A hamster hunt for Super Mom
By Tim Lemire
Thursday, 7:03 a.m.: I left a message on my supervisor's voice mail that pretty much summed up the situation. "I'm gonna be a little late. There's a big puddle of water in the middle of the kitchen floor, and the hamster's cage is open and the hamster's gone, and there's water in the basement, and the kids are hysterical, and nobody knows what's going on."
It's morning in Parenthood.
As the first one awake, I had discovered all this, struck not only with the convergent shock of all these things gone wrong, but also - it being 6:53 a.m., seven minutes before my wife officially gets up - with the conundrum of whether to wake a sleeping she-bear or just let confusion idle until the stroke of 7.
I woke her. I used the same run-on sentence I later used with my supervisor.
Our daughters, ages 6 and 7, were frantic. The elder was the owner of the hamster, named Buddy, aka His Hamstership.
She wailed: "He's going to turn up as a brown splotch in the middle of the road!"
While I understood my daughter's concern, I didn't bother telling her that in 20 years of driving, I had never had to swerve to avoid hitting a hamster.
I also didn't tell her that I was the one, the night before, who inadvertently had left the cage open.
By 7:15, we figured out that Buddy had bitten the water line to the fridge's icemaker. Out the water had come, above and below the bite.
While my wife shut off the water, I took my daughter aside. I explained that it was my fault that Buddy was missing. I was feeding him, and I must have been distracted when the time came to secure the cage door.
I apologized.
She said nothing.
I left for work fearing the worst and feeling inept, a typical dumb dad who might appear in a second-rate sitcom.
Read the rest at The Christian Science Monitor
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