Children Come in Many Forms

Late last night, I lay stewing in a lavender bubble bath, a glass of red wine on the rim of the tub and a book in my hands. My small conure, Figgis, sat atop my forehead, leaning down across my face to comb through my eyebrows - all conures are born beauticians, if you didn't know. Last I saw, Bast had curled up on my bed, making sure that my feather pillows stayed flaccid and covered in hair before bed time. This is a typical evening here, if only for a little while.

Being a lower mid content wolfdog, Bastas is mostly dog with a generous dollop of undomesticated genes floating around. This does not mean he is a wild animal - one look at him sprawled across my bed, his paws wrapped around my linens (he prefers the pillow on the right), makes it abundantly clear there is no savagery in him. His mixed heritage just means that he is a dog who is a little fay around the edges: a loving, gentle creature with a healthy helping of whimsy and caprice. While his favorite daily activity is simply laying on the couch with some part of him touching me - a paw on my thigh, his forehead against my side - he occasionally hears a song that most humans have lost touch with, and he needs to get up and cause mischief.

Soaking in my bath last night, I heard the creak of my bedframe as Bast rose to his feet. I don't need to see him to know exactly what he looks like at that moment - eyes squinted, ears back, stretched up on tiptoes with his back arched and his bushy, fox-like tail extended out behind him. I heard the soft thump of his paws as he dropped off the bed, but as Bast makes very little noise when he moves, after that I heard only the quiet popping of my bath bubbles and the rustling of Fig's feathers as he settled on my hair.

I turned back to my book, but I was not fully re-immersed in it before I heard a slight shift on the carpet and became aware of something watching me. Bast stood in the door way, orange eyes softened to a warm, butter-squash hue by the low light, watching me with his head cocked to the side as if listening. I reached one hand out to him and said, "What is it, baby?"

Acknowledgement being apparently the only impetus needed to answer the call of the wild, Bast's eyes widened, his body dropped to the ground, and he shot forward in a black blur - to snatch my underpants off the bathroom floor. The sudden motion startled the parrot on my head, who shrieked, stretched, and shit down the front of my face.

As I sat in the tub, partially-digested raspberries plopping off my brow into the bathwater, listening to Bast's claws dig into the carpet for better traction to escape with his panty prize, I glanced down at the clock on my e-reader. 12:02 AM.

Happy Mother's Day to me, from my furred and feathered children.