This is because of a cricket.
Upon returning home from a weeklong vacation, we discovered a cricket had apparently taken up residence somewhere in the master bedroom. The chirping noise was coming from an area near the corner window and patio door. I searched every crevice of the carpet. Every slat in the blinds. Not many hiding spots in this zone, and still…. The cricket would quiet for a few minutes when I did this, and then start up again as soon as I retreated. This went on for a half hour or so until my husband deduced that the cricket was either right outside our window or inside the bedroom wall.
INSIDE the wall. Can you imagine??
That night, and every night for a week, the cricket chirped all evening long. I wore earplugs at first, unable to fall asleep from the fear of waking to find a cricket sitting on my face. After day three I just got used to the cricket noise as a new part of life.
Oh, we just live amongst the crickets now, I shrugged. We are now cricket people. Like a sleepy dog who doesn’t notice a fly has landed on its eyelid.
But it still creeped me out and was starting to drive me a little crazy.
Then, one afternoon in the garage as my son and I were putting on our shoes to go out, I heard a chirp and realized it was a cricket! That %^$&# cricket that had be keeping me up late and filling me with nightmares was sitting on the floor within a foot of where I was standing. And by the way, have you ever seen a cricket up close? It’s not a cute, top hat wearing little guy like Jiminy Cricket. It’s all appendages and antennae, and gives off the unnerving sense that it could jump two feet up into the air and right into your mouth as you open it to scream. The horror.
My animal instinct just took over. I grabbed the biggest shoe I could find – my husband’s size 13s – and smashed it down on the cricket before it could hop away. A millisecond before I made contact, I heard my son gleefully yelp “a cricket!” Too late. Smush. Dead cricket.
Immediately knew I had made a mistake and looked at my son, whose face just crumbled right before my eyes. His eyes welled up with tears and the most crushing look of disappointment I’d ever seen on his face. With one fell swoop of a size 13 I had hurt my child’s heart worse than if I had hit him with the shoe instead. I was instantly ashamed and regretful for my impulsive and callous action. Sure, you could argue that it’s just a bug, and an annoying one at that. But his face said it all. I had killed something. Something whose existence he cared about.
And in that instance, I saw the paradox that I was both a bad mom and a good one.
Bad because I had killed this small life and caused my son great distress.
Good because I have taught him to respect nature and mother earth, and the lives of creatures big and small.
Even his reaction reflected this discordant duality of my being: Through wet eyes that threatened to spill onto his flushed cheeks, he scolded me for smushing the cricket. “Mom!” He wailed. “Why did you do that? Why didn’t you put it outside in the yard??”
He didn’t hit me. He didn’t threaten to hurt something I loved. He just expressed his deep dismay. He suggested a kinder way to have handled it. And then he listened as I apologized for my behavior and acknowledged his approach was the way I should have acted.
“I forgive you. But don’t you ever do that again mom. I mean it.”
Put in my place by a five year old. Do you want to know the worst part about this whole terrible thing?
It wasn’t even the right cricket.
Yep, the cricket in our room chirped that night, and every night since, like a ghost haunting me from beyond. I fell into a troubled sleep that evening, imagining how I had affected that small cricket world. Was the dead cricket in the garage the worried mother trying to find her runaway cricket son? Or the long lost lover who had tracked his cricket soul mate over a vast expanse (which in their world is like maybe 100 feet?), only to be killed while literally at the doorstep of their reunion? Perhaps the cricket in our walls is a pregnant mother, and the dead cricket was the father sent out to find food to feed the little ones.
I am basically living a cross between Crime & Punishment and Kafka’s Metamorphosis. The cricket incident will haunt me for a long time I think.
But this is what I learned from my actions:
Sometimes we do terrible things. Sometimes we do wonderful things. And in that tearful moment, as I asked my tender-hearted 5 year old to forgive me and he agreed, I realized that somehow my good had forgiven my bad, and my bad learned from my good.
