Problems with Pigeons
By Maria Jerinic
Recently a pigeon got caught in my cat’s self-feeder, one of those tall cylinders designed to let a little bit of food out at a time. We leave it on the back patio when we go away for a night or two. It lets Kitty cat around. She likes the freedom.
I have an infant and a toddler, my excuse for why after we returned from our last trip, I forgot to clean the feeder and put it away. So a few days later, while the three of us were having lunch, I glanced out the kitchen window and noticed several pigeons flocking around the dish. Immediately I began to bang on the window, and they all flew away, all except the one that in its greediness had managed to wedge itself into the cylinder.
What to do, what to do? Our neighborhood had been having pigeon-control problems and thoughts of insidious diseases and feline hunting parties crowded into my mind. But it was more than that; I was just plain scared. I danced around the kitchen for a few minutes in fear and frustration while my two children watched, befuddled. I explained the situation to them. “There’s a bird stuck. We’ve got to get it out, or Kitty’s going to get it.” My husband was out of town, and we had just moved, so I didn’t know anyone, couldn’t summon a soul to rescue me. I was sure the fire department wouldn’t appreciate a call, but I considered it for a few minutes. Finally, after my son asked me for the sixth time what would happen to the bird, I just went onto the patio, and before I could think about it too much, I reached out and unscrewed the feeder’s lid. I jumped back. The pigeon fluttered. It rustled around, but no exit.
“Great, just great,” I sputtered and did another dance. Then I ran up to the feeder, kicked it over, leapt behind the hot tub, and watched the bird fly away all to the sound of my slamming heart and my son’s repeated cries, “We hate birds!”
My relief was tempered. What was worse, that my son knew the word “hate” or that he harbored this prejudice against pigeons? Such anti-birdism could not be a good thing, and I knew instantly that it was my all fault as was his recent use of the word “butt.” (After a fifteen minute diatribe in which I wondered to my friend where he had picked up the word, she, almost immediately, caught me using it.)
I had betrayed my children. Not only had I uttered undesirable sentiments, I had let them witness my raw fear, my panic. How would they understand it, digest it?
For this moment was just another example of how parenthood has forced me to accept a truth about myself, one that I have long suspected and resisted. I am a coward. And parents, I’m increasingly convinced, have no business being cowards. Yet since I have had children, my cowardice has increased to the extent that I am almost always afraid. Fear is constantly there, hovering at the fringes of my consciousness, a nagging reminder that there are so many horrors that threaten my children, from global destruction to my son’s precocious ability to pry apart the childproof locks on the cabinets. It’s really a blessing that I’m so exhausted from our days together; otherwise I’d never get to sleep.
This particular failure haunted me for the rest of the day, the rest of the week. I tried to understand why a bird stuck in a feeder was so horrifying. Why was I so scared? My mother would never have behaved this way, and she was not someone whom you would describe as brave. From her I inherited my tendency to panic when the toilet overflows or the sliding closet door jumps off the track (as my son has inherited from me the tendency to knock the closet door off the track).
But my mother has something I do not have, guts when it comes to the possibility of guts. She would charge out immediately to save the poor mouse or chipmunk that our cat was torturing. She resignedly cleared away the body parts left from little animals that were not so fortunate and buried them behind the stone wall in our back yard, in what came to be known as the Kitty Burial Plot. (Her children avoided it at all costs.) If the dog had an accident inside, she cleaned it up, while the rest of us, my father included, ran screaming to the far reaches of the house. But the example that most boggles my mind is the uncomplaining care she took of our rabbit’s teeth. He was a little Netherland Dwarf; we called him Puff to his face and Saber-Tooth Bunny behind his back. He had a condition that caused his bottom teeth to grow out of his mouth into fangs, and his top teeth to grow down his throat. It was my mother’s job, after one lesson from the vet, to clip these teeth so he could eat, so he would not choke himself.
The years have only increased my awe that my mother was able to do this on a regular basis, as if she were just changing a litter box. For me, it’s not just pigeons. I have still not gotten over the horror, almost ten years old, of having to remove a dead kitten from my postpartum cat’s nest. My med student roommate, the one who talked affectionately of the cadaver she was dissecting, couldn’t bring herself to do it. It was up to me. I spent the few hours before I managed to gather the courage skulking around my office, hoping one of the environmentalists, outdoorsy types I worked with would offer to come over and do it for me. No such luck.
My fear leaves me disgusted. A poor innocent creature needs help. Why the panic? ? If I can hardly face cleaning a nest so that new kittens can thrive or freeing a helpless pigeon from a cat dish, how am I going to teach my children to be strong, brave, and compassionate? How am I going to protect them from the really scary things of this world? And yes I know that I can’t protect them from everything, but I want my children to feel safe for as long as possible, to feel, for a while, that I can always remedy what’s wrong in their world. If I panic, don’t they lose this?
But I can only endure so much self-flagellation. Either I am an optimist or all too willing to forgive myself, but as I think about my mother, I have to admit that she probably did not jump eagerly at the chance to clip a rabbit’s teeth or to pry a chipmunk from a cat’s claws. I have, however, no memory of her fear, of her hesitation, but just that she acted and made the world right. And I did too. I did go kick that feeder to free the bird. I did not succumb to the temptation to shut the blinds and leave it to the neighborhood predators. I wasn’t particularly heroic, but I faced a fear, and I did it because I knew that however small, my children were watching.
And so, perhaps, my pigeon becomes a dove. While there is no olive branch, there is hope, hope that while I never know what ridiculous or valid terrors will rise up to challenge me in the course of a day, for the sake of my children, I will – maybe, probably -- face them. And if I’m lucky, that’s what we’ll all remember.
Maria Jerinic is now a mother of three in Las Vegas, Nevada. She also teaches in the Honors Program at UNLV and is an editor for Topics with Victorian Literature and Culture. Her personal essay, “License to Knit,” recently appeared in Knit Lit the Third: We Spin More Yarns (2005).
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