I spotted the first mouse last October.
I watched it run out from under the stove and into the nearest corner where it then, in an impressive show of upper body strength, climbed into a cabinet. I would soon discover that this mouse had been regularly feasting on our dry goods. I would also discover that where there is one mouse, there is a multigenerational family of mice, and sometime between that first sighting and Christmas day, our midwest suburban farmhouse turned into something like the plot of a children’s book. I could picture the first mouse scurrying back to the nest, tugging his scarf tightly around his neck as he ran. “I found it,” he probably exclaimed to his parents, children, aunts, uncles, and (I’m only guessing here) a few friends and business associates. “They keep rice and pistachios in the pantry, and upstairs they have forgotten about an entire bag of candy in their spare closet. There is toilet paper in a bathroom drawer that will keep our new nest warm. Follow me. I know the way in.”
And so they moved in. Slowly at first, I’m sure—just to get the lay of the land. But then we went out of town for the week before Christmas, and I think the quiet of our house must have said to them, This is all yours now.
//
The year was 2006. Jake drove us down the Chicago tollway through a light snow, and I sat quietly in the passenger seat, waiting for him to break up with me. We had been dating for about four months, and it was unclear to me whether Jake actually wanted a girlfriend. The only way I could reach him during the day was his dorm room landline and because he wasn’t often in his dorm room, I spent a good amount of time just waiting around in my own room, hoping he’d show up on my doorstep. He showed up often and usually unannounced, but I started to view myself as a puppy dog—attached to him in a way that was pathetic and not at all cute. In the quiet of my own mind, I convinced myself that I was way more interested in him than he was in me. I connected all the clues like I was tracking a murder case and came to a clear conclusion: a break-up was imminent.
I told him all this, there in the car.
“What?” he said. “I don’t want to break up with you. I’m sorry you felt like that.”
We talked through everything, this time including his perspective which I hadn’t yet considered. The story I had told myself was reduced to actual facts.
We didn’t break up. We worked out what needed to be worked out.
//
I spent the day after Christmas doing what can only be described as panic cleaning. I took our shop vac to every corner and crevice of our first floor—under the kids’ beds, inside closets, beneath all the furniture—and I emptied out our pantry shelves and any cabinet where I could tell the mice had been. I found all the mouse traps we had set out weeks before, and they were completely untouched because in addition to acrobatics, these mice were apparently also well-trained in engineering and mechanics. The last place I planned to clean was the floor of our pantry, so of course that was where a mouse was waiting to startle me. It ran across the floor as soon as I moved the trash can. I screamed at the sight of it, tripped over the shop vac on my way out of the kitchen, and caused such a racket that the kids abandoned their episode of Wild Kratts to come find out what had happened.
“There’s a mouse in the pantry,” I panted, and then, because I am a strong and capable woman, I made an assertive decision to wait five minutes until I knew Jake would be awake to deal with it.
“You don’t have to be scared of them, you know,” he said later. “They’re scared of you. They won’t hurt you.”
Of course I knew this. But it’s one thing to know something and another thing entirely to anticipate seeing a mouse every time you open a cabinet, door, or drawer. My imagination was getting the better of me.
//
The year was 2021. It was bedtime, and my four kids were completely feral.
My middle daughter hung on the railing of her top bunk while being stretched completely parallel to the ground by her big sister who was trying to yank her tights off at the feet. The boys jumped on the twin bed in their room completely naked, and I kept having to say, “Don’t put your butt there,” while attempting to wrangle them into pajamas.
In the middle of all this, I thought about Jake who was enjoying a quiet evening with his friends in a Colorado Airbnb. Must be nice, I said to myself with something that resembled rage. I pictured all the times he got to leave the chaos of our house, all the nights I put the kids to bed alone, and all the mental burdens I carried which he knew nothing about.
I started to believe sentences that started with I never and he always and he never and I always. I brought them all to a boil in my mind, and then let them simmer there even after he had pulled back into the driveway.
“You know, you can get away, too,” he said later that night, after he put all four kids to bed. “I would be happy for you if you did.”
He would be; it was true. Most of the things I told myself while he was gone weren’t.
//
The mice started to taunt me with their audacity.
One night, while I sat quietly in the living room, I watched one run back and forth across the kitchen floor as though he owned the place. The next night, two came out at once, briefly, as though they had a scheduled meeting near the piano. I honestly wouldn’t have been surprised to see one fly out from underneath the refrigerator on a tiny, toy motorcycle. I started to enter rooms slowly, and my startle reflex intensified. I learned that mice can climb up walls, and, as a direct result, stopped going into my closet altogether. My sister-in-law joked that our guinea pigs were their queens, and I laughed as though I hadn’t already pictured the mice kneeling before Nutmeg and Clover in a nightly ritual that preceded their jaunts through our house.
I threw the comforter back and patted down the sheets before I dared to climb into my bed at night, and then I’d fall asleep supposing the mice were working out how to reach the almonds I hid on the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet.
//
The year was 2023, and Jake’s schedule was not aligning with mine. He was working mostly night shifts and sleeping many days, and we started to pass in the house with only enough time for a few pleasantries and anecdotes before being interrupted by one of the kids vying for his attention.
The unpredictability of Jake’s schedule had, by that point, been a predictable staple of our family’s life for almost a decade. Why aren’t I better at this by now? I kept asking myself. Why does this still feel so hard? I couldn’t answer those questions. I figured I’d never stop asking them.
I forgot to remember all his days off to counter the days and nights on and fully convinced myself that I would, forever and always, feel like my husband was my roommate. I inflated reality into something it wasn’t.
Jake and I ordered in steak salads on one of his nights off, and I told him how I had been feeling.
We talked it through. The problems in my mind became regular-sized again.
//
Jake finally had a few days off from work, so I put him in charge of (how do you put this mildly?) mouse extraction. He put sticky traps along the walls and, together, we emptied and sorted and rearranged and found every place any snack had ever been hidden.
At some point in all this overhaul, overwhelm consumed me. The job felt too big. I would clean all day and then I would clean all day again and then I would clean all day the next day too and then I would have to go back to what I cleaned on the first day because it needed to be cleaned again and then I would remember that we hadn’t even made it down to the basement yet.
I started to believe we would always live among the mice. I watched an Instagram video of a mouse who tidied up a man’s workshop every night and wondered if we could teach ours to at least do the same.
“We’ll never get rid of them,” I told Jake one night. “They’ll always live here.”
It was a week night in early 2024, and I was tired. I lay flat on my back on our bed.
“We’ll get rid of them,” Jake said. “I’m not worried about it.”
He stretched out next to me on the bed, completely unfazed by the mice. He had a plan, and his level head pulled me back into reality. I forced myself to think about what was true and only what was true which brought clarity to the actual problems and eliminated the rest.
“We’ll work it out,” he said, and I knew he was right. We would. We always did.
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Listen, the writer in me very much appreciates how you did not give me a happy ending after all (the setting scene of the mice family and business associates is chefs kiss.) However, the permanently scarred by mice infestation person in me is very upset and would like a resolution, thank you very much.
"I honestly wouldn’t have been surprised to see one fly out from underneath the refrigerator on a tiny, toy motorcycle." Made me laugh! We had a mouse in January. It casually came out from the bottom of the dishwasher while I was working at the kitchen counter. I LOST MY MIND. We set a trap and finally caught one two weeks later. It bugs me that I don't know if it was the same mouse. I'm on high alert now!