My Mom’s Imagination: Where Molehills Become Mountains and Mouse Droppings Become Large Rodent Turds

My mom was a trooper about the mice...kind of. She didn’t refuse to stay here and for the first few days she was willing to help out in the kitchen (where mice have been sited). By the end of her trip she wouldn’t stand by the oven (under which four mice traps lay) and she was very jumpy. She said she was on “turd patrol”, hoping to find evidence of our small housemates. She never saw a mouse, but her imagination got the best of her.

A baseline of fear really started with stomping. Whenever Mom walked from our bedroom through the kitchen to the rest of the house, she’d do a little clog dance. Stomp-stomp-(pause)-stomp-stomp. She recommended that we get flood lights for the kitchen and leave them on all the time to fool our nocturnal friends.

But all out paranoia and delusions started one night when we settled into watch a movie. Fifteen minutes into the movie, she yelped and jerked up. When I asked her what happened she told me that she thought a mouse was climbing up her. I burst out laughing, “Mom, they’re scared of us. They are not going to climb up onto you.”

We watched the rest of the movie without incident, but Mom was further on edge. I saw my opportunity. I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom on one side of the kitchen and she was in the bedroom on the other side of the kitchen. I hurried through my hygiene and snuck into the kids’ room and found a small pink ball. Then I hollered, “Mom, are you coming into the bathroom? Should I turn off the light?”

“I’m coming,” she said. Then I heard stomp-stomp-pause-stomp...at that point I quietly rolled the pink ball across the kitchen floor right in front of her. Of course, this movement on the floor out of the corner of her eye appeared to be a mouse and she screamed bloody murder and grabbed her heart before she could get her last stomp in. I was on the floor giggling until it hurt, while she shouted, “Let the old lady die! Call the coroner’s office!” We chuckled together for a couple minutes, really I chuckled and she shouted at me with a smile. Then I retired and she headed for the bathroom.

Apparently, while she was using the toilet, she leaned forward to inspect where the baseboard heater pipes went into the floor, calculating if a mouse could fit through there. At that point she felt something fall onto her back and visions of mice peeping out of the pipe hole morphed into a hallucination. Again, she screamed, but this time it was longer and it was more agitated. From my position reclining in bed I was sure it was all over: rats had infested the bathroom.

I raced to the bathroom to find my mom standing with a hand towel in her hand, “I thought a herd of them had fallen from the sky and landed on my back. I thought they grew wings and were doing a free fall attack.”

She was serious. I started laughing so hard I couldn’t stand. She went on for awhile. I grabbed a notebook and started transcribing nearly every word she said.

“My back is tight. My eyes are blurry. My knees, my knees! I wasn’t going to shower tomorrow, but now I’ve had day’s worth of sweat in one half a second. If I die in the morning, you’ll know why. I’m weak, weak, weak, and more weak.”

The bed shook with laughter as I tried to get down her most colorful musings.

This morning I read this blog to her and she said, “My thighs start feeling some numbness when you read that. I am so scared. Sumner also told me that the mice were scared of me. I thought: impossible! They would be a whole bunch of psychotic rodents trembling in the floor if that was true.”

Oh, my. I love hyperbole. And my mom.