ODD mom moments

Among the many things my pre-children self could never have predicted I would say are various versions of “we don’t bring _____ in the house”. In fact I can distinctly remember walking into my guest bathroom one afternoon and seeing a well-laid out miniature tea party with barbie teacups and tiny saucers. And the guests of honor? A family of pill bugs. 

“Rolly-polly tea parties are an outside activity,” I voiced to anyone who would listen.

Yep. I never thought I would say that.

Aurora has a special affinity for the undesirables of the world. Snakes. Spiders. Even flies. She doesn’t just love to hold them. She also gets VERY upset when we kill them. We live next to a river, and at times we get little garter snakes in our yard. I maybe have said, “No snakes in the house,” a hundred times. She will catch them, let them slither around her hands for a while, and then release them closer to the river where nobody can step on them. 

Spiders in the house? She will catch them and release them outside.

Flies? She can’t usually catch them, but she can hide the fly swatters in order to protect the ‘poor things’. 

And she does. 

When Aurora was in second grade, her teacher brought a couple of giant cockroaches to her class. After that, she begged me to let her have a pet cockroach. 

I said no.

About three years ago, when Aurora was seven, I was cleaning out her room in preparation for a move. You can imagine how fun cleaning her room is…so I maybe had put it off for a long time. It was pretty bad. I finally got to a point where I could move her bed to clean under it. It is one of those beds with shelves and drawers underneath it, so in theory there shouldn’t have been much under there. Unbeknownst to me, however, it had become a sort of treasure box for Aurora.

A treasure box wherein she hid all of her treasure and then promptly forgot about it. I couldn’t fit under her bed behind the shelves, but she could. 

I managed to move the bed and proceeded to sift, sort, and place the items in their proper homes (mostly in the garbage).

I began to notice a strange, unpleasant smell coming from the conglomeration of random objects. Eventually I came to the source of the smell. Something had been wrapped in a plastic grocery sack and stuffed into a corner. 

It’s probably something that embarrassed Aurora…like poopy underwear or something, I thought.

Knowing that the smell would obviously increase once I opened the sack, I held my breath, picked up the sack, and unwrapped.

I stared down at the lifeless form of…a chick? It was a baby bird of some kind. Maybe a duckling. Maybe some other bird. It was yellow and fuzzy looking. If not for the fact that it was dead…and smelled awfully rotten…it was perfectly preserved. It looked stuffed. Or like a body that has been prepared for a funeral. It looked almost fake but…whole. I couldn’t see any signs of injury or decay in the 10 seconds I stared at it.

And then I promptly fainted.

Ok, I didn’t actually faint, but I felt incredibly light-headed and squeamish. I had a ringing in my ears and I let out a silent scream of pure disgustedness.

I had still been holding my breath (which may have contributed to the light-headedness), but the shock of what I was seeing prompted me to forget and take in a breath. Oh, how it did reek.

And fainting would have been totally understandable in the moment.

Once I again became aware of my surroundings, I rewrapped the…object…and dashed to the outdoor garbage can to dispose of it. And washed and washed and washed my hands.

“So, Aurora,” I began as nonchalantly as I could manage, “I was cleaning out under your bed. I found a bird.”

Her jaw dropped in horror. “Oh no,” she muttered, “I forgot.”

Generally when Aurora was confronted with something she had done wrong, she denied it or tried to pin it on someone else. Not this time. While she never did share the story behind why she had a dead baby bird under her bed, I think the shock of having me find it caused her, in that moment, to forget to deny it. 

One unfortunate situation she did try to deny, however, took place not too long after the malodorous dead bird incident. One day I found tucked away in Aurora’s closet a whole bird egg. It was small and speckled. I am not a bird egg expert, but it looked like maybe a sparrow egg. I asked her where it came from. She said she had no idea. 

Looking more closely, I could see that she had set up the area with warm clothes around it. I’m pretty sure she was trying to hatch it. 

Yep. 

I am positive she didn’t mean for it to never have a chance to live. This is a situation where her love of nature and beauty and her interest in how things work overtook over her ability to reason and became destructive. This is a common ending to Aurora adventures. She lacks the skill of knowing when she has crossed the line from curious to destructive. And she exhibits great amounts of anger when I suggest she has crossed that line.

In case you are wondering, she eventually broke the egg open, leaving the remnants in her bathroom for me to find. (She rarely cleaned up after herself even to cover her own tracks.)

Pill bugs, flies, snakes, spiders, cockroaches, and dead birds. Aurora sees beauty in everything from the lowest of the creatures to the mightiest. I am absolutely certain that her ability to do so is a God-given gift that will serve her well.

I just wish she would pursue these particular interests outside.