The husband and I were sitting in the living room reading last night; he on the sofa, me in the easy chair. Suddenly he jumps up and says, “I swear I just saw a mouse run under the sofa.” The living room opens to a hallway and the kitchen–there’s no door. He immediately starts moving furniture to block the entrance. He already had the kitchen table on its side and was moving it into place when he looks and me and says, “What are you doing? We have to block it in.”

I’m embarrassed to say that my first instinct when he said there was a mouse in the room was to pull my sock-clad feet off the floor and scan the room from the relative safety of the chair. I’ve always prided myself on not being squeamish. When our daughter split her forehead open (she was running in the house, slipped, and hit her head on the door frame–this is why mothers say don’t run in the house), I was the one who held her hand while the doctor stitched her back together and he was the one turning green and looking as though he was going to pass out. I once dislocated two fingers and reset them on my own. I’m an old school punk who used to slam dance to Suicidal Tendencies and the Pink Holes for crying out loud. Ironically, I was reading Cinderella Ate My Daughter, by Peggy Orenstein, which examines contemporary girlie-girl culture. She reaches a lot of the same conclusions as I have (although with far better research). The kid is five and has drunk the Princess Kool-Aid. I tell her that most of the time, the princess just sits around waiting for some prince to come and rescue her and who wants that? And yet there I was, huddled on the chair, waiting for my handsome prince to catch the fucking mouse.

I felt shame for about four seconds, then hopped off my chair/pedestal and grabbed a kitchen chair to help block the entrance way to the living room. We tipped all the furniture to look underneath and didn’t see anything. Finally, behind the bookcase and lamp in the corner, he saw it. It was a baby field mouse, dark gray with a little pink tummy. It was about the size of two cotton balls. Honestly, it was freaking cute. We threw an old towel over it and he took it outside and released it. Realizing that no mouse gives birth to just one baby, we looked around. Mouse number two was on the stairs. I’m proud to say that I caught the second one, although I still gave the husband the privilege of taking it out and releasing it. He put a couple of traps upstairs in the crawl spaces that are conveniently located off my upstairs office. So I guess any other mouse in the house doesn’t get the free pass the first two did. (I must add that although my husband can frequently be grumpy, he is kind to animals and people working in the service industry, two behavior indicative of good character. So in that respect, maybe I did marry a prince.)

Dear little mice, please stay out of our house. I guarantee you it will be better for all of us.