From Bad to Not Quite Good

You've all said what you needed to about The Great Snake Debate: To Keep Or Not To Keep. And I've considered your opinions. Sort of. What I mean to say is, I've seriously considered the opinions of those of you who advised against keeping the snake.

Yes, it's small. Sure, it's low-maintenance. Granted, my son thought he'd died and gone to heaven. Maybe, to some (freaks), it could even be called cute.

But all I've heard is story after story about friends-of-friends who owned a snake and it somehow got loose and it was missing for months and it finally turned up in the middle of the night slithering across the body of the friend-of-a-friend, drawn to the warmth of his/her blood. I've heard, minimum, five stories like that.

And frankly, they scared me shitless.

Plus, I decided that if I'm going to be the sole female in a house (well, apartment) of boyish-boys, then I've gotta set some ground rules. Establish a sense of reasonable autocracy. You know, veto-power. Otherwise, I know - I just know that a singular, small snake will expand, eventually, to ownership of a large, alligator-consuming one.

Just like I know, just know that the frog I bought in substitution for the singular, small snake I returned on Friday - will get lost. In my house (well, apartment).

To my credit, I gave Elan plenty of warning that the snake was, indeed, going back at the end of the week. And in return, he gave me plenty of notice that should he go along with such a plan, he expected a different pet, preferably reptilian, in exchange. Some people claim life is made up of moments - mine's more like a series of negotiations.

Friday morning, I woke up and breathed deeply for the first time all week, smiling as I brewed coffee, pleased with the knowledge that I'd be heading to the pet store, snake in tow, as soon as I could get the kids dressed and in the car. When we parked in the back lot of the Aquarium Center, however, I found myself faced with an unanticipated setback: Elan got sad. His face crumpled, his lower lip trembling, shoulders hunched, rising and falling slowly with silent sobs. Big, fat teardrops left streaks down to his chin as he looked steadily at the ground.

I crouched down, putting an arm around his shoulders. "Honey. It's going to be okay. Snakey wasn't the right pet for us, that's all. I couldn't handle having him forever. But it was cool having him for a few days, wasn't it?"

Elan shrugged, still refusing to meet my gaze. Ariel, too, placed an arm around his shoulder. "You sad, Enon?" he asked, in his signature broken English.

My heart broke. Right then and there, I felt like the meanest mom ever self-deluded enough to bear children. But an inner voice reminded me that none of it was my fault. It was Y's! He should never have put me in this position in the first place.

Of course, while certainly true, the realization didn't do much to help me in that moment. Sighing, thumbing the tears from Elan's cheeks, I heard myself saying, "All right. We'll see if there are any other pets in the shop that I don't mind having."

Apparently, this was all the kid needed to hear, because he grinned, tugged his short sleeve down far enough to wipe his nose on, and darted off ahead of me into the store.

The teen behind the counter was the same one who'd sold Y the snake five days earlier, and he was obviously disappointed that I wasn't a fan. But he brightened a little when I asked, reluctantly, "Do you, uh, have anything else that might be appropriate for a four-year-old, that's, uh, perhaps a bit less" [whispering] "gross? Like a frog?"

I've always found frogs rather cute, so I didn't scream, rather liked it, in fact, when he placed a large, neon-green one in my hand. Elan scrambled to take a turn.

"This guy's perfect for you. He doesn't hop that much, so you can play with him, and he's totally harmless."

"He's adorable. I love him. Elan, do you like it?"

"YES YES MOMMY CAN WE HAVE HIM? CAN WE KEEP IT?" He was shrieking, overcome with excitement, yet caressing the frightened body with a tenderness I'd only before witnessed him use with Snakey.

I checked the price. It was $26. We'd get a refund from the snake. Perfecto.

"It's done," I smiled at the kid with the mop of dark hair framing his pubescent face. "So can I just keep it in the same 5-gallon tank I had the snake in?"

"Oh no. He needs a big tank - like at least 25 gallons. Oh, and he can't be in temperatures under 80-degrees, so unless you don't use A/C, you'll have to get a heating lamp. And a UV-light one. Total, it should all cost under $120 - that work?"

No, it didn't work. Aside from the monstrous, needless expense, I didn't want a large tank anywhere in my home. Remember - I'd just recently managed to divest of a 100-gallon aquarium, and Mr. Turtley's home was 40-gallons. I'm not willing to forfeit space. Not again.

"Crap. It's not gonna happen. Unless I get rid of our turtle, and put it in that tank."

Elan swore he wouldn't mind giving up Mr. Turtley (kids...Where's the loyalty?) so long as he could take home this frog. Snakey was already a distant memory.

"Your turtle could live outside, in your backyard - mine does!" the kid informed me. For a moment I considered it. But Mr. Turtley? Come on. He's a wimp. I doubted he could survive the elements on his own, like weeds, and Roly-Poly bugs. And I felt terrible about the thought of trading him in. I mean, there's borderline cruelty. And then there is Just Plain Wrong.

"Ok. Big Frog isn't for us. What about something smaller, a frog that doesn't need such a large, warm environment?"

The boy came up with a nice little tree frog, but not before suggesting a "little spider," along the lines of a tarantula.

"He doesn't bite!" he swore. "Only thing is, if he gets away, he's gone. You'll never find him."

"If he gets away, in that case, I'll have to move," I replied, still smiling, always friendly. He's just a kid, I reminded myself. Clearly, he wasn't getting it, but still, just a kid. With a turtle living in his backyard.

"No spiders." Smile.

"Be careful with the tree frog," he said, placing it into Elan's cupped hands, "'Cause this one is a jumper. He'll jump all over the place when he gets scared, and he's fast...Oops!" The tiny, bright-green thing had leapt from his hands, and landed on Ariel's forehead, who, in turn, giggled, then screamed.

"YUCKY! COCKY! GET OFFFFFFF!" Ariel yelled, brushing the frog back into flight. So different from his brother.

I laughed, and told the dark-haired boy to wrap it up. At $8.99, we finally had a sale. Elan chose a plant and some carpet for what used to be the Corn Snake's little home, and insisted on holding the taped-closed paper bag full of frog in the car ride home. He never stopped chattering excitedly, repeating every word of the experience to Y over the speakerphone of my cell, including the part in which the salesboy recommended a "tarantula that doesn't bite but if we lost it it would be gone just like that gone forever so fast and we'd never find him ever so Mommy said NO SPIDERS."

I didn't realize he'd been listening.

I asked him what he would name his frog, and he said, "I don't know yet. I need to 'hink about it." But I suppose a couple of seconds proved enough time to mull it over, as he soon declared he'd call it Froggy. "Because I always name my pets like what they are, like my turtle is Mr. Turtley, my snake was Snakey, and now my frog will be Froggy."

Admiring his bullet-proof logic, I gently encouraged him to be more creative. I gently reminded him that Froggy was, well, a sucky name.

"How about Green Bean?" I suggested.
"No, his name is Sally," Elan stated definitively.
"So it's a girl?"
"Sally is a girl's name?"
"Traditionally."
"Oh. Then my frog's name is Hoppy."

I didn't remind him that Hoppy, too, was a sort of sucky name. After all, I was supposed to be the adult in the situation. I just took Hoppy out of the paper bag, set up his new home, and chased him around the apartment with a delighted Elan, as the animal proceeded to live up to its name.

Once the kids were napping, I cleaned out Mr. Turtley's tank - a task I usually leave for the housekeeper - feeling remarkably guilty about that which he couldn't have known: how, today, albeit briefly, I'd bargained with his life. Or did he know? For shortly after I filled his feeding dish with lettuce, he left me a less-clean souvenir smack-dab in the middle of the recently freshened tank.

I cursed my pointless guilty conscience.

Hoppy is very cute, though much harder to handle than the snake was. I think I might like him, impractical as it might be.

-- He doesn't eat live mice every two weeks.

-- He does, ahem, eat live crickets. Every two days.

I know, nice iron fist. What the hell is wrong with me?

---

It's the next morning. Did I say we had one frog? So silly of me. Because what I really meant was three. We have three frogs. Y and Elan went to the store to pick up crickets to feed our ONE frog and I, once again, stayed in the car, and they came out with two more little guys in a tupperware poked with holes. Moral of the story: NEVER stay in the car. Never stay in the car. Never stay in the CAR.

On the other hand, I did clean it out while I was waiting.