Month: April 2019

Last weekend, Kit’s Dad and I went out for dinner. It a relief to finally be able to leave Kit alone as an adult meerkat, without having to worry about a baby-sitter for his personal safety. Although, I sometimes wonder if we should get a baby-sitter for the safety of our home when he is in it alone. But, to his credit, so far he has not set fire to anything he couldn’t put out.

As I stood at the bathroom mirror attending to my make-up, Kit sat on the counter watching in fascination. “Why are you doing that, Mum?” he asked.

I answered, “So I’ll look nice when your Dad takes me out.”

“But, what’s the point?” he persisted. “Since you turned forty, you’ve really let yourself go, but that doesn’t worry Dad at all. He could probably get a much younger woman than you, but honestly, I don’t think he can be bothered with the amount of personal grooming that would take.”

“Well, that’s charming!” I thought, saying only (knowing very well that I was going to thoroughly regret it), “Would you like to elaborate?”

So he explained, “From what I’ve googled*, in most species, the males have the higher sex-drive, so they are the ones that need to attract females, who are usually very picky. So, why do human females make so much effort to make themselves attractive to males? I don’t think there’s a woman alive who could not get herself a man if she wanted to. I’ve met men who would date a hole in the ground!” he assured me.

He continued, “In bird species, it’s the males who have beautiful but, unwieldy feathers sprouting from strange places. Whereas, human males are more likely to have hair sprouting from strange places, and many men don’t do very much to make themselves attractive to women.”

“Kit,” I said gently, “That’s a bit of a generalization.”

“But women say stuff like that all the time,” Kit countered, “It’s all over the internet!” (At about this point the afore-mentioned regret kicked in.)

I am now plotting how to limit Kit’s internet surfing without him noticing too much. It really won’t do to have him being right like that!

*I use the lower case for ‘google’ because I am generalizing. We actually use the search engine Ecosia because they use their profits to plant trees. Kit thinks this is pretty cool because they produce oxygen, and he enjoys breathing so much that he does it on a regular basis.

“How can there be Times New Roman font?” Kit asked, “When there are no new Romans. I thought they went extinct.”

“They didn’t actually go extinct,” I countered, “They were human, and there’re still plenty of humans around. Roman culture and language sort of faded and evolved into other things and bits of it got absorbed into other cultures and languages.”

“You’re not kidding about there being plenty of humans around,” Kit mused, “I wonder if rabbits use the phrase ‘breeding like humans’. The funny thing is, wherever you go, you never actually see humans doing it, but you must be having it off every time the door shuts because there are gazillions of you everywhere I look.”

“I think,” I theorized, “That’s it might be less to do with over-active sex lives and more to do with us being very good at staying alive compared to most species.”

Suddenly, Kit startled me by making the most high-pitched squeaking noises. Soon, he became indignant at the pained expression on my face, and haughtily informed me that I was privileged to have witnessed a very promising performance of The Bee Gees, Staying Alive.  That the fact that I needed to be told this contradicts his conclusion somewhat, but don’t tell him I said that.

Cutting short Kit’s singing career, I steered back to the subject at hand, “You know humans have sanitation, and vaccines, and Caesarians.”

“Caesarians, eh?” Kit mused, “Didn’t you have a Caesarian Salad at that restaurant one time?”

“I should hope not!” I admonished, “Do you know what a Caesarian is?”

“Enlighten me,” he encouraged. The problem with living with a young adult meerkat is that, although now grown up, he has still only had four years to learn about the world. So, while he is able to rationalize like an adult, his general knowledge is similar to someone who went into a coma as a child, and didn’t wake up until they were twenty-two. Or possibly, like someone who never paid attention to anything anybody else (by which I mean me) said. Ever.

So I described a Caesar salad to Kit. And then I explained what a Caesarian Section is.

“Oh, right,” he said, “Surely, you can understand my conclusion. Due to the addition of the suffix, ‘ian’, I thought that that made Caesarian an adjective, like ovarian or authoritarian. ‘Caesar Salad is all wrong!” he announced, “You’re using a proper noun as an adjective.”

Ignoring the grammatical failings of salad names, I asked “Would you like to try a Caesar salad for dinner?”

“After learning about Caesarian Sections,” he replied, “I don’t feel like eating anything for quite a while! To find out the answer to my original question, let’s look up the history of Times New Roman.” So we did, and got absolutely no answer whatsoever.

Like many offspring, one of Kit’s favourite activities is pretending to help. It’s not that he is inherently unhelpful, but he is so tiny that it can sometimes be difficult for him to assist in a physical way.

Fortunately, Kit is great at moral support (and God knows my morals need all the support they can get). He celebrates every win, no matter how small, in the hopes of celebratory food and drink. He leaps and dances, whoops and cheers, and offers high fours (his competitive spirit inspired him to point out that they are superior to those of a sloth, who can only manage high threes).

Kit loves to share. He especially loves sharing other people’s things. Well, generally my things because that’s what mothers do! If I want to eat junk food, Kit is always happy to help. But, he’s not so keen on sharing anything that makes its way to his stockpile of treasures under his bed; like his favourite smelly clothes that he doesn’t want to be parted with( even to wash), beer caps, chocolate that he pilfered from me, and the ubiquitous dead beetles (he thinks I don’t know about them; but really it is he who doesn’t know about vacuuming under the bed).

When I told Kit he has a congenital aversion to sharing, he replied, “I don’t get it. Isn’t ‘congenital’ conjoined twins who only need one pair of knickers?”

“An interesting extrapolation, but, no. It means ‘from birth,’” I answered. “In fact it’s lucky you’re an only child,” I went on, “No siblings to share things with.”

“You’re weird having an only child,” he said, “And in quite a lot of other ways, but I don’t have time to get into those. Most humans I know think that people should have more than one child. People say, “You can’t make them an only child. That’s cruel! But I’m glad I’m an only child. I don’t want to share your resources and attention with some annoying little ankle-biter.”

“Annoying little ankle-biter, yourself!” I teased.

“Touché!” he replied.

“Ow!” I exclaimed as he lived up to that designation, and scurried away before I could catch him.