September 1st, midnight
I’m on my way to bed, later than I should be up, but I am the last one awake for once and it’s hard to resist a silent house even when I’m dead tired. I reach to turn off the kitchen light, and realize that I haven’t checked on the bunnies yet. Their light is still on I bet, and probably one of them needs water or something. Feeding the rabbits is Rena’s job, but she’s seven and...One more thing before bed. I can manage that. I need to check on Kyrah, Lee’s bunny, anyway. I’m beginning to suspect she’s pregnant (for real this time, she had a false oopsie last month), and if so I should be watching for her pulling fur before giving birth. I am thinking this as I open the door to the “rabbit room” (what used to be our family/game room) and walk down the two steps. I blink. What is that? Two pink squirmy things are lying on our old couch. And the couch is covered with downy white fur, again…
Oh no. Nonononono nooooooo….
Oh yes. Those are baby bunnies. She didn’t give me a warning this time, knowing that I would lock her in her cage again and deny her access to the couch, that deathtrap of cushions that she is determined makes the perfect rabbit burrow for her babies. I’m fairly certain I’m whimpering as I dash to the couch and lift the squirming newborns off the crack between cushions. There is a trail of white fur leading down behind the cushions of the couch and I following it, finding another baby (this one dark), and another…and another. The zipper on the back of one cushion has torn away at some point leaving a gaping hole which I’m afraid has let babies worm their way inside. It’s like a sadistic magic trick.
“Ok…Ok…” I keep repeating this, willing it to be true, as I put the babies down and look around frantically for a box, something I can put the blind and deaf infants inside that isn’t likely to smother them. The only box in sight is the one I keep my serger in, so I haul it out and dump the collected bits of storage debris onto the top of a cabinet. I rip a few flaps off and fill the inside with wood chips, then top it with a soft cloth that Mommy Bunny found in my scrap box and added to her nest in the couch, along with another soft cloth and all the fur that Kyrah pulled out of her body to keep her babies warm. It’s not a bad nest, nice and soft and the box on it’s side is contained and hidden. In the babies go, including two I pull out of the cushion with the hole in it and one more buried deep behind the other cushion. I thought I counted seven, but with them all in a writhing pile I can’t tell. Kyrah has been less than helpful, frantically hopping around and impeding my rescue attempts with her attempts to tell me that my help is not needed, thanks but no thanks, and her babies are perfectly fine where she put them. A headcount at birth is what I really need from her but she doesn’t divulge, and I’m left to worry about the three inch slit I found in the back lining of the couch, which in theory could have let a baby fall down into Upholstery Underworld. I further her anxiety by popping the top off her cage so I can settle the box of babies (“See Kyrah? This is a better nest, isn’t it?”) inside a much safer environment and close her in with them and a prayer that she will be a good mother (“Seven babies, Kyrah? What were you doing, trying for a record?”). I get her fresh water and add some apple cider vinegar to it, leave some treats for the hungry new mommy, and stagger off to bed. Boy, will I have one hell of a surprise—and story—for the girls and their daddy in the morning.
September 1st, noon.
“I’m not laughing. I’m not,” my sister texts me (she totally is). I had just caught her up on my adrenaline-inducing adventures last night. This morning I checked on the babies again after and thought I’d counted nine this time, but they were so tiny and all piled together and I couldn’t be sure. She wanted to know if my husband was still breathing (him being less enthusiastic about the rabbits than us girls).
“I…didn’t tell him yet,” I confessed. Nine surprise baby rabbits is kind of a big bomb to drop on a man. I was too busy worrying about Kyrah to spare time for anything else though. Her milk was clearly coming in, but she didn’t seem to be nursing the babies. I knew that baby bunnies in the wild only nurse, like, once a day, but these weren’t wild bunnies. Every time I went to check on them she seemed even more desperate to escape from her cage than the last time, and if I let her out she dashed straight back to the couch and started digging in it and pulling fur again. Hour by hour I was becoming convinced that she wasn’t going to take care of her babies until I moved them back into the magic trick nest she had made for them (which wasn’t going to happen). We seemed to be at an impasse, and standoffs like this make me very nervous.
September 1st, 6pm
I meet my husband at the door, hands literally clasped beseechingly in front of me, tears just behind my eyes and voice. We need to move the couch out of there, now. Kyrah is completely engorged, her babies are squirming and squeaking and seem hungry to me, and she’s having none of it. I’m envisioning my life as a foster mother to nine (nine! Oh Jesus) baby rabbits, and it isn’t pretty. Thursdays are his game days with his dad and two of his brothers, and I’m asking him to give up dinner before game time, but he can see that I’m on the ragged edge of a rabbit-induced breakdown, so he agrees. It’s not a particularly large or heavy couch, but it is full-sized, and the route is awkward. First we try maneuvering it out of the hallway and to the front door, but by the time we have it wedged inside the bathroom as far as it will go we find out the hallway is too short by inches to get it out the door. So we have to back up and move the bunny cages away from the family room door, disturbing Her Majesty even more than she already is, and carry the couch out that way…and all the way to the garage, which will be it’s new home. It now has a gaping slit in it’s back cover from when I decided to check and make sure that no babies fell inside it last night, and one cushion is bloodstained from birth. My heroic man then gives me the best advice I’ve had all year, suggesting that I take a couple of cushions back inside to make a safer couch burrow for the diva mommy. I move the cages back into place, pop the top off her cage again so I can get the baby box out, and try to replicate her burrow with two large cushions, one leaning over the other and against the wall to make a hidey hole of sorts. I leave them alone again and hope. Of course, she still isn’t satisfied and it’s two hours and several tries later that we finally agree upon a suitable burrow…but eventually the babies are fed and I start breathing normally again.
All of this to explain why I had no choice but to move a damn couch. I could have asked a neighbor for help, but in the drama of the moment it didn’t occur to me. Neither did it occur to me that I might be anything other than sore for a couple of days and need an adjustment or two. I was worse after the second adjustment, my back so inflamed that my chiropractor told me just to go home and ice it and “do as little as possible.” That’s when I should have insisted on an X-ray, but no. I waited until I literally could not get out of bed without crying to do the obvious and reasonable thing and find out that I had a compressed disk in my low back. That took more than two weeks, by which time the baby bunnies (all nine of them) had their eyes open and were starting to hop around the room. If you’ve never seen a two-week-old rabbit, I warn you: they possess the power to turn the most taciturn adult into a shrieking, gibbering puddle of helpless adoration with a single nose twitch (they’re rabbits, alright? so their noses twitch incessantly. You get the picture? They are truly dangerous creatures). Dangerously precious creatures which, after sacrificing my back to please their mother, The Queen, I could no longer bend down to pick up. Life is truly not fair.
And that, dear readers, is how I spent my September. Not continuing my yoga practice and achieving deeper stretches and greater fluidity with each passing week. Not taking long, rambling, solitary hikes communing with nature, God and myself. I spent my month obsessing over baby rabbits (nine of them. NINE FREAKING BABY RABBITS) and trying to stay one deep breath and an hour of sleep ahead of the nagging depression. What have I learned from this exercise in best-laid-plans-gone-dipshit? I have learned that I have a serious problem taking up space on this earth if I’m not functioning and contributing to the well-being of my family. For more than a week I was a resident of the couch (not the old family room couch, that’s still out in the garage. The cat loves it), because I could not sit or stand for any length of time. We did school work on the couch. Watched National Geographic’s “Secrets of the Whales” series for science. The indoor cat was delighted by my captivity and did his part to keep me immobile. Lee, my youngest, who is part cat, snuggled under blankets with me whenever she could. We even shared a nap or two, like when she was a baby and too cute to put down to sleep. Two more weeks passed, and baby bunnies started joining us on the couch, snagged from out their mommy’s nose (now that they’re older she’s happy to have somebody else babysit one or three for a while). The cat stares daggers at them, but he doesn’t dare do anything more (Kyrah is a very fierce protector of her brood). Sitting and cuddling for hours on end leaves me ample time to think, and read, and write, and do some beading while listening to podcasts, keeping busy so as not to let the moodiness set in.
Which is how I found this gem from Emily Baldoni, wife of Justin Baldoni, who hosts the Man Enough podcast. As a mother, she also struggles with what she calls enoughness. She says:
How could me spending time in what I feel is magic , if I spend time with the things that bring me bliss, how could that possibly be enough? How am I helping humankind? How am I saving the planet? How am I doing my part? How am I making myself worthy of the space that I am taking up?1
That hurt. A lot. I am not doing enough right now to justify my right to take up space in the world, and I’m feeling the anxiety of that need to prove my worth as I sit (well, recline) with nothing to do but rest and heal. “Man, that stuff is exhausting,” Emily says, “and it makes me show up with only half of myself.” How can I be really present if I’m always watching over myself to make sure I have justified my existence for the day? It isn’t possible, and I’m not the only one who will be affected. Emily concludes:
I’ve done a lot of work in allowing myself to follow my bliss and what feels like my soul’s mission on this planet…that is where I find my magic, that is where I find my light, that is where I have downloads that I can then turn into a service to others. That’s where I get to process my trauma and find compassion for myself so that I sit with other people’s trauma and have compassion for them, even if they are completely different from me…We’re enough; and it takes a journey to understand that…we have to commit to taking a journey of enoughness.
Enoughness…it sounds so good, doesn’t it? So far, my injury has cost the kids two weeks of homeschool co-op, and resulted in us not auditioning (Rena) for a community theater play this Christmas, all of which were big disappointments for the kids and made me feel like a leading candidate for the World’s Worst Mom awards. I have also had to rely way more than I want to on Rena’s help, making me cringe every time I ask her to do something for me because I was once Oldest Daughter and my mother’s extra hands. Can I let myself and my kids down in so many ways and still be enough?
October 3rd, 8pm.
On the couch, again (the one that the rabbit didn’t birth in). I’m better now, but still can’t do yoga or hike. I have tried to spend time alone each weekend, usually in a bath. I try to still spend several minutes each day stretching and breathing, or at least just breathing deeply. I’m trying to get plenty of sleep. For month three of my Year Of Small Changes challenge, I’m going to practice letting that be enough.
And right now? This moment? Why, I’m cuddling a perfectly “so fluffy I’m gonna die!!!!!” baby bunny.
Pure bliss.
Baldoni, Justin; Liz Plank; and Jamey Heath, hosts. “Calling Us In: Season Finale with 10+ Returning Guests”. Man Enough. Wayfarer Studios, 27 June 2022.