Our hearts have surrendered to a 4-inch blind newborn. Darla, mother to five baby bunnies just Saturday, which she seemed to be tending to busily enough when we peered into her hutch, taking bundles of hay into her mouth and laying them over her kits, did not in the end seem to be able to feed them. Now we have the survivor, named Jordan Tikki (Tikvah, the Hebrew word for 'hope' which speaks volumes), and all of us are enslaved by her extreme vulnerability, a captive, whimpering audience to her feeble movements and need for warmth. We cup her tiny body in our hands, have scarecely left her alone except for our first meal as surrogate parents to this newborn rabbit and even then she was only a few feet away on a countertop in her blue felt-lined, hay-padded box. Ilana spends hours a day holding her, belying her own ten years. She is doing all the things a new mother does, fawning, adjusting, worrying, kvelling.
This time last year, Ilana and I were quite literally engaged in a poetic struggle; she pleading for a pet rabbit, I resisting and turning my belligerence into a writing exercise to avoid hers. It worked and we produced a poem to which she added pictures and titled, "Other than a Fish," the title really a refrain at the end of each verse suggesting other insane ideas for pets. Each verse was a testament to her doggedness to have anything but a fish. A bunny was her uncompromised desire.
But let me start at the beginning.
Years ago I met a woman, mother of two sons then, pregnant with her soon-to-be third son and not yet thinking of the daughter she would also eventually have. When G and I met, I admired her busy household, made busier than my two child family because she had two dogs. And not only did she go onto have a 3rd and 4th baby - I was content to stop at the third child, but was held in thrall by her ability to manage 4, to want to in spite of an au pair who could do so much of the daily work of child-raising for her - she got a guinea pig and a cat, then another dog. Chickens, too, and a rooster which woke me up in the dark cold of a January morning when I visited G in her Chicago suburb and I sat up in bed and tried to remember where I was. I could harldly believe how smoothly it all seemed to work in her home; how the animals moved about with the people in the house, dogs and cats getting underfoot, being loved, rejected, fed, counted on, absorbed, ignored.
Eventually, we got a dog. Norman. My childhood was spent with cats, avoiding dogs, fearing them. But we went to the pound 6 years ago and I recall with some shame and gratitude that my unwillingness finally gave way to the bleeding heart I must have inherited from my mother. Norman stole my conviction. There he was, doomed. He'd been in the pound for 5 days and stood, stalwart, perhaps resigned to his fate, unbeseeching in the deafening corridor we wandered. All the other dogs campaigned hard to get out of there and Ilana, I remember, 4 at the time, beelined for the puppies. I would have, too, since we talked about waiting till spring and getting a puppy we could train and spend the summer getting to know on our terms. But Norman's mute gaze seemed to find us, and there I stood in front of his cage and wept for the dog we probably wouldn't take home because I had told everyone as we pulled away from the curb, "we are not taking an animal home today" only to see Joe and Ariel exchange a conspiratorial smirk they thought I'd miss.
We walked Norman in the little pet cemetery and he was trembling and unwilling to move much. We tried coaxing him out of a trauma we didn't understand and then had the keeper put him back, opting for a beautiful Nikita named Austin that ran us around as if pumped on steroids, too strong even for Joe. Smitten even as we knew Austin was probably bionic and out of our league, we put him back and prepared to leave, all of us weepy over poor, bedraggled Norman. But after the kids got into the car, I looked at Joe and told him, "I'm going back inside to see him" and asked the keeper what Norman would be like with a person he knows. So, she brought him out and he was all over her with happiness, the clever cur. We took him home. He had me regretting the decision for a good half-year as he chewed shoes, belts, brushes, and girls' panties from the dirty laundry! Early on I tried wrestling him to the ground and growling at him when he was out of line - a misbegotten piece of advice I got from a neighboring dog owner; I was lucky he didn't take a bite out of me for trying to tell him who his quavering boss was! But we called Willie in, a K-9 expert and he taught us a few tricks. Since then, with a few endearing and annoying quirks that are quintessential Norman (yes, underwear if it's dangling from the hamper), he has become a grateful and loyal pet. I've left the wrestling to Joe and the two go at it like a pair of lions.
Since bringing in the newborn bunny, Joe has come home early twice to aid in the feeding and care of this miniscule heartthrob, this robber rabbit, this tiny white hope. Now he's holding Jordan Tikki in his hand and cleaning her after a feeding that, if it wasn't vigorous, gave us hope that she was interested as she rooted around for more, craned her little head toward a warm space on Ariel's or Joe's shirt. I took a picture of her little mustachioed face, captioning it, "Got Milk?" but her features are practically embryonic even at 4 days, even at zoom-in range with my camera phone.
Norman has been a chap about it, truly, and getting extra treats because he's so good about not mauling the newest member of our family, not even sniffing around her box. He does as he always has done; following us from room to room and laying heavily at our feet or near them, waiting for someone to leap up and show him the way to the next room, his black-outlined brown eyes, doleful forever, finally beseeching, 'can I stay with you always?' He knows the answer, though it seems to be the question lingering there all the time, even before our tiny orphan came in.
A friend asked me if I resented Darla for abandoning her kits. At first I was stunned by the rejection of her flesh and blood. But no, resentment hasn't occurred to me mainly because Darla might not be mother material. She may, as this friend pointed out, need her freedom, love her emancipation now that Fletch, her hutch mate and the father of her kits, is fixed but good and no amount of surprises at her backside will yield more than a hind-leg warning from her or a lady-like skip toward a plump patch of grass. So, I look at it, as I hope the kids do, as a possibility, a cruel condition of Nature, a sly crook of Nature's finger that might have steered Darla astray, and fooled us all, not knowing she couldn't be a mother.
Last night, our first with Jordan Tikki in the house, Joe and I hardly slept. If I wasn't padding into Ilana's breezeless room to touch the tiny sleeping form in the blue box on her desk, to reassure myself of a pulse, then Joe was. I even drank water on one of those trips so I would need to waken myself to pee again before dawn and check one more time.
Tonight, someone sedate us. Stat.
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