Her voice was cheery enough. But the message began on an ominous note.
“Hi mom,” my daughter had phoned from college, “I’m in the process of becoming a mother.”
I inhaled quickly and audibly. Never good at spontaneous comebacks, I tried the textbook approach for extemporaneous speech – think before responding. Using my most non-committal voice, I casually asked, “Does that mean I’m becoming a grandmother?”
A Snake Shrink
Ronda was a junior at Western Washington University. She was single. She had waffled on selecting a major area of study. Once it was psychology; she had most recently chosen herpetology. That combination sounded like she would become a snake shrink. At age 22, Ronda was one of the few people who “sexed” snakes. While three or four large friends of hers subdued a much larger boa, my daughter used a probe to determine the reptile’s gender. She said she had been never wrong.
Perhaps there was a bigger calling for her skill among the educationally elite in Bellingham than there appeared to be in Maple Valley. Ronda needed to earn a living better than snake-sexing would seem to generate. Through her pet store job, she had become a surrogate parent to normal apartment pets, like a couple of pussycats and tanks of fish. But an interest in zoology also prompted her to adopt something that looked like an enormous mouth wedged into a baseball-sized frog body. Its tongue rolled in-and-out while glueing itself onto hapless insects. Ronda also had a gecko, an odd assortment of vermin, two milk snakes, and five corn snakes that ranged in size from two to four feet. At the time of her ominous phone call, she was witnessing the sex life of her snakes.
Infant Serpents
Ecstatic at the prospect of infant serpents in 85 days, Ronda was calculating her newest source of income. That winter she had turned off all heat in her apartment’s bedroom, forcing her pets into hibernation. According to plan, they awoke in April, shed their skins and began the rites of spring.
Ronda was becoming a mother, just in time for Mothers Day.
*
2020 Update: The feature article about Ronda and motherhood was first published in 1994. A 1990 Tahoma High School graduate, she earned a bachelors degree in biology and was employed by three pet stores while also providing baby snakes to the largest exhibit in the world for reptiles and breeders. At the 2-day yearly reptile exposition at Puyallup Fairgrounds in 2002, she earned $3500 selling her snakes. Her highest yearly income in snake sales was about $12,000. Ronda’s Masters Degree in child development prevailed however. While she was frequently a classroom speaker with live snakes for children to touch, she began her formal career as a teacher at Tahoma Cooperative Preschool, and then as a mental health counselor. She now is a Family Resources coordinator at Children’s Therapy Center in Maple Valley. Her current hobby is not snakes, although garter snakes do visit while she attends to her newest passion – gardening. She still “mommies” many of the more traditional house and yard pets; however, her collection also includes turtles and the exotic axolotl. The axolotl is an amphibian salamander. It is an aquatic pet but if it lived above ground, it would lose its gills, and become a terrestrial salamander (like tadpoles that turn into frogs). “Cute little guys,” exclaimed my daughter. Happy Mothers Day, Ronda.
