The Squirrel
When I think about the squirrel, I close my eyes as hard as I can to try to block the memory from my brain. One beautiful summer day when I was 36, I’d taken my dogs to the dog park, where they leapt over fallen trees and weaved through ferns in an exhaustive race. My dogs Rufus and Olive could have been twins but Rufus hailed from New Jersey and Olive from South Carolina. They both weighed in at forty some pounds and had wiry terrier hair, light brown and curly, with little lion’s manes around their necks.
Olive and Rufus chased each other through the woods, disappearing from sight for several minutes and then bursting out of the underbrush beside me. They ran off again into the bushes and I heard their excited barks trail off through the trees. They raced as I lapped the park, carefully stepping over roots painted hot pink in the trail.
At the gate to the park, where dogs congregated around dirty water bowls and laid in a perennially muddy puddle, I found Olive and Rufus waiting for me. Olive had something in her mouth.
“What is it, Ollie?” I asked. As I got closer I saw that it was a squirrel. I yelled at her to drop it, and she softly opened her mouth to let the squirrel fall to the dirt. It was still alive, though its tiny grey belly was greatly distended, as if it had swallowed a golf ball. I couldn’t tell if it was sick and vulnerable, and that’s how Olive was able to catch her, or if Olive’s teeth had caused an injury.
I looked for some large soft leaves with which to pick up the squirrel and ripped some off of a nearby tree. I carefully wrapped up her tiny little body, all one and a half pounds of her, my brain racing to figure out how to save her. I had to get out of the dog park so that the dogs couldn’t try to get at the squirrel, who had closed her eyes and seemed to be having trouble breathing.
I hurried out of the gates and sat down on a wooden park bench where I could still see my dogs inside the park. I laid the squirrel gently in my lap on her back and called my husband.
“What do I do? What should I do?” I cried into the phone. I started shaking from the panic that was gripping me, a response that I didn’t understand at the time. He said I needed to try to get her to a veterinarian. I hung up and Googled local wildlife refuges and found that the closest one was about 45 minutes away. How was I going to safely get the squirrel into my car and load the dogs in and keep them from getting to her in the car? I felt hopeless, torn between my obligation to my dogs and wanting to help this tiny creature.
I watched the squirrel in my lap, splayed out on soft green leaves. I watched her breath rate slow down, then stop altogether. Her tiny body relaxed. Despite the golf ball sized abdomen, she had no puncture wounds and no blood on her fur, so she may have been sick and died from the shock. Tears overwhelmed me, a feeling of failure accompanying them. One of our dog park friends had seen the whole incident and came over to me. I showed him the tiny grey baby in my lap. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. He said his house backed up onto some woods, and he would bury the squirrel in a place where his dogs couldn’t get her, if I’d like. I handed her over, and Jack walked away with the squirrel in his arm and his two hound dogs trailing him.
I sat on the bench until I could get it together, feeling humiliated by the tsunami of emotions that had overtaken me. I really dislike being the center of attention or doing anything at all to have people notice me in public. I walked back through the gate of the park to collect my dogs, who’d been watching me through the chain link, confused.
A few weeks prior to the squirrel, my father was planning to sit for the bar exam for the fourth or fifth time. Given his advanced Parkinson’s, he couldn’t drive himself all the way to the testing site in Philadelphia. My mother, who had never been on board with his decision to attend law school while trying to run a business and being so sick, refused to make the drive again, so I volunteered. As we drove down the Pennsylvania turnpike in the bright sun, we talked about his previous attempts at passing the bar, at his law school experience as a senior citizen student, and about his summer landscaping projects. He always enjoyed gardening, even the mulching and weeding. It was something we often did together. He'd pay me to plant marigolds and geraniums in the front beds, tucking mulch around them in the early summer. What we weren’t talking about was what I was going through that summer. I’d started in-vitro fertilization (IVF) to try to get pregnant, and it was both emotionally and physically painful.
My father knew that I was going through IVF, as I’d told him and my mom when I started the process. I’d called home at the outset of the journey, hoping to reach my mother, as I wanted them to know that I’d be going under general anesthesia as part of the process. It seemed to me a courtesy to let them know, given the potential risks with anesthesia. My father answered. I asked if my mother was home but no, she was out grocery shopping.
I took a deep breath.
“Ok, well, I just wanted to let you guys know that I’m going under general anesthesia as part of my IVF treatment, and I’m sure everything will be fine, but I just wanted to let you know.” I said.
He laughed a little and said, “Spare me the details, Leigh. I’ll let your mother know.” And then he hung up. I stared at my phone. His reaction felt cold and dismissive. He could have been embarrassed by the topic- it was sensitive, anatomical- maybe he didn’t know how to react. What was more likely was that the issue had nothing to do with him so he couldn’t engage with it. My dad was a very self-absorbed person, as are many people with depression and a history of trauma. He navigated the world by his own self-interest, steering away from other people’s concerns, issues, or pain if it didn’t directly impact him. The parameters of his universe were dictated by his own needs and desires, even when it came to parenting. There was a familiar refrain when I asked him for advice: What should I major in at college? Where should I move next? What should I do with my life? The answer was almost always, “Well, whatever, Leigh.”
After that phone call and on our drive to Philadelphia for the bar exam, my dad started to talk about religion. The impossibility of faith was a longstanding topic of fascination to him. He both admired people who believed, and thought that belief in anything beyond this world to be nonsense. He began with his usual diatribe. “The beautiful thing about religion is that people believe that they’re going to see their loved ones again after they die. They believe they’ll meet them again in heaven, and that must bring them so much comfort.”
And the next thing out of his mouth was: “You know, Leigh, someday you’re going to look at your baby, and you’re going to say, ‘Baby, you’re going to die someday’.”
The air was sucked out of the car, sucked out of my body. He was speaking about the baby that didn’t exist yet. The baby that I was suffering physically and emotionally to create. He was thinking about this non-existent collection of cells expiring before it had even begun.
I willed myself to stare at the road ahead even as my eyelids wanted to close to shut it out. I could feel something cold and terrible fill my veins. My chest began to tighten and the tip of my nose began to burn as if tears were imminent. I didn’t reply. I didn’t know how to reply. I just drove. This fatalistic obsession of his was well-documented in our family, but this was a new low. This was a perversion of the deepest magnitude. To think, much less verbalize, the death of a child years ahead of its inevitability, showed the twisted grip that death held on his mind and soul. His words threatened to drag me and my non-existent child down, deep into the depths of the ocean where there was no oxygen and no light.
We passed the remainder of the drive mostly in silent tension. I knew that there was no defense that would help the situation- if I freaked out and yelled or if I calmly told him just how fucked that line of thinking was, he would argue back that death is just a part of life, another common refrain he sang a lot. I wanted to get out of that car as soon as possible. I weaved through the Center City streets, parked in front of his downtown hotel near the convention center, gave him a hug, and wished him well on the exam.
On my drive home across the bridge to New Jersey, I felt a burning start to rise in my chest. It rose up into my throat and my mouth- it tasted like bitter anger. As I rumbled across the river, I started thinking, and what I thought about was protection. I needed protection from him- from his fatalism, from his darkness, from the net that death cast over his mind. He was too far gone, too mentally ill. He was too risky and I was too vulnerable. I was soft and tender, prone to fainting and crying at the fertility doctor’s office in my weekly check-ups. I needed safety from his damage, from his ability to damage me. I had suffered a lifetime of his fatalism, the perennial darkness that had tucked itself into the crevasses of my brain.
By the time I pulled into my driveway I began to see that my relationship with him had been pulled too taut, the fibers shredded and frayed. I couldn’t maintain a relationship with him, not while I was going through IVF, at least. I had to let the fabric rip, let space and silence exist where there was once connection. I wouldn’t speak to him, visit him, text him- I wouldn’t entertain any contact with him. I would build myself an exoskeleton, plate by plate, until I was fortified, impenetrable. That would protect the bundle of raw nerves I had become. In order for me to conceive this child and build a new family, I had to rip apart a bond with my own family.