Mom's B-Day Present ( long! )

[Snakeknot]

My mom's birthday is tomorrow so I decided to write her an article. Last time I wrote an article about my experiences in doing foal watch and just happened to send it to her around Mother's Day. She thought it was her gift and cried. Well, I'm going for the same reaction but might not get it due to the subject matter. We'll see. Anyhoo, I thought you guys might get a kick outta this. I've already had JemmaUK from cornsnakes.com edit it but if you see any blatant screw-ups, please let me know before I e-mail her this tomorrow a.m.

Devon

I must assure you that I wasn’t trying to get rid of my mother. It would be different if Mother and I had a spat and weren’t speaking or I was trying to keep her away from me but it’s not like that at all. I love my mother dearly. The older I get the more I appreciate what she went through to raise me. And I sure didn’t make it easy sometimes!

At the time of this writing, I am forty three and my mother is that mystery age seniors never want to tell you. Suffice it to say, I’m the last of three children. My sister, the firstborn, and my brother were much closer in age than I was. My sister is ten years older than me. She was a teen through the Beatles heyday. My brother took the Grateful Dead to heart in college. I experienced adolescence to the tunes of Prince and Michael Jackson. (That was before Michael got creepy.)

But as of the past two years I have made a decision to share my home life with a creature my mother only has fear and loathing of: the snake.

My mother has never liked snakes. I remember growing up in that ancient house surrounded by Delaware marshlands and the cat bringing home a half dead snake. I had to dispose of it. Mom wouldn’t set foot in the room with even a dead snake. As a little girl, my mother took me to the Philadelphia zoo with a group of other kids my age. When we got to the reptile room, Mom waited on a bench outside while we went in to look at the cold blooded critters. We stayed inside for well over an hour. Finally Mom felt pressed to face her fear to go in and find me. She tracked me down by searching out my shoes because she didn’t dare lift her head. That was so brave of her! I remember as a teen, Mom finding a black snake of extreme girth, coiled up and around a door through a small hallway in the house and Mom having to call a neighbour to evict it. The snake was large enough to scare both the neighbour and me. So with the use of a garbage can and a broom we toppled the poor snake from his comfortable, nap time perch, (which did not sit well with said giant black snake!) and took him back out to the marshlands where he belonged. I went to high school the next day and wrote about it in creative writing which amused my classmates to no end. I wonder whatever happened to that essay? It was quite funny as I remember.

I now live in a beautiful if small, ancient, log cabin in the Pennsylvania woods. The garage has been converted into a stable for our three horses. We have cats inside and outside the house, a lean, rescued greyhound; and snakes. As of this writing I have four of the scaly critters to be exact.

The lovely Francesca was the first to enter into the fold. I went to a nearby reptile show to purchase my very first snake, hopefully a corn and instead came home with an exotic, fat, nearly adult, Kenyan Sand Boa.

Hubby was expecting me to come home with some sort of reptilian thing. But when I proudly showed off my new gal pal all he could say was, “What’s THAT? It looks like BAIT!” He stills picks on my Sand Boa. He will go up to the small tank which comprise their home and say, “You sure you have a snake in here? I can’t see a thing. No wait! There’s a head.”

You see Sand Boas love to hide and dig. Secrecy is safety for them.

Fran has been a lovely ambassador for her kind. She is so colorful and slow and so well socialized to being handled that I have allowed children to hold her. She will sit still for a moment and then take her shovel-nosed snout and try to dig between their fingers just like any normal Sand Boa will do trying to find something to burrow underneath.

After Fran’s addition, my mother refused to come in the house and waited in the car for us. Sigh.

Gar, a baby Okeetee colored Morph Corn Snake, followed after Fran. But he proved to be a little nippy, so I traded him to a breeder for Wishbone, a Red Albino hatchling corn snake with a much better disposition. She is shy and cautious but generally very friendly as corn snakes tend to be.

Lastly there’s my favorite of the corns, Draco. I purchased him from another reptile show (Evil, bad, tempting things reptile shows are, poisonous to your wallet!) and Draco was a full grown adult. He is another Red Albino. I purchased him because I wanted a big snake. Fran was small and was going to stay that way. The other corns were hatchlings when I got them. I wanted to see if I could handle a big guy because guess what; Yes, I was actually scared of the big snakes. See Mom? I understand just a little of your fear. Fran helped me to deal with this apprehension. And when I chose Draco, I chose carefully. I was more interested in something I didn’t feel threatened by than color. I’ve always wanted a blood red corn but the blood I handled that day was a bit frantic. Draco was active without being bothered by my handling. So I came home with him. He still has a wonderful disposition. I can literally reach into his tank, lift up his bark hide and pet him like a cat.

Why do I like snakes? Good question. Listen carefully now here’s the answer. I have no flippin’ idea! I’ve been scratching my head about that one for a while now. Why snakes? Why now? I don’t really think I have a very good answer for that one.

I guess you could say that I think of them as living jewelry. The sun sparkles on their scales like gems. And the corn snakes come in nearly every known color imaginable except for purple and green and their colors brighten or deepen from shed to shed.

But there are other qualities about snakes that draw me to them. A snake moving slowly across your skin almost feels like a light massage. The varieties of snakes in the world and the different personalities of them I find fascinating. And yes, snakes do have personalities other than the aggression that you see all the time in the media. There is also so much variation in behavior between one species and another that I don’t think I will ever tire in learning about them. I will never own a giant snake because I just don’t see the point. Also, when a pet garter snake has a bad day, nobody cares. When someone’s 250lb pet anaconda has a bad day pain invariably happens and it shows up on the news to perpetuate the general belief of most people that all snakes are dangerous and will grow big enough to eat their owners. I also don’t have big snakes because the big snakes mostly come in boring brown and who wants that? I have no interest whatsoever in owning a venomous snake of any type but I enjoy watching the professionals deal with them from the safety of my couch. And I love assaulting snakes, tame or wild, with my camera. That’s Dad’s fault. He was always taking pictures of wildlife.

I enjoy speaking to people about the truth versus the myths about snakes. Once you know more about a topic it usually reduces the fear regarding it, usually. I do not believe any animals on this planet are “bad”. But we do have negative perceptions of certain types of animals. The fear of snakes or any other animal of that matter, are usually taught very young. As long as people keep teaching children, by their words or actions, that snakes are evil, people will continue to fear them. In the case of snakes like most pets, a bad owner & bad conditions, will make for a nervous or aggressive animal which only perpetuates the myths, to the snakes general detriment.

The truth of the matter is that there are many varieties of snakes kept and bred for the pet trade that are non-poisonous and will never get big enough to eat your dog, your cat or your child. Snakes such as Garters, Milk, Corn, Rat, Bull and King snakes, are native to America. They have also been bred to come in many more colors known as ‘Morphs’ than would naturally appear in the wild. Such colorful varieties, such as my amelanistic corn, would never make it to adulthood because most predators would find them a tasty, easily caught treat as juveniles. These are the only snakes I am interested in owning. You can keep the gargantuan, exotic breeds.

My mother used to write a column for the local paper when I was little about her experiences in re-habbing wildlife while raising young children. She wrote an article about her opinion of snakes. I remember her asking me to find a snake for Dad to get a picture of for the article. Well Dad wasn’t around when I found the snake she needed. So Mom had to do the honors and approach within ten feet of her dreaded adversary to take the picture. Never mind that I had a death grip on this very upset, common water snake that had thoroughly musked me for holding him, Mom was much more courageous than I. In this article she wrote that she tried very hard not to pass her fear onto her children. She hasn’t and should be loudly praised for that.

So I guess what I’m saying is that snakes have become one of my passions in life.

Sigh! Will my dear mother ever forgive me or visit me again? I sure hope so. I love both my mother and my snakes…

[guidofatherof5]

Very nice.

[Mommy2many]

Excellent! I hope your Mom will enter the house again.