Mouse

I am sooooo……sleeeeepy.

We didn’t sleep very well last night. Lately Bryan and I have gotten into a bad habit of starting into deep discussions about the direction of our lives around 10:15 at night. Our recently weaned one year old is newly insecure about the world and wakes up at six in the morning hollering for company. But the reason we didn’t sleep well last night has nothing to do with either of these things, and is in fact an altogether much smaller reason.

We have a mouse in our room.

I had seen suggestive evidence of such a creature in our room earlier this week but had brushed it off with a rather naïve hangover from my childhood: “It can’t be a mouse. This is America.” But of course last night, right after we had finally wrapped up our thoughts on facing the future with courage, I heard an unnerving scratching under the bed. I flipped on the lamp and sure enough, a brown ball of fuzz scurried under the bedside table.

I nearly had a heart attack.

   

We spent the next 30 minutes trying to whack it with shoe then scrounged up a trap out of the garage and planted it strategically on the floor in the corner, all the while terrified that Annabelle would somehow miraculously climb out of her crib in the night, open her closed door, walk into our room and step on the trap. I went back to bed cramped with the suspense of waiting for the trap to spring shut (Did it get my baby?) and deeply angry at the tiny rodent in our house. How dare a mouse come into my bedroom!

I have distinct memories of rodents in our house in North Africa that could carry this little guy here around in their mouths. One of the first nights there we were sleeping in a mud tukul when we heard the jaws-of-death trap that Bryan was always afraid would take his arm off every time he set it up snap shut with a crack like a gunshot on the other side of the room. We laid there in the dark for a moment and then recoiled in horror as we heard metal being dragged slowly across the cement floor. Another time, our cat Nimir brought a rat almost as big as he was into our living room and then let it go at the feet of our horrified American guests. The maimed animal scurried and bled all across our house with our sadistic cat chasing and batted at it while I uselessly ran after him trying to shoo them both outside. It was terrible. But on both of these occasions, and many others in between (I won’t mention the rat in the toilet incident), I remember laughing. Yes, of course, it was disgusting and irritating, but it didn’t really upset me. It just seemed to come with the territory. It was just part of the deal. But last night I was downright mad.

Expectations, I am learning, are everything. Realistic or otherwise, they have incredible power to shape your perspective. Expect a few rats and you get free entertainment. Expect a pristine home and you get a sleepless night and a headache the next morning.

I would do well to remember this. It seems like sometimes I forget that trying to live faithfully, to make a difference, to carve out a life of compassion, to try and live to our fullest human potential – whatever you want to call it, living well, is going to cost us sometimes. It will put us around a few rats from time to time, whether they are situations, or feelings, or people or…well, rats. But somehow knowing that going into it all helps me so much. They honestly don’t seem so bad when you know they are coming. In fact, sometimes their nasty little presence helps remind me that maybe I’m in the right place after all.

I’ve spent too much time being mad at mice lately. I’m ready to laugh at rats again.          

                                        (I'm sorry, I had to.)