On Furry Friends & the Love I Overlook

 

We added two furry friends to our family this month—a mama guinea pig and her baby—and I really wanted them to love each other.

They arrived, huddled under a pile of hay in their carrier, and as they stared up at our five smiling faces with their deep brown eyes, I had visions of them sleeping cuddled up together, a jumble of black and white and orange fur, with matching white streaks down the bridge of their noses. I pictured them inhaling lettuce side-by-side and climbing onto my lap one after the other for a scratch under the chin.

Instead, they don’t often want much to do with each other. Mama pig claimed the roomy, willow stick hideout, and baby is stuck with the smaller one in the corner. If baby pig notices the coveted hideout is free, she’ll sneak in and leave her mother an unpleasant surprise. Mama pig steals strips of carrot peel right out of her baby’s mouth without apology and chases her away from the food bowl if she decides it's her own turn for a snack.

It’s not quite what I expected, and while I sometimes feel a little (or a lot) like mama pig chasing the children out of the kitchen and sneaking the leftover Valentine’s chocolate, she and I don’t share parenting styles. I even wonder if she really loves her baby much at all.

To me, love looks like the five humans in my house cuddled up on a queen mattress. It looks like rocking a child who is far past an acceptable age to be rocked to sleep. It looks like an impromptu hug from a child who I don’t rock to sleep anymore and a giant grin from a tiny face a few inches from mine in the darkness of the middle of the night. It looks like read alouds on the couch, important conversations that keep us up way past bedtime, and inside jokes.

This is how I expect love will look, because it’s how love looks for me.

But here’s the funny thing about mama pig: if she senses danger—the first day in our home, a stranger peering into the cage, a loud noise—baby is always welcome into her prime willow stick real estate. They’ll huddle together until mama decides it’s safe to come out of hiding, and then she’s on her own again. Watching mama pig’s protective instincts makes me think perhaps what I frame as hostility and indifference was actually love all along.

I wonder how often I forget the cuddles and the inside jokes are not a monopoly on what love looks like, no matter what my personality and my decades of life, my political leanings and my rocking chair may have me believe.

I wonder how often I miss love because it doesn’t look how I expect it will look.

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This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Love Looks Like."