I did exactly what one should never, ever, ever do. I left school at lunch time and I went to Friendly Pets and I asked for a loving, sweet, brown dwarf hamster. I bought him and I brought him home and yes, if you’re curious, I laid him next to Bonoui to see if he was a close enough match, and yes, he bore a decent resemblance to our dead hamster.
I cleaned out the cage and I swapped a beloved dead hamster with a “close enough” new one.
Later that night I got a call from Kaya while I was at dance class with her sister.
“Bonoui isn’t acting right!” she sobbed into the phone. “He always comes when I call him, but now it’s like he doesn’t know me at all! And, he just doesn’t look right.”
What did I do then? I gaslighted my own child. I told her that maybe he was under the weather, having an off day.
“But, his tummy was cream and now it looks white!” she countered.
I explained that sometimes as hamsters age their coloring changes. And then I rushed her off the phone. But, in my heart I knew. The jig was up.
The next morning Kaya was sobbing again.
“Bonoui has a Harry Potter stripe down his back, and now it’s straight” she told me through her tears. I knew I couldn’t let her go on thinking that somehow she had lost her mind and her hamster had magically transformed.
So, I came clean. She, as you may imagine, came completely unglued. Bat shit crazy furious. I don’t blame her. It was a shitty thing to do. The worst really. Something that I never would have imagined after the first loss, or the second, or even the fifth or sixth. But, we’re nine losses in now and things start to go sideways at that point. I just couldn’t bear the pain. Not for her, and not for me holding her.
But, here she was, in pain. And I did what any repentant mother would and should do. I went outside, where the ground was too frozen to bury a hamster, and I brought Bonoui’s body back to Kaya so she could say a proper goodbye.
She held him for close to an hour. She caressed his “Harry Potter” stripe and she pet his creamy tummy. She told him how much she loved him and how missed he would be. I told her why I did it. I told her that someday if she is ever a mommy she will do so many things to try to protect her children’s hearts. Sometimes she will do everything right, and sometimes it will be an epic fail. But, it will come from a love and a protection deeper than anything she could possibly imagine.
She understood. She told me quite firmly that this falls into the “Epic Fail” category, and I agree wholeheartedly, but she understood. We sat together in her beanbag chair holding her dead hamster and sharing stories for a long time before we took him outside to give him a proper burial under what has now been dubbed the “Bonoui Tree” in front of the house.
And as for the imposter hamster, after much thought and consideration Kaya decided that she can love him on his own terms. She also decided that Bonoui is way too cool a name to let go of so soon, so he is Bonoui 2.0 (“Bon Bon” for short). Our hope is that he will live a long and happy life. But, if that isn’t his destiny we will mourn him together, the proper way, because my child is strong, and she can take it. And also because she has a photographic memory and she doesn’t miss a stripe.
elsterlore 