A Better Chicken Mama

Elvira, who died last week, had a little sister. We have been calling her Elmira. And Elmira is not looking good. She is about half the size of some of her cage-mates, big burly chicks with necks like snakes and developing combs whom I feel quite surely are roosters.
She has been sitting quietly in a corner, often trampled by the big boys she shares space with. She has been eating and drinking but as I know by now, this is no sure sign of a positive outcome.
Last night, when he got home, Mr. Moon decided to take matters into his own hands. While I cooked his supper, he went online and then came out to the kitchen and made up a paste of chick feed and sugar and a tiny bit of a Centrum Silver vitamin. He doesn't take them but there they are on the counter, in case he decides he wants to.
He mashed all this stuff up with the wooden end of an oyster knife and I looked on rather disdainfully, trying to move around him as I cooked. I mean really- the chick is going to live or die.
He disappeared into the back portion of the house with the mash and I continued to get supper ready and then he appeared back in the kitchen and said, "Come look at this."
I followed him into his bathroom where he sat down on the closed toilet and holding the dish of yellow goop in one hand and with Elmira firmly grasping his finger, he showed me how she was eating the stuff as if there was no tomorrow, chirping cheerfully all the while.
"Look how she's going at it," he said. "And she's sitting on my finger!"
And she was.
She loves chicken feed, sugar and Centrum Silver, all ground up and watered down.
After he determined she'd had enough, he put her into a separate box with the rest of the mash, some feed and some water. She cried because she was lonely, so we put Buttercup, the next littlest chick (and a hen, I think) in with her for company. They finished up the goop before we went to bed and have gone through a good amount of water and regular feed at this point in the morning and I think Elmira might make it.
I hope so because that is going to be Mr. Moon's favorite chicken of all if she does. The internet said that occasionally, a sickly chicken will make it and called it a miracle when it happens. So if she lives, she will be our miracle bird.
And I feel... guilty. Because I was just going to let her die if that's what happened without intervention and what kind of a mother am I?
A cruel one.
I do have sort of a "root hog or die" sensibility when it comes to the animals and also to the plants in my yard. I tend them but I do not go to great lengths to nurse them. If they are having problems, well, they'll either live or die. If they are strong enough and in the right place, they'll live. If not, well...curtains for them.
Thankfully I do not have this attitude towards the humans in my life.

And today I am off to town to take my mother back to the neurologist with absolutely no personality whose advice to my mother has proven to be useless to see what his next suggestion is.
Frankly, I think she'd be better off if Mr. Moon took her, but as her daughter it is my job.
I freely admit though, that he has the bigger heart of the two of us and the stronger back when it comes to getting done what needs to be done as well as the gentler of us. Honestly. He is.



My sweet, good man.
Mr. Moon, the doer, the dreamer, the determined.

The better chicken mama of the two of us.