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The Birds, the Bees, and why I lied about Santa

13 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by lsteinauer in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

fish, kids, parenting, pets, Santa

Today I spotted one of my fish, Rainbow Sparkle Razzlesplazzle, or whatever impossible-to-remember-name my kids gave her, hiding behind a plant with a guilty look on her face. The moment she saw me, she hurried back to her regular hangout by the heater, leaving me to wonder what mischief she’d been up to.

The last time she acted so strangely it was because she had just given birth to a bunch of live baby fish. Two seconds after that, the only adult male fish in the tank, Taco, died. A month has passed, and as far as I know, Taco is still quite dead, his body flushed far far away. So Rainbow Sparkleplazzle couldn’t be having more babies. The only other adult fish in the tank is female.

Meanwhile, Taco’s fourteen children, the ones Rainbow didn’t manage to swallow whole, dart merrily between plants. They are a constant reminder that I now have way too many fish.

The next time I walk by the tank, something catches my eye. Something small, something that looks like a newborn fish. But that can’t be. It must be a leaf, a fish poop, or maybe my eyes telling me that I need to stop watching late night episodes of Millionaire Matchmaker.

Pressing my nose against the glass, I study the aquarium floor. One, two, three, four, five, six, eight, ten, twelve itty bitty brand new fish staring up at me.

The aquarium store’s fish-whispering misanthrope explains it over the phone. “Female Wag Platys can conserve sperm for up to a month, allowing them to birth two batches of babies from only one mating.”

Now she tells me.

Taco, you virile old dog, you. If you weren’t already flushed down the toilet, we’d be having a serious talk.

Of course I tell the kids. And for a few minutes they even feign interest in watching Rainbow Sparkplug chase her new babies. But my kids know better than ask questions about the fish. No more, “why do the mommy fish eat their babies?” Instead my four year old squeezes my hand and tells me she appreciates that I didn’t eat her when she was a baby.

My seven year old begins to ask how the mommy fish had more babies without a daddy fish. But she doesn’t finish her question. There’s a reason she doesn’t. It’s because she’s not ready for the full truth. It’s like when I mistakenly blurted out that Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer was make-believe, causing her face to fall. For a moment she was silent. Then she frowned. “You don’t know that for sure, Mommy! How could you? You haven’t waited on the roof all night on Christmas eve looking for reindeer, so you couldn’t know for sure.”

In the meantime, the mommy fish keeps chasing her new babies around the tank. Watching this spectacle, I feel a renewed sense of gratitude: gratitude that I haven’t yet had to explain the birds, the bees, sperm conservation, and why I’ve been lying all these years about Santa to my children.

It’s been over a month since we first brought our three fish home and the novelty of having a pet (or in our case, 25+ of them) is long over. My kids have moved on. They are thinking about more important things, like summer vacation and how to dismantle the living room in less than 30 seconds. I am alone in caring for, or even remembering that we have fish. And as I open the aquarium lid to sprinkle some food into the water, Rainbow Frizzsplat corners a newborn and opens her mouth.

I should have bought a damn puppy.

The Zen of Querying with an Aquarium

13 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by lsteinauer in Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

aquarium, fish, parenting, querying, writing

While waiting to hear back from literary agents, here are two things you can do to keep your sanity from running off with your empty inbox:

1)   Write something else.

I made the mistake of devoting all of my free time (and I mean all of it) to writing and rewriting my manuscript. So when I started to query it with agents, I had nothing else to fall back on. Associating too much of myself with my manuscript made each rejection feel more painful than it should have. What I needed was another project to broaden my own identity as a writer. And it didn’t have to be big, like a novel. It could be a short story, or a picture book. With multiple projects, there’s always another angle to explore, another possibility…

2)   Get an aquarium.

Yes, I’m talking about living fish, those silvery zen creatures who swim in silent circles to the soft burbling sound of the tank’s filter. Feeling freaked out that you might not be the writer you once thought you were and every agent will reject your work?

Go look at the fish.

Feed them a few pellets and see how happy they are. At least they look happy, don’t they? For argument’s sake, let’s just pretend they’re happy.*

*Keep pretending they’re happy until one of them floats. Then you can call yourself a fish killer/bad parent/generally inept person. I mean c’mon, who can’t keep a lousy fish alive?

Apparently me.

But look at it this way, now you can have a deep conversation with your sobbing kids about the circle of life while driving to the aquarium store to have your fish water tested, resulting in:

1) A stern scolding from a fish-whispering misanthrope

2) A bigger tank

3) A new filter

4) An $85 bill

Then when you get home, you discover that your dearly departed fish, Taco, left  something else to remember him by:

Babies.

Lots of them.

Wait. How many?

Father of fourteen, Taco died with a smile on his face. And now your kids can watch the beauty of new life unfold in their aquarium…

Until the mommy fish start swallowing their babies.

Kids are crying again. Time for another, more confusing conversation about the circle of life. But we’ll leave that one for Dad.

So after all this grisly fish death and cannibalism, why would I recommend you get an aquarium?

Because you’ll totally forget about that empty inbox.

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Recent Posts

  • From Across the Parking Lot
  • Sifting Through The Ashes of Berkeley Family Camp
  • Reaching Through the Looking Glass
  • The Birds, the Bees, and why I lied about Santa
  • The Zen of Querying with an Aquarium

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