Mama's Havin Trauma

I am a victim of the warm, fuzzy, much beloved midcentury children's book. My generation of suburbanites and our privileged, Disney-loving offspring have been lulled - LULLED, I tell you, into thinking that mice are gentle, furry, adorable little creatures who dwell in cute, cozy, lamplit abodes behind perfectly arched miniature doorways carved in the baseboards of someone else's house.  They dine on mellow, aged cheddar and wear bonnets and tiny sprigged frocks and drink tea.  That's the world I want back, now that my innocence has been shattered.

Let me tell you.  The reality is toxic poop and violent traps.

  Night before last, Sir and I were watching the last few spellbinding minutes of The Bachelor. (Yes, this is a family blog so I can't divulge how I induced him to actually sit through an episode of that ridiculousness - suffice it to say it involved promises of chicken parmesan and apple cake in an iron skillet and a free car wash.)  Suddenly, a  furry, black varmint with a long, bald, nasty black tail shot right across the living room, into the open cabinet where our cable box and dvd player sit, up the bundled cords, and into the opening in the wall where said cords reside.

I screamed like a six-year-old on a playground.  Sir jumped up with catlike reflexes.  I screamed again.  Sir put his hands over his ears.  Sean sent Ashlee home.  She cried in the limo with the same sense of hopelessness I felt.  I did what all panicky women do when faced with a challenge.  I posted on Facebook.  My brilliant friend A suggested that we stuff something in the wall quickly, and I, in a tone of voice that poor Sir had never heard before, barked the order gently suggested that Sir might wish to find a towel and put it rather rapidly in that opening.  I wasn't able to go get said towel for him because I was STANDING ON THE SOFA WITH MY EYES GLUED TO THAT SPOT. For two hours. And then all day yesterday.

So Sir plugged the hole, and yesterday afternoon brought home a mousetrap or two.  His deranged wife said something to the effect of  "Don't you even COME home with less than a dozen traps Dear, please bring more than one."  He had springloaded traps, and sticky traps, and giant hockey puck traps with trap doors, and (I feel like Bubba Gump) we baited them all and placed them near the dreaded cord opening and all over the basement.  Sir removed the towel, and I screamed several more times, and then this morning, we found that The Mouse or one of his brothers had chosen the Disk of Death filled with peanut butter.

In a cruel twist of fate, I felt sorry for the little guy.....for a brief moment.

And then my heroes Hubie and CJ from Better Termite and Pest Control of the Northern Virginia Area, A Family Owned and Operated Business arrived in their little truck.  They grinned reassuringly as they shone their  flashlight beams into the dark recesses of my upscale kitchen and said, "Yep, you gotcha some pipe runners for sure.  I'm seein' droppings way back under your dishwasher, your stove, your furnace, your sump pump and your kitchen sink - oh, and looky there where they been chewin' on the insulation around your gas and water intake."

I die.

I begged them to tell me that it was just that one rogue mini-monster who stumbled in through the front door and wreaked havoc in five or ten minutes and then had the decency to surrender to the trap.  Surely I could not have been standing for two months in front of that very kitchen sink, scrubbing my fingers to the bone not two feet away from a FAMILY of nightmarish, skittering, gnawing rodents.  Hubie and CJ bestowed their well-practiced, pitying smiles upon me and set out more traps.   Sure, we're living in the fanciest home I've ever been privileged to have, paying rent that makes a grown man weep - why NOT play host to the Greater DC Society of Rodents Cotillion?

I have a sweet closet in the basement which houses only table linens, candles and holiday decorations.  (It's the blessing of having rented a house too big for just the two of us in order to be close to Sir's work.)  I found a lone tealight candle with its metal cup chewed to shreds, the slivers scattered all over the carpet.  Hubie said the mice were collecting nesting materials, and it was just lucky they hadn't chewed up the tablecloths instead.

I die again.

I had just been sitting on the floor in  that closet, sorting the shelves, the day before.

CJ pointed out the poop - it looks like pieces of pencil lead or grains of black rice.  Hubie cautioned me to sweep them up with a soft brush and be sure to wear a protective mask and rubber gloves because they release hospitalization-worthy viruses into the air.  Oh, and we'll know better how many mice we're talking  by how much MORE poop there is in two weeks (when Hubie returns to seal things up.)  It was all I could do not to throw up right on the both of them.

 GAGGING as I type, I'm headed to Home Depot to purchase the necessary disposal items so I can spend my afternoon cleaning up their business.  I'm pretty sure I would trade Sir's car for a hazmat team right now.  I want one of those white suits the scientists wore when examining ET, and I want a thousand mousetraps, and immediate PCS orders to anywhere I can find a hermetically sealed apartment.  And I want my mommy.