On Mice and Forgiveness
I started the year in the throes of a months-long household mouse infestation. I spent weeks and weeks anguishing over the location of new droppings – no longer just in the kitchen, but near the front door, under a radiator farthest away from the food, on the sofa. That was the worst. On the new sofa.
When the sofa droppings happened, I lost all my chill. Maybe I never had chill. The mice thrummed in my mind all day long. I’d shriek, like a cartoon character, every time I saw them. I’d freeze if I thought I heard them scamper under the fridge. I’d run away if I heard a trap snap.
Rodents give me deep, uncontrollable, shuddering heebie-jeebies bordering on lunacy. There is a clinical name for it, of course, like there is for all of our irrationality: musophobia.
My husband has the patience of a scientist to track the critters, find their paths, their entrances, their escapes. He strategically inspects the dead to determine their approximate age, to know if we should plan to exterminate a litter or just outsmart survivors. Not me. I’m just mean! I’m unforgiving. I lay siege. The caulk gun on the dining room table was armed and ready to plug up any hole bigger than a sesame seed at a moment’s notice – and there are a lot of holes in a 120-year-old house. I single-handedly rolled the upright piano, that no one plays, over an aluminum screen because I suspected the critters were living in it. Wrapping the entire backside of the piano with the screen, I secured it with staples and duct tape. I stuffed miles of copper mesh to tightly block the space beneath appliances. I even laid out sticky pads, then refused to check them lest I find evidence of my heartlessness. I made my husband dispense with the stuck casualties, tears in my eyes.
“If you don’t leave them a way out, they’ll double down, eat what they can. They’re just creatures, trying to survive,” he warned me. “They’ll hide for a long time, but they’ll still be there.”
That’s how we ended up with the smartest holdouts – the last two survivors, one living in my stove, the other in the sofa. They had no way out.
The last two rodents finally perished and I declared a cautious end to the mousecapades. That’s when I read Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional. I had no idea it was about a mouse plague or I might never have picked it up. But midway through, the story shifts from the fact that the mice – their appearance, the killing of them, the stench of their demise — interrupt the monastic idyll the unnamed narrator seeks at a convent. When she meets with a ghost from her guilty conscience, she searches for forgiveness. The mice are rendered to routine backdrop and the daily discomfiture becomes the search for forgiveness.
As much of a musophobe that I am, I shifted with the story and stopped contorting in apprehension about the rodents. Instead, I became deep-breaths anxious about absolution and understanding. I wonder what the clinical word is for someone averse to forgiveness. Maybe it’s just “human.” Whatever it is, I suffer from it. Forgiveness, the meaning of it, what it actually is, occupies a lot of rent-free space in my mind. In real life, I’m bad at it.
My mom knows that I carry this sort of rancor in me. And when she catches a whiff of a grudge she thinks I might be holding, she doubles down on me, urging me to mend fences. She reinforces her lifelong lesson that amnesia can sometimes be a necessary balm to ensure the appearance of normalcy. To preserve harmony in life, leave others a way out.
The process of forgiveness is supposed to start with accepting our own humanity and then letting go of our own, and others’ shortcomings.
I think of the mice and still begrudge them. I know they’ll be back some day. During our mousecapades, my husband said, in a tone equally tender and derisive, “You’re taking them too personally. It’s really not about you.”
When the mice return, I want to resist blocking off the entire pantry entry with sticky pads, and not just because I stepped on them more than once. I want to remember to leave escape routes. I don’t want to be the shrieking victim again. I’d love to rise above the insult of rodents, to not take them personally, to move on from the offense of them.
But no promises. I will likely set out traps.
© Diana Rojas
Diana Rojas is the author of Litany of Saints: A Triptych (Arte Público Press, 2024), the forthcoming novel, They Hold Grudges (Arte Público Press, 2026) and children’s book, Clara’s Big Green Coat (Piñata Books, 2027). Her essays are featured in Grit & Gravity, The Washington Independent Review of Books, Latino News Network, and the forthcoming anthology America’s Future (WWPH, 2025). A one-time journalist, she grew up in Connecticut and New Jersey and graduated from NYU.
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