Sometimes I can be brave like Atticus and Meg. But sometimes I avoid conflict. Sometimes, when a problem is complicated, and I’m worried that solving it will lead one of my loved ones to think I am something other than kind, steady, and reliable, I’ll keep my mouth glued shut and my worries tamped down until I’m about to boil over like Vesuvius. At this point, my insides begin to curdle, and then I overreact to minor annoyances. Research shows this is exactly how kind, steady, and reliable people behave.
As you can imagine, this tendency has its pitfalls. But give me an activity where I can channel my latent anxiety, frustration, and rage into conquering a formidable obstacle, and I’ll dive right in. Such activities include, and are apparently limited to, combat sports, soccer, writing, running, and quilting.
I’ve admired my sister-in-law’s gorgeous quilts since about 2005, and after my kids were born, I wanted to learn to make my own. Some of the most beloved characters in our house are—keep your eyes peeled for some foreshadowing here—Little Critter, Charlie and Mouse, and Calvin and Hobbes, all of whom snuggle beneath cozy patchwork. With visions from 1000 storytimes dancing in my head, I eventually braved a twin-sized quilt for my younger son, with the goal of making a coordinating one for his big brother.
Over the course of 2020, my sewing efforts took on a manic edge. Life was utter monotony, regularly interrupted by bottomless horror. I felt like I was watching an eternal trainwreck, and that was just the national stuff. My personal life teemed with awkward situations begging to be addressed. But because I am a stifled volcano, I convinced myself that I had enough to deal with and it would be kinder to myself to just… not. I mean, there was a pandemic! We moms need self-care.
It’s just that this brand of self-care made me miserable. And the situations continued to exist, even though I specifically avoided them for months. When it became apparent that I had no other choice, I got busy with trying to work things out, and despite my lack of elegance, the results were fruitful. Pompeii didn’t happen.
Some discussions were more excruciating than others. I hate making people sad, but I also hate being dishonest, and I was in a position where these two aversions were at odds. I came to understand that my private mission to never let anyone down in any way, for any reason, no matter what, was impossible. Painful as it all was, it was clarifying too. Later, I talked to my husband about how much better it is to just be forthright. This was in no way an epiphany to him, but he nodded kindly.
The dismantling of some of my most cherished illusions about myself, my personal history, and my world was a tad draining. Sewing had provided some solace during this time— here was an action I could take where my progress, no matter how small, was evident, where I wasn’t plagued with existential dread, and where my habit of muttering curses while stressed would be drowned out by the sound of the sewing machine. I hoped my older son’s quilt would be an uplifting project that would get me through what promised to be a depressing winter. But my efforts ground to a screeching halt when the mice came.
Our house had a tight layout. The kitchen, dining area, and living room all overlapped in a compact square. One short staircase led up to the small bedrooms, and one led down to a small basement. This arrangement made it possible to supervise all three of my kids from anywhere in the house. Granted, this would also be possible in a mansion considering that talking, sprinting, and being right next to me are their three favorite pastimes. It was a tight squeeze, but our home’s simplicity felt comforting to me.
The one thing that could make me feel like torching our cozy abode arrived a few days after Christmas. Related to the global catastrophes and the local implosions, it had been a rather melancholy yuletide. Before we could gather up the last of the wrapping paper scraps, some uninvited guests arrived to investigate the detritus. My anxiety was at an all-time high, and their arrival felt like a sick joke. Here I am, at home with my three cherubs nearly all the time, and now you’re telling me we must share quarters with disease-carrying small mammals?
Still, it was not our first rodeo, so we set the traps, expecting quick success. But not this year. Oh no, this year’s models were cunning and swift, clearly the pedigree of Martin the Warrior, Ralph, and Despereaux. One trotted into our dining area while we attempted a family game night at the table. One peeked out of the kitchen each evening at precisely the moment I flopped down on the couch for a prolonged exhale. They dove beneath our appliances, pooped on our countertops, and even had the temerity to set their nasty little paws upon our living room rug.
After much irritation, we did manage to catch two of the mice. One, however, had an unquenchable spirit. He remained infuriatingly elusive, and he had made his home somewhere in the vicinity of my husband’s tattered, beloved blue recliner. We encircled it with traps each night, and each night he flitted between these traps before climbing onto the arm of the chair to stare at us.
For the next step of my quilt, I needed to lay out its pieces and pin them together. But since the living room floor was the one place in the house where I had space to do that, and since the remaining mouse was confirmed to live somewhere very near the living room floor, I couldn’t take the plunge. I hated that mouse. He ruined my mornings when I found his poop, he ruined my evenings when I saw him out jogging. I couldn’t bear the thought of him touching my son’s quilt while I tried to pin it. I just knew if it happened, it would be the one thing that sent me over the edge. And I needed to hold it together. So, in the name of self-care, I decided to wait until the mouse was gone.
But he didn’t go. And as we all know by now, when problems don’t go away on their own, it’s time for mitigation. Mitigating the mouse problem meant waking up in the morning, removing all the traps from the floor before the kids found them, removing all mouse droppings from the floor before the kids touched them, and sanitizing all countertops before we needed to use them. Over the weeks I engaged in this ritual, my furry enemy began to seem less like a cosmic joke and more like a knock-knock joke. He stopped ruining my day. But he was always there.
My neglected quilt rested in pieces on the guest bed. Due to a sharp increase in online shopping and a sharp decrease in guests, I had amassed a teetering pile of cardboard boxes in the same area. But now I needed to access the boxes, because I needed to pack the boxes, because I needed to move all our stuff to a new house, as soon as we found and purchased a different house, which would be any day now, according to my mental timeline. And to get the ball rolling, I needed to finish that quilt, mouse be damned.
One early spring evening, I set my sewing machine up on the dining room table, held my breath, and pinned the quilt. The mouse didn’t come. I hauled my cherished project over to the table and got busy. The quilt was a spread of reds and blues—my son’s favorite color, and mine. All of the prints reminded me of things he liked. Speckles like on a camping mug. Trucks carrying fireworks. Candy recipes in loopy cursive. Smiling, sleepy clouds. I’d used some of the same fabrics in his brother’s quilt and planned to incorporate them into future ones. It’s so satisfying to take 12 overwhelming yards of cotton, deconstruct them, and rearrange them into something beautiful, comforting, and—
SNAP.
I locked eyes with my husband, who was stretched out on the couch across the room. He immediately began a solemn vocal rendition of taps. Being less psychologically tortured by the mouse than I, he had silently observed it pop out from beneath the blue chair while I was busy contemplating the wonders of fabric. The mouse surveyed the perimeter, saw that my quilt and I were parked in its usual evening route to the kitchen, and changed course.
After its trek through the kitchen, its frazzled rodent-Siri directed it not through the dining area, but through the living area and under my beloved bookshelf. This was the one place we could leave a trap during waking hours without endangering the kids. One had been waiting there since the mice first arrived, and they had even nibbled at its now-stale peanut butter, but the lone survivor had neglected the area in recent weeks. That night, it went under the bookshelf, and that was the end.
In my adult life, there has been a prevailing theme—when I need to adjust my mindset, I will only do so after being slapped in the face with the stark clarity of my foolishness. I imagine God has a divine hammer labelled “Catherine’s Edification,” and he uses this to bluntly recalibrate my pride. Despite waxing poetic to my husband about the fruitlessness of avoiding the inevitable, despite my spoken conviction that my actions are more powerful than my evasion, despite all the painful exchanges that hadn’t yet killed me, the prospect of one more ugly confrontation still felt like too much to handle—even though this particular challenger was four inches long. It turned out that the secret to defeating the mouse was to stop waiting for it to go away, and to make a move.
It’s been a year and a half since I finished that quilt, and I’m glad to report that since then, I’ve been mostly too busy for my sewing machine. The world has opened up. I have happier things to think about. But now my daughter has a big girl bed, and the weather is getting colder. I am starting to work on her quilt, and I keep thinking of that mouse.
I despised my furry foe, but I was able to turn its existence and demise into a useful personal metaphor, and for that, I thank it. I’m hoping its descendants aren’t plotting revenge. Based on the sum total of my life experience up to this point, I am dooming myself to a rodent invasion tomorrow by hitting publish today. But I’ll risk it. In this way, I am demonstrating to the universe that I have learned my lesson and no more rodent-based education is necessary. Okay, universe?
🤣 Fine thoughts, Catherine!