It?s a fact of parenting that the thing your child needs is often the exact opposite of what you need. You learn this right out of the gates, when your need to sleep gets trumped by your newborn?s need to eat. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
As kids get older, their needs become more complicated but the pattern continues. They need privacy and you need to know what they’re doing in there. They need to sing that Beyoncé song over and over and over and you need to never hear that Beyoncé song again.
Not all needs are equal. In the family economy, kids? needs often count more.
Which is how I ended up with a hamster. Despite my terror of hamsters.
My ?thing” about rodents lands somewhere in between strong aversion and phobia. It was a bogeyman of my childhood and those are hard to shake. So when my daughter Rosa, then eight-years-old, asked if she could get a hamster, my response was deranged laughter. My daughter had been begging for a pet?a pet you could pet, meaning no goldfish, thank you very much?for years. Her petitions for a dog, cat and bunny were denied on the basis of her siblings? allergies. So, the plea for a hamster, a low-maintenance, cost-effective and non-allergy-inducing pet, was inevitable. Still, it was a non-starter.
?Honey,? I told Rosa. ?You know how I feel about rodents.?
?But Mom,? she said plaintively, ?I need a pet.?

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