My Hero

Disclaimer: I found through a thorough research of my own more-numerous-than-I-had-previously-thought posts, that I have not yet posted about this.  It was a difficult search.  Which I suppose is a lesson in vaguely funny titles and completely-unrelated post labels.  But I found it.  Or rather, didn't find it.  Hence: my post.

I was on the phone with E this evening (seeing as how he is on summer vacation and I am on call...) and we were chatting about our weeks.  I think it's funny to tease him when he's gone, and last week when we spoke I said that my recycling was piling up (one of his daily chores).  This week, I told him that there was dog poo piling up.  In the backyard.  Also one of his chores (see how this parent thing works to my advantage, people?).  Just like last week, he exclaimed that he's not here and I'm going to have to start picking it up on my own.  So I told him I didn't know how.  And he said "Well, do it just like you taught me how to pick up that dead bird." HENCE: this post.

I have a thing about birds.  A bad thing.  A thing where the very thought of bird legs and bird beaks makes me nauseous.  And where if birds flutter near me, I get nervous.  And where if there are dead birds in my vicinity, I pretty much lose it.

I tell myself in self-defense that it's familial.  My paternal grandmother and my father's sister both have similar ornithophobias.  But it really wasn't bad until medical school, when I would routinely come across dead birds who had flown into the windows of a walkway that happened to run right over the entrance to the school.  And by "come across", I mean "almost step on".  The first time that happened, I thought my heart would stop.  It kept happening (birds, it turns out, are not the smartest of creatures about flying into darkened glass windows with people regularly walking on the other side of them).  And the more little feathered things I would see lying about with crumpled wings and crippled limbs, the more the horror grew.

Last year, not long after we'd moved for residency, I walked out our back door and came across a dead bird lying in the middle of the patio. (Note: at this point, I advocated sending our dog back to the pound from whence he had come, because he was the culprit who had dragged this tasty morsel up to the door for us to worship...)  If you know me, you know my reaction was pretty typical.  Having almost stepped on the thing, and having been completely and utterly unprepared for the sight, I wanted to do several things simultaneously: gag, pass out, scream, and cry.

After stumbling back into the house and running into my bedroom to curl up on the bed in the fetal position (you think I joke...), I frantically called my husband, who was out of town for a job.  Who, of course, thought someone was either dead or fatally ill, from the sound of my voice.  And who laughed, of course, when he found out what the problem really was.  I flatly told him that our backyard was just going to have to be unusable until he came back into town.  He replied "just have E get rid of it."

I suppose, if I were less...self-centered, I would have been horrified at the thought of exposing my baby boy to such a terrible thing as a dead bird.  However, instead I was just glad that I'd be able to look out my back windows without fainting.  I called him into the room and at first, he was just like, "ew, Mom, no." But because my powers of persuasion are greater than his powers of resistance, he relented. I coached him through the process, and he took a plastic bag and some gloves and went outside to dispose of the carcass.

The event lives on in infamy in our family.  The story comes up with shocking regularity, especially if E has anything to do with it.  After all, he got to take care of me for once.  He got to be the one with the power.  His part in the fiasco was much braver and wiser and calmer and stronger than his poor weakly, ornithophobic mother's.

That's ok with me, though.  I'm just glad I have a designated bird-corpse handler.