On Which We Must Learn about Predator vs. Prey

I have two daughters. They are sweet, lovely girls who are heading (way too fast for my liking! Time just flies…) toward becoming terrific, strong young women. As they grow, it amazes me how they handle life’s lessons with courage, dignity and humor.

Yesterday, unfortunately, they had to handle a little life lesson that I wouldn’t have expected them to face. As a reminder, we live in Suburbia (Targets galore, supermarkets, malls, schools close by.) It’s pretty predictable and it works for us. My brother, (whose farm we are going to visit in a few hours) lives in the Middle of Nowhere, Mass.: Big farm (to a Suburbanite’s eye), lots of farm animals, rolling hills, etc., etc. They have nature up there on a different level than we do here in typical suburbia.

Anyway, I was talking to my brother on the computer yesterday a.m. (Instant Messaging) and he casually let me know that the barn cats and three chickens were no longer members of their farm family. These are the same two cats that my daughters have been talking about playing with all week. The cats and chickens got eaten by something (I think he called it a Fisher Cat???, he’ll correct me if I got that wrong.) So now I am left with a major problem. Around here, cats don’t get eaten. How the hell am I going to present this to my daughters??? My husband and I discussed it: Should we tell them the cats “went away”? No, my niece and nephew know what happened to their barn cats so that won’t work. We decided honesty, delicately delivered, would be the best course of action. Of course, I would be the deliverer of this information.

For reasons that I can not explain (and I might have to do some soul searching to figure it out) I dropped the cats no more bomb on them at the the local diner. Maybe I thought the girls wouldn’t freak out in a public place???… These are girls, preteen girls. They freak out wherever and whenever they feel like it! This was not an award winning smart mommy-ing moment on my part. My older daughter dealt ok. She had a look of horror and sadness but held herself together . She can be quite stoic. My little one, the ten year old, was not so stoic. She lost it in the diner and was a crying puddle of a girl, burying her head into my chest, heaving with tears and sorrow. Of course, it was at that moment that the really sweet waitress came over to our table to take our order. This nice waitress, only a teenager herself, gave me a look that said, “Evil Mommy what did you do to that poor little girl”. We had a lovely meal.

More about the farm and the Mass. Sheep and Wool Festival to come. Pictures of stash enhancement will be shared!!