Bats, bats, baby

Hello everyone!

Let’s skip past the part where I remark on how long it’s been since my last dispatch, since we’re all living in the era of Just Doing Our Best and Muddling Through. Plus I had a baby, famously not an event that provides one with a generous influx of discretionary time. I’m not sure what the point even is of this newsletter anymore, since I don’t have new advice columns to link to, and promoting my book isn’t really necessary when recipients are surely aware it exists already (although obviously I’m still going to link to it. It may be a product of the Before Times, but some bits are eerily prescient, like this subhead from the work-from-home section: “You Can Clock Out Any Time You Like—But You Can Never Leave.” Little did I know...).

I could use this as a way to distribute baby photos, and rest assured, there is one below. But right now I just want to talk about how weird the past 10 months have been, for me specifically. By which I mean, of course everyone’s life is weird right now, at best (with many weathering incredible losses and hardships that I don’t want to ignore). All told, I feel incredibly lucky, and if anything in what follows sounds like complaining, please know that it is grounded in an acknowledgment of my own good fortune.

With that out of the way, let me tell you about the bats.

When I last wrote, we had just closed on a new house—a historic home that, as I noted understatedly, needed “some work.” An example of such work was: an entirely new roof! One that does not leak! Et (as I’m sure you can imagine) cetera. The folks we bought it from had begun refurbishing it but a certain degree of dilapidation had been allowed to set in under the previous ownership, and you know how mice can get into tiny nooks and crannies? Consider how much easier that’d be for mice if they also had wings.

Now, if you grew up in the Midwest, as I did, you may not think about bats as animals that live in places like “houses meant for humans.” (Although strangely enough—if you can forgive a total tangent—one got trapped in the window of our Chicago apartment when I was hospitalized for a ruptured appendix back in 2010, perhaps sent by providence to train my spouse for future encounters. At the time we just thought it was there to keep him company and distract him while I was away convalescing. Or—if you ask him—to keep him from giving too much credence to so-called “signs” and help him embrace the awful randomness of life.) However, in the wilds of Central New York, where we live—just a few blocks from Lake Ontario—bats are...kind of a thing. When I tell folks from other regions that a bat got into our house (which, yes, that’s where this story is going), their reaction is “a BAT??! got into your HOUSE??!?!??” Whereas when we mention our travails to our neighbors they’re like “heh, yeah. darn bats.”

The first bat (there was more than one bat) appeared in the nursery ca. 3:30am on the day after what was supposed to be my baby’s due date. Since the baby came early, he was 3 weeks old at the time and currently being fed by me. I saw something out of the corner of my eye that my extravagantly sleep-deprived brain struggled to process. “A...bird? Inside? No, not bird. Bat. Wait—BAT?!!?” I was in a chair across from the door and it was circling overhead, so naturally I yelled for my spouse who was catching a few precious Zs in our nearby bedroom. It was at that moment I had the comforting(?) thought that this might just be a hallucination, but then the bat escaped into the hallway and I heard Doug scrambling to deal with this unexpected and unwelcome challenge. On the one hand, good news that I wasn’t experiencing postpartum psychosis, but on the other hand, not exactly thrilled to realize the bat was in fact real.

Quick sidebar for a pro tip, should you ever find yourself with a bat in your home, especially if you would like someone else to remove it on your behalf: do not lose sight of the bat. Because if you do, you will not see it again unless it decides to make itself known.

It was a long 5 hours after that first sighting, during which we packed up all the baby-changing supplies and holed up in our bedroom, and I tried to sleep but mostly waited until Animal Control was open so I could get guidance on what to do. We had just moved into our house a month earlier, and attentive readers will note that “a month earlier” was also “roughly a week before the baby was born significantly early,” a confluence of events that was not conducive to our best-laid plans to unpack. Thus when the person on the phone advised me to “look for any nooks or crannies the bat might’ve roosted in” I gazed at the truly astonishing number of boxes surrounding me while contemplating the equally cluttered state of every other room in the house and felt a very distinctive kind of despair. Lots of people have to deal with the thunderdome of new parenthood, but adding in a complete lack of family or professional childcare AND THEN the fear that a rabid bat is hiding out somewhere in your home, plus even less sleep than your usual newborn-caretaking baseline, is...a potent cocktail I do not recommend.

The bat (which did not have rabies) reemerged, around 10pm that night as a nocturnal animal is wont to do, and I—as I was instructed by Animal Control—called 911 to reach the after-hours bat-catcher. And so I was become Karen, destroyer of bats.

When the second one showed up a few months later, we were in the middle of watching Starship Troopers (1997). Our house has doors that enclose the living room—super useful if you’re trying to keep a bat out of the place where your infant child is sleeping—but in our haste to initiate Bat Containment Protocol we failed to pause the movie and locked ourselves away from the remote. The unexpected upside of this was that I now have a video of a bat flying around my house, accompanied by space-explosion sounds and cinematic music.

The third bat materialized the next night, probably because he’d flown in with the other one and then managed to hide out before getting captured. We felt bad about having the Animal Control lady out two nights in a row, but she told us not to worry—she was about to head to another house that she’d also visited the night before. Like I said: bats are a thing up here.

Annnnd now there are probably a couple more roosting in our attic but we’re having a guy come out to deal with that this spring. It’s fine. It’s allllll fine.

If you feel like a series of bat incursions during a global pandemic where bats are implicated as disease vectors feels a li’l too on-the-nose from a narrative standpoint, rest assured: I too feel this way. When coincidences like this happen, Doug & I usually joke that “god is a hack writer,” but the sheer ambition of the current storyline has to be respected.

So if I’m teetering perilously close to becoming a mommyblogger with this entry in the ol’ tinyletter archives, at least I have the living-amongst-bats angle to distinguish me from the crowd. The other peculiar thing about my own personal experience of new-parenthood is one I share with everyone else in my pregnancy/childrearing cohort: the uncanny way it overlaps with lockdown protocols. Pregnancy is full of ways you’re compelled to alter your own behavior for the sake of the gestating fetus, and having a newborn at home is (to understate again) disruptive. I’m constantly trying to disambiguate the cause/effect of the ways my life has changed in the past year. Not eating deli meat or runny egg yolks? Pregnancy. Carrying around pieces of old junkmail that could be used to touch the elevator buttons in our apartment building without using my fingers? Pandemic. Being awoken in the middle of the night by random screams? Parenthood. Laying awake at night while battling aimless anxiety? Pandemic. Never going out to restaurants anymore? Parenthoo—well wait a second, that one’s both. And at this point, more the pandemic’s fault than the kid’s. It’s almost inconceivable for me to imagine a world where I can move about freely again, because some part of my brain is certain that my child’s wellbeing is dependent on my total isolation from society. Although to be fair to my brain/myself, right now that’s pretty much true.

Oh no, this started getting slightly woe-is-me, which I’d meant to avoid, but I guess an undercurrent of “well an objectively terrible thing is happening, relentlessly” is inescapable these days. At least now the actual US government isn’t actively part of the problem, so that’s exciting! Plus the days are getting longer (in the northern hemisphere), vaccines are existent, and soon all the places where it’s currently winter will start getting warmer again. It’s like we’re all on the bat-exclusion guy’s schedule for spring, in a spiritual sense.

~court

PHOTO TIME: As promised, here’s a baby who’s encountering snow for the first time and delighting his parents with his own delight. (Both because his joy is contagious, and because we live in one of the snowiest parts of the country and this bodes well for his future happiness.) Props to the coworker whose extremely luxurious hand-me-down snowsuit facilitated such a cheerful moment.