My Pet Rat Disappeared And I Had A Strict Mom But I Got Suspended Because Of Potatoes

This is a true story about what happened to me when I was thirteen years old and still living at home. I'm seventeen now and living with my boyfriend and his cousin and compared to the hell I lived with at home, its pure heaven.

My mom thinks that my boyfriend must have brainwashed me or kidnapped me or something cause she thinks that she's all that and that I should want to live at home til I'm like twenty or at least until I'm married. How old fashioned is that? But then my mom is super strict and kind of religous too. Not in the start flailing your arms and babbling like an idiot kind of religous but more like the sit and stare at a statue of the Virgin Mary kind of religous and go to church two times a week even though normal people barely even go once. One of the times is just for her ladies prayer group but I still think that if its on church property that its too much church for a regular person.

She got me Whiskers on a count that she heard that having a pet can teach kids to be repsonsible and to appreciate their parents more cause they see what its like to look after something else that doesn't do much in return or pay any of the bills. Whiskers was my pet rat and I called him Whiskers cause I couldn't think of any good rat names other than Ratty or Ratso and my mom said they were offensive kind of like calling black people niggers. I don't think Whiskers would have minded being called Ratty cause he was kind of ratty looking even for a rat and I have always thought that you should face up to your shortcomings.

Anyway, my mom being super strict always made me come right home from school to help with chores and stuff and one day I come home and she's got this huge pile of potatoes on the table and she tells me to sit down and start peeling. See, her church group was going to have a social and she wanted to show off how generous she was and how good a cook she was by making this huge batch of potato salad that the magazine where she got the recipe said it was a sure fire favorite at any picnic or gathering. So she tells me to sit down and start peeling and what else coiuld I do? I did just that.

Then about halfway through peeling all these raw potatoes she reads in the recipe that they are supposed to be cooked before you peel them. See, she'd never made potato salad before even though we're Irish and are supposed to eat potatoes all the time, so she didn't know that your supposed to cook the potatoes and then chop them up for the salad part. Well this makes her start to have one of her nutty spells where she gets herself all worked up and threatens to run away and leave me all alone with Whiskers as my only companion, but I remind her that her church is counting on her to bring something really special to the social and she can't risk looking bad in front of all her church friends so she starts in to praying to her Virgin Mary statue for an answer as to what to do with all the uncooked peeled potatoe.

So while she's busy praying I sneak off to look after Whiskers cause he must be wondering by now why I didn't come to feed him or to scratch his ratty little head after school like I always do. Sure enough Whiskers looked like he was ready to chew through the wire in his cage he's so agitated at being made to wait for his rat food and head scratches. Just seeing him like that made me feel so bad inside like I was a mean mother who only cared about her church socials and potato salad, that I let him out of his cage to run around a little and burn off some of his steam. I'd let him before when I cleaned his cage so I wasn't expecting what happened next. It seems that Whiskers wasn't riled up cause I'd left him sitting without dinner for a few extra hours, he was hopped up cause there was a girl rat living in a hole in the wall and he'd sniffed her out. The second I let him out of his cage he ran right to the hole (which I'd never seen before partly cause it was usually covered up by my dirty laundry all over the floor but it wasn't there today cause it was the last Thursday of the month and that was when momma gathered all the laundry there was in the house and sent it to the Chinese lady down the street since we didn't have a washing machine of our own.

Like I was saying before though, Whiskers usually just ran in circles around my room and sniffed at my dirty clothes a bit til I was done cleaning out his cage but this time he ran for that hole like a shot and that's when I saw her. Another rat just as ratty as Whiskers and the two of them ran off together. I had no idea where they went or what became of him until two days later when my mother sent me to school with some of the leftover potato salad for the pot luck lunch we were having in my classroom.

While I was busy trying to find Whiskers and his ratty girlfriend and get him back in his cage, my mom got an answer from God as to what to do about her potato salad. She figured out she could still cook the potatoes even if they were peeled already but that it might not taste quite as good as if the peels had been left on. So she prayed a little more on that one and I guess God gave her a good answer as to how to fix that one too cause by the time I came back to the kitchen she was smiling and singing and the potatoe salad was all but finished. Not wanting to spoil her mood and put her back into a nutty spell, I didn't mention that Whisker's was missing and I didn't mention the hole in the wall where him and his girl rat freind had disappeared to either, It turns out I didn't have to.

It seems that my mother had known about Whisker's girlfriend all along and set out rat traps all over the house. The both of them must have got caught in them, that much was obvious by the way thier little necks were twisted and broken. What I can't figure out though is how they ended up in the batch of potato salad my mother got me to take to school that day. Mom sent the potato salad with me in a big icecream pail and since the lid was on it, I didn't notice that there was too dead rats stuck in the middle of all that potato salad. It wasn't until Susie Whitmore started screaming that there was something in the potatoes that anyone noticed anything at all and I guess that two or three kids had already scooped off a spoonful or two of the potato salad and were already eating it when Sally's spoon hit poor Whiskers's right on his dead head.

That's when Mrs. Schneider came to look at what the big fuss was aboiut and unearthed the two dead love rats out of the uneaten potato salad. Well let me tell you, she was stinking mad and the kids who'd already taken a bite of potato were throwing up right there in the classroom while all the girls were screaming and pressing themselves against the far wall away from the table where all the food and the rats were. The boys tried to be more macho and jsut said things like "Ewwww" and "Gross" and then everyone's attention turned to me. Just what was I doing with two dead rats in my potato salad? Mrs. Schneider didn't even wait to hear what I had to say about it, she just turned to me and sputtered "Principal's office, NOW!!!"

I told the principal that I didn't know anything about the rats in the potato salad but when they called my mother to ask her what she knew about it she just acted dumb and said "So that's what happened to her pet." I got suspended for two weeks all cause of my mother's dumb potatoes and my poor rat Whiskers ened up in the trash bin at school cause he couldn't resist a girl rat just as ratty as he was.

And that's a true story. You can take it to the bank.