I'm your baby and I'll cry if I want to. Exchange your experiences with infants who wail in the Mothers Who Think section of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Kiddie pants or kiddie porn?
By Deborah A. Lott
Nothing comes between kids and their Calvins -- except charges of pedophilia
(03/12/99)

Lost in the supermarket
By Sallie Tisdale
A trip to the store leads to appalling moments in the world of too much and nothing good enough
(03/11/99)

Why I didn't report my rape
By Jenn Shreve
I believe Juanita Broaddrick because I know why women keep silent
(03/10/99)

Small massacres
By Patrick Chamoiseau
A child in Martinique reaches into the dark corners of imagination with the miraculous force of fire
(03/09/99)

The walls around the garden
By Fiona Morgan
An interview with Tara Bahrampour, author of "To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America"
(03/08/99)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

_____After preaching respect for animals to my kids, how
_____could I finesse my death wish for the rats in our walls?

BY JILL WOLFSON | Something creepy was happening in our living room. My children, huddling around me, had the circle eyes of really bad science fiction actors acting "scared."

"It's nothing," I pretended.

"It's something," insisted my 12-year-old son. OK, so there was a sound, a clippity-clop much like the cast of "Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk" tap-dancing the finale in our walls.

"Is it ghosts?" my daughter asked.

I didn't answer right away. That's because I was praying. Please, please, please, let it be a ghost. Let it be Aunt Minnie who promised to come back and haunt us for not visiting her enough in the nursing home. Let it be Christmas Past. Let it be anything except for what I knew it to be.

"Mom, why are your lips moving?" my son asked.

"It's not ghosts," I said. "It's rats."

We humans don't call it going "rat-fuck" without good reason. The next few days, despite my prayers that the rats would decide to just pack up and leave on their own, they continued to raise hell in our walls. One night I jolted out of bed thinking, Earthquake! Evenings were especially wild. I have since learned that early evening, the cocktail hour, is also the preferred rat nookie hour, with female rats going "into season" every four to five days and remaining hot for action 12 hours at a time.

"You know, you can't just ignore rats. You have to do something," my husband said. "Rats have babies. Lots of babies."

"We can capture the babies and make them our pets," my 9-year-old daughter, the family nurturer, interjected dreamily.

We are, in fact, a rodent family, the way some families are cat or dog families. Our current pet, Hamsterdam, lives in a swank cage with a wheel, slides and a salad bar of gourmet rodent food. He is one fat, spoiled hamster. Not long ago, we made the mistake of getting a second "male" hamster to keep him company. Before we knew it, the new friend had given birth to a litter of eight. There are never enough loving foster homes for all the world's unplanned hamsters. So, suddenly, we had another litter. (As my daughter said at the time, "Yuck, that means Hamsterdam had sex with his granddaughter. That's like me having ..." I stopped her there.)

I did some swift mathematical calculations. Rats become breeders in only two months. The Wilt Chamberlains of the animal world, rats can mate up to 20 times a day. I read somewhere that New York City has about 28 million rats running around, a rat-to-people ratio of four to one. Considering the pitter-patter in our walls, we were well on our way to matching Brooklyn.

Willard! Evil beady eyes, sharp teeth, a face that escorts you to hell. Rats who swim through the sewers and enter the finest homes via the toilet. Rats who chew through aluminum siding, concrete, electrical wires. They burn down homes! They leave their droppings in the hors d'oeuvres! Rats who climb into cribs and suck out a baby's breath! No, wait -- those are cats. But never mind. What about the Black Death!

"OK," I finally agreed, "you can't ignore rats. What do you do?"

You go to the Yellow Pages. Excavating and Exercise and Eyelets. There was Evictions, but no Exterminators. I was puzzled until I caught on to the linguistic diplomacy. The word "exterminator" exudes darkness, concentration camps, Arnold Schwarzenegger with a machine gun. Modern Americans prefer more subtlety to their pogroms. I turned to "P" for Pest Control.

In my Northern California town of 50,000, there are 10 pages devoted to pest control services. My town, like New York, is also a harbor city, which makes it a haven for rats. Clearly, our family was not alone in our little problem. But which pest control specialist to call?

I considered a full-page ad for a company offering the Nazi-esque "Complete Solution." A wholesome family of four beamed gratefully at a man holding a 30-gallon spray can of poison, enough, I figured, to mutate the genes of my children, their children and their children's children. Another ad took a more whimsical approach: the Piped Piper leading away a line of cockroaches, sow bugs, earwigs and termites. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that story didn't have such a happy ending.

For $69.95, I could purchase a Rat Zapper, "composed of a power supply and an electrocution chamber," which claimed to be clean (no blood or guts) and more merciful than snap traps and glue boards. This struck me as a peculiar boast -- like death penalty advocates alleging that fryin' 'em is more humane because it's less messy than a firing squad.

"Definitely not that one!" my daughter said, pointing to an ad with a cartoon rat dressed in a jaunty, big-city hat and wise-guy pants -- Joe Mantegna playing a rat. Looming over him, eight times the rat's size, was a cartoon relative of "Spy vs. Spy." He beckoned friendlylike to the rat, but hidden behind his back was a huge mallet.

"No fair," my son said. "The rat doesn't even have a chance."

He had a point. The rat was a rat, but the human, sneaky and poised for overkill, was obviously a rat, too.

"Yeah, you say we shouldn't hurt animals," my daughter said. "We should respect them."

I started to squirm. Why didn't they want to talk about something less complicated, like, say, my own personal drug experiences? "But the rats are in our house." I sounded lame, even to my sensible middle-aged ears.

My son, the lawyer-to-be, didn't miss a beat. "Don't you mean that our house is on their land?"

My daughter also aimed and fired with liberal rhetoric. "Yeah, is it the rat's fault that he wasn't born in a pet store like Hamsterdam?"

I had obviously taught my children well. Respect for life. No killing just to kill. Stand up for the downtrodden. After all, doesn't a rat just want what the rest of us want, a roof over his head and a little something to nosh? I had talked to them about why I'm a vegetarian and why, if they were going to eat meat, they should be grateful to the animal that sacrificed its life for their burger.

Years ago, when our vegetable garden was under siege by snails, my son and his friend decided to save our harvest by giving the culprits "snail flying lessons" (they all flunked). It was me, friend to the snails, who insisted that we hand pick them and drive the snails to a field where they could live out their lives in slimy happiness. That was the Jainist in me, the person who's perfectly willing to seek an I-Thou relationship with a rat.

But there's also the part of me that's my mother's daughter, and that part of me wants nothing to do with an urban wildlife encounter. My mother shivers involuntarily at the sight of a spider in the bathtub and actually shrieked, "Eek! A mouse!" when one dashed across the garage. I wanted to set a good example for the kids. I wanted to do right by the rats. But I also wanted them off my real estate.

I found an ad for Critter Control that boasted "exclusion, prevention and humane removal." There was hope in any place that calls vermin "critters."

N E X T_ P A G E: Blame it on El Niño