Our Goldfish (RIP)

Our goldfish died yesterday. My daughter brought him home from school three months ago in a little plastic bag. I dug up an old glass vase to use as a makeshift fishbowl, since experience has taught me that goldfish in our house never survive for more than a week.

Countless mornings, I have come down to the kitchen and found myself facing a wide eyed fish floating upside down at the top of the bowl. Though it usually makes me slightly queasy, this time I took a deep breath, marched right over, picked up the whole bowl, and flushed the hapless fish down the toilet.

As my children trickled groggily into the kitchen one by one, I held my breath praying they wouldn’t notice the absence of our vase/fishbowl. As I doled out cereal and milk, plain cereal, and cereal in a bowl with milk on the side, none of my children seemed aware that anything was amiss. Only once they were all safely ensconced in school did I allow myself to exhale, mistakenly believing that a crisis had been averted.

“Where’s Goldie?” my three year old inquired later that afternoon.

“Who?” I asked a little too loudly.

“OUR FISH”, she replied, clearly annoyed at my ignorance.

I had to think fast. Should I tell her the truth? Did I really want to explain the concept of death to a three year old right now? After all, it was just a fish.

“Well, ummm, our fish got very sick, so I had to flush her down the toilet.”

“It’s cuz we fed her too much fish food, right Mommy? Can we got to the pet store and get a new one?”

I smiled, relieved that she seemed to have taken the news in stride, and that there was no accompanying tantrum.

When my three older kids came home, things did not go as smoothly. The absence of the fish, which had gone unnoticed in the morning rush, was now glaringly apparent. Although my kids knew that pet goldfish are wont to die, especially in our home, they were horrified at my appalling misdemeanor. How could I flush the poor dead fish without a proper funeral?

As I vaguely recalled the popsicle stick grave markers in the miniature cemetery behind the garage, I chided myself for allowing my children’s fish funeral ritual to slip my mind.

When our last goldfish had expired, I had been in the early stages of pregnancy, and the sight of a fish, as well as the smell of fish food, had sent me dashing to the nearest bathroom, awash in waves of nausea. When my oldest son, realized that the fish had passed on, he bravely scooped it up in a cup, lovingly placed it in a plastic baggie, and then proceeded to officiate at the funeral, while my two other kids looked on solemnly. Fishy (I think that was his name) was then buried alongside his three predecessors, Swimmy, Orangey, and Sharky. How could I have forgotten?

As a devoted mother, the fact that I consistently attempt to shield my children from life’s disappointments, coupled with the knowledge that death (even that of a goldfish) is an uncomfortable topic to discuss with kids, had prompted me to dispose of the fish swiftly and quietly, thereby deluding myself into believing that I could circumvent the whole predicament with a quick flush of the toilet.

I recalled with amusement the first time we had acquired a goldfish, and it had died within a couple of hours. The kids were very young, and being the novice parents that we were, my husband had raced out to the pet store, minutes prior to closing time, and replaced the ill-fated fish with a look alike, hoping to spare our kids the disappointment of the death of their first pet.

Often, in our quest to be perfect mothers, we desperately want our children’s lives to remain halcyon and carefree, yet we are ultimately doing them a disservice by sheltering them from the harsh realities of existence. By gently guiding them to face the world’s challenges head on, painful as it may be for us, we can hopefully fortify them to deal with the bumps on the road of life ahead.