Current mood:	peaceful
Current music:	wilco: either way

catch a rat then let it go.
one of the cooler things about growing up is how parental relations eventually shift away from an awkward tension to a more relaxed appreciation of each others nuances which in turn, makes being alone in a car with them less uncomfortable. i discovered tonight that my mum is one cool mother.

my mum and i returned home late at night to discover shuffling noises in the kitchen - the rat-trap had been armed and it had just proved its worth with a gargantuan catch.

as i peanut-buttered my bread, i casually asked her about her preferred method of rat disposal. i proposed drowning it but she felt it too cruel because the rat would die a slow death. as she lit a cigarette and propped a pot of water on the stove, she revealed to me that her choice mode of rat homicide is pouring boiling-hot water on them.

she said it with a cold-heartedness that suggested many-a-rat had been disinfected to death by her. like how animals in the wild are best able to illustrate the contrast between a gentle, nurturing sensitivity and borderline murderous protectiveness towards their kin, the prevention of rat-infestation was just another smudge on the window pane or soup stain on the carpet that needed to be cleaned for the good of the household she keeps watch over. getting rid of rats was just all in a day's work for her.

but rat-death wasn't meant to be, at least not this night.

the rat looked disturbingly huge, like the notorious b.i.g. of all rats. a closer inspection revealed more - it wasn't just one rat, there were 2! one bloated, pregnant mother rat and a tiny baby rat that was hidden underneath it. i swear that confused the shit out of us.

it would've been pretty unlikely that two rats crawled into the trap simultaneously to share a meal. but it would've been even more unlikely that the big rat had just given birth to the smaller one (which we considered for a moment because of a huge wet spot on the newspaper lining the cage). whatever it was, it derailed my mum's plans for rat-extermination.

earlier on, i had mockingly chastised her for the way she handled a bothersome exercise with her mother-in-law : instead of accompanying my grandmother to church (catholic - the extra dreary kind), she forced my siblings to go in her place, dropped the bunch of them off at church and went off for breakfast with her ipod and sudoku book in hand. this was a mother that cared little for sucking up to a naggy mother-in-law, choosing instead to care for this unfortunate rat duo. just as promptly as she settled on boiling-water-rat-death, she had decided to let the rats free instead.

the big rat was obviously pregnant and whether or not the little rat was newborn or some oliver-twist kind of rat that happened to be hanging around the same rat-trap, looking for trouble, it just seemed wrong to murder BOTH an infant and a pregnant mother, irregardless of species. if either of us believed in karma, we'd be were sure we would die horrible, rat-related deaths at the end of our lives.

so we took a drive to the foot of the hill at the edge of our neighbourhood where the fence keeps out the bushes where indonesian workers go to fuck their gay lovers. while feist played on the car radio, me and my mum set the rats free.

they scampered away from the blinding headlights, into the dark as my mum called out gently and ever-so-politely, "promise me you won't come to our house and cause mischief, ok?" - as if she was a kindergarten teacher urging two toddlers to share their lego blocks with each other.

mothers.