The Porch Birth

Our suburban brick house is similar to the others that line the street, towering a bit over its neighbors but all in all fitting in. That morning, it had been designated a safe house. I didn’t have much confidence in that status, though not all hope was snuffed out as I drove my car into the garage.

Like a real jerk, I had fled to a discount chain store for some escapist shopping. Before racing to T.J. Maxx, I dumped a responsibility on my husband. Three hours had elapsed, enough time for him to make a decision and to act. I dropped my purchases — the candles, earrings, and fast fashion dress — on the chair, and he showed no interest in the acquisitions.

Then I walked to the kitchen window and inhaled mindfully, followed with one long, slow exhale. On our exterior screened-in porch, the ceramic tile was scrubbed clean, with no trace of beginnings or endings. Eight had nestled together, their sum equal to the content in a battery pack or box of crayons, and when my husband saw them in their blind and furless state, he closed his eyes to block out what he considered a grotesque display. It had none of the charm of an Impressionist painting, I had to agree. Inches from her pups, a mother rat sprawled in the residue of birth. Though our house had no special distinction, she had chosen our porch for the delivery, heaving across the dusty tiles, trusting us.

We were too late to observe the births, and the newborns squeaked as their mother recovered from the stress of delivery, the pale spots on their sides indicating stomachs full of milk. Their presence on our porch shocked my husband. This was our private space — our turf — and he considered the many strikes against rats, that they carry lice and fleas that transmit diseases, and he hated them for their role in driving bird and reptile species to extinction by consuming their eggs. He worried about the rats’ proximity to our home — only three short steps from the door leading to our kitchen. Some folks keep rats as pets, but we are not those people, and my spouse knew where to find the shovel and black trash bags.

I know that a rat is a rat, but my response to the situation was different. One rat could be disposed of without guilt. But a litter of eight vulnerable pups? I was fascinated with the number of pink newborns, identical in size and shape, each as light as the nickel in my purse. As children, our daughters wielded the crayons in a standard box like eight magic wands, making refrigerator art without commercial value that was nonetheless a treasure to us. Brain studies suggest that rats can dream of a desired future, and in her drowsy state, perhaps the mother rat imagined some sort of “ratopia” for her progeny, a rodent’s version of Mary Oliver’s musing, “Tell me, what will you do with your one wild and precious life?” I cannot say for sure.

During her six-hour estrus, a brown rat mates up to 500 times with a number of male partners. Charged with caring for pups for just a few weeks, she can give birth to seven litters in a year, and with each of those young (and their own offspring) reproducing, a female rat may have 15,000 descendants in a year. While they mate recklessly, rat mothers are careful with their newborns, tenderly pulling away the placenta and birth sac, licking membranes to clear airways. After cleaning each pup, the mother ingests the placenta and umbilical cord, restoring nutrients to her body.

On thousands of occasions, I have disrupted and ended life by walking over grass and on sidewalks, squashing insects and spiders without regard, and now I wondered about the line between what deserves protection and what is deemed disposable. When our nephew nursed an orphaned baby squirrel back to strength, my husband applauded his compassionate project, and when baby birds fall from nests, we cry together. Somewhere I’d read about a study finding that rats also can empathize. According to National Geographic, lab rats have given up rewards to help other rats that are in trouble, and they remember and reward peers that help them.

It was too late for my spouse, whose fight-or-flight response had activated, and his torturous review of the family tree showed in his face — contemplating 15,000 rats would make anyone nervous. I doubted that the rodents would win in our well-tended suburb, and that confidence provided me with time to process a Plan B option. Wouldn’t it be generous to save the rat who had sought a safe house for her pups?

I imagined my husband gently picking up the mother and babies with gloves or a small shovel and placing them in a box that fit inside his van. “You could take them to a place where they will have a chance,” I said. “You could pick them up and drive them somewhere.”

He blanched.

“They have value to their mother. You could let them live,” I added in a final push, leaving him to wrestle between the extermination plan or my suggested course of playing savior. It’s always easier to shift the burden of deciding what is right or wrong to others, whether it’s problems with the environment or other ills impacting human and animal life. And to be honest, I didn’t want to deal with the messiness of transferring the rodents and the logistics of finding a drop-off place out in the woods. So, I stepped aside and went shopping.

Storing away the pile of cheap items destined for the landfill, I didn’t ask about the fate of the rats. I never asked whether he had thrown them in a trash bag, or alternatively, driven them to a place where they had a chance to survive. He never offered any information, and I did not want to know which action he had chosen. Knowing my own history of accepting the awful, I didn’t want to confirm the same in him. Eight baby rats had nestled together, like bright and individual crayons.

That evening, a dark and ugly silence divided us. Still, I appreciated that the ceramic tile was scrubbed fresh and clean — at least he had taken care of that.

Tagged: Essays