Graceful Parenting in Austin

Thanks for the Helen update, you might say, but what about the raccoons that come into your house at night? How are they doing?

Well, to tell you about the raccoons, first I have to tell you about my karas. Kurt Vonnegut introduced the idea of a karas in “Cat’s Cradle” (Kurt Vonnegut). A karas is a group of people you are linked to by fate throughout your life. This doesn’t include fake karases like Dallas Cowboy fans or Mommy Bloggers, but people who repeatedly show up in your life for no apparent reason. Like Darin Murphy, who I used to see play cover songs at the Gingerman in Houston fifteen years ago, who I interviewed on college radio when we both moved to Austin in the nineties and who sang at Grace’s service this past fall.

Raccoons are in my karas. I didn’t know from Cat’s Cradle that a kind of animal could be in a karas, but my personal experience says it is true.

I don’t live in the woods or in a wooded neighborhood and I don’t keep food scraps laying around my yard. But six years ago, when I was single, I had raccoons come through the cat door in my old house nearby and now, married and in a new house, they have found my new cat door. This was especially shocking and disturbing when their 4am - 5am dinner time coincided with one of Baby Girl’s night feedings and the cat food bowl was just on the other side of the door between the nursery and the kitchen.

We tried traps at first, working with Karen with Austin Wildlife Rescue, who maintains a semi-wild refuge for raccoons. We trapped the whole family, one at a time, Mom, Dad and the kids. It was quite a long process, because the raccoons became trap-smart and we had to use marshmallows and camouflaged traps to trick them. And then there was getting the trap to the rescue center, which seemed to be necessary only when Blue Eyes was out of town and I was so sure I would drop the trap, the door would open and the raccoon would come after me, like the possessed, evil animals in Stephen King movies.

But every time we trapped one, another would come into the house the next night. This trapping business wasn’t going to work. With lots of study and research made possible by the Internet, Blue Eyes and I came up with a new plan - a new and improved cat door that locks in both directions. The previous cat doors were unlocked by magnets on our cat’s collars, but the door was only locked coming into the house. The raccoons figured out they could get their long, curled claws under the lip of the door and pull it backwards.

The door was so new, it wasn’t manufactured yet, so we had to wait, then our order got lost so we had to wait some more and since then, it has been one of those things to do that stays on your list of things to do each week, mocking you and making you feel sad for all the things you can’t seem to get done.

It’s hard because putting in the new cat door means making a bigger hole in the house. I mean a real Hole In Our House. It is intimidating, really, because if you make it too big, event by half an inch, then we have a bit Hole In Our House and it’s hard to make a big hole smaller without using cardboard and duct tape and that doesn’t look nice.

And, we haven’t been as motivated because Baby Girl sleeps through the night now and, now that I get more sleep, I realized that I could just put the cat food bowls in a baggie in the pantry at night, so there is nothing to smell and they have no reason to come in the house.

But, so our cats can eat at night and so I don’t have to baggie the food bowls forever and because it is too late to return our fancy cat door, we will install it, one of these weeks, when we are feeling especially brave. Until then, I feel like we are Safe Enough and we try to not let this one thing on our list make us sad, there is no reason to be sad.

I suspect that raccoons will come back into my life sometime later, and I’ll remember to not be sad then either, it just just my karas at work and sometimes my karas brings fun pop music

and sometimes it brings wildlife,

it’s all part of whatever experience I’m meant to have and it makes for an interesting story and that’s all good.