Fish Parenting: Why People Say Pets are Like Children

Aside from notions of species superiority, there are undeniably parallels in being parent to a human being and parent to some creature that depends on you in some way. I can say this because I've been both. I've raised my nephews through most of their lives, from infant to middle schoolers. I've changed diapers, dried tears, taught life lessons, loved to the point it aches.

Before working at Petco, I didn't think much of fish. I had fallen in love with a betta fish when I was a child, crimson bodied, prismatic fins, completely non-aggressive. Be careful-- he'll fight other fish. Except he didn't. Claude made friends with all the fish we put him with. When he met his end because my brother decided to add craw-dads (crawfish to everyone else), it broke my heart, but I never thought much of them after. 

I cleaned fish tanks at work; mostly because everyone else hated doing it, but I found it incredibly calming. We'd get new fish all the time, but it was the cichlids that intrigued me. All the other fish-- tropical flakes. For cichlids, I was told they liked the pellets. While caring for them, I noticed we had one little yellow guy in the bunch (an electric yellow labido) and he wasn't getting sold. He grew bigger little by little and often was the one starting a 'dance' with the other cichlids, a ridiculous up and down flitter along the edge. It made me laugh.

When I went home, I looked things up. Starting a tank, what to get, what they ate. Wasn't planning on getting any fish, but I did want to know more about them. Maybe subconsciously I was preparing to be a fish parent. And then I decided it would happen.

It wasn't the goldfish you get at a fair. I started nesting, so to speak. I shopped for a stand, a filter, a heater, decorations, gravel, a gravel vacuum, food. I set each thing up as I got it, but I was waiting for the large tank sale. However, I couldn't wait because I grew attached to the yellow one and I didn't want him sold. So I bought a little ten gallon set and took it home to set up. I'll admit, I didn't do it 'right'. I conditioned the water but didn't stumble on the nitrogen cycle information. Luckily, cichlids are hardy enough that they survived my beginner's duh. I didn't just get the yellow one, but a lively blue mbuna too.

I set up the large tank properly-- seeding the tank with bacteria to start the cycle off of rocks in their current tank, testing the water until the levels were perfect. Holy crap, the little guys were terrified by the transfer. Perhaps instinctively, they must've thought bigger tank meant they were primed to be food for a predator. They swam cautiously until they began to revel in a world 5.5x what they were used to.

Every little problem was a panic. I would cruise over the equivalent of FishMD pages for every little thing out of the ordinary-- tumors? Bloat? Parasites? Aggression? What the hell did I get myself into? And then they started breeding! It was one of those moments were I actually relaxed-- cichlids don't breed unless you're taking great care of them. But holy hell, how do I take care of the babies? Luckily, nature builds that duty into them the way they were meant to. They worried, they grew, they learned on the fly just like we do. Okay, they also eat the ones they can catch, but fish do cull the population to keep their species healthy. (Oddly enough, they were almost 'reserved' about that part-- I never once saw them eat their young, but you'd notice when the numbers dropped.)

Flashing-- that was another wild card in fish behavior. Most pages worry you with concerns of parasites or aggression or an illness. It's where they quiver or rub along things like a cat. Crap, mine do it all the time! It took a while to observe that this was also a cichlid thing. My dominant especially likes to flash when he's annoyed, angry, even happy and, like any parent, it was an emotional cue and I could tell the difference between them in the subtleties. It's those things you start to fall in love with. You start to know their faces, the way that only they use them, the things they try to tell you when they can't speak. They're sweet and mean and wise and reckless. They watch me too. I'll never figure out what could possibly interest them about me most of the time, but they do little dances when I talk to them, get jealous of whichever ones I'm speaking to and try to cut in front to absorb my affection.

Okay, maybe their deaths aren't as devastating or long lasting in our grieving. Then again, maybe they are. I'm not saying it's a matter of ranking, but with fish, I accept their short-lived nature. It hurts when I do form an attachment. When my dog and cat died, I mourned for months, just like I've done with people I loved, but fish are very different. How, it's harder to say. I worry about them but there's a sort of knowledge about their unpredictable health I've come to prepare for. With our own kind, we tend to develop longer lasting attachments or instant dislikes. 

Love and hate don't feel quite the same, although the intensity can. There are so many different kinds of love that a 'different' love often doesn't have a vocabulary we can make another understand. I always laugh when I hear parents of human children protest with unshakeable arrogance that you don't know 'love' until you've had a human child. They are willing to forget that there are parents who never connect to their children so strongly if at all. There are parents who adopt with not a speck of blood shared between them and love that child as their own. Not all of us need to have people that share our face to feel a real and meaningful connection. Many people even connect more strongly to other species than their own, either through trauma or experience. I could say that you don't know love until it is a choice and you make the choice again and again. It's not about being unconditional or expected or accepted. Love, even short-lived, leaves its mark on how we grow and learn to receive and give it. People will even try to attach conditions on what someone else considers unconditional love, but in truth, we just don't get to define it for anyone but ourselves. My mom and dad, the most incompatible people to outsiders and even people close to them. They fought like children but came together like soulmates even after divorce and drama. It wasn't storybook romance and it wasn't constantly evident, but it existed-- without simplification or reason.

Now my nephews. I knew I was bound to them from the time they were born and it was the stupidest thing I could do to myself. I knew they would be used against me and that I would never have the legal right to decide for them as a legal parent or guardian does. I knew it would be turmoil, sometimes absolute hell, that as much as I loved them, there would be days I didn't like them at all. I knew I had no business being a parent, that I didn't want to risk either passing on my demons nor bringing kids into a world I couldn't vouch for. I didn't choose to love my nephews either, but it happened. Against all reason, against all intentions, I had already felt they were mine. Feelings don't equal the absolute reality, so for years, I couldn't trust like that a regular parent does. 

I have my father to thank for giving both me and them the security to give them that chance. He told me under no uncertain conditions that he would not let them get taken from our secure situation on the whim of their parents. It was hard to get them to trust that I wouldn't leave them or let them get taken away, hard to even step aside so they could bond to their grandpa as they had come to rely on me. I had to build a bridge and help them meet in the middle. My nephews were socially haunted and it took a lot of nurturing to help them build confidence in the validity of their emotions. They want for nothing, but they aren't spoiled either. They understand responsibility and trust. These aren't things that came overnight. It was a battle for all of us, not a fairy tale of starting a family.

Of course, people asked me when I would have 'kids of my own'. A socially acceptable question that really shouldn't be. Another thing I had to laugh about. They ARE my kids. I have no desire to start from square one with 'my own'. They're not 'practice kids' or any less than ones that I might pop out of my own body. Aw, it's such a shame; why is it always the people that would make great parents are never the ones that want them? My situation was something, not exactly tailored to me, but one I tailored into my existence. I can't say I sacrificed anything other than drug addiction or useless wandering. These kids were a wake-up call that made me into the person I am proud of now. I've had to adjust. I don't believe I would have handled 'my own' as well because I think sometimes the supposed guarantees give us room to take things for granted.

Parental affection isn't something universal. It's built on many, many blocks. Things like death or disappointment or consequences of life are not things we can gauge nor can we bear all the blame or understand all its intricacies. When a pet parent says they love their pet as much as you love your child, they do. We all know what our hearts filled to bursting feels like and it's not lesser based on your opinions of it. When people say it's just as hard, it is, because people lose sleep over it just the same as you. Or, as Bill Burr said, the stakes are higher with pets. Your kid bites me and they get time out; my dog bites you and it gets put down. Now, you could put everything on scales and play the 'my misery is worse than your misery' game, but why not just trust that people know what they're feeling. Hell, maybe they will have kids one day and join the 'you don't know love until you've had a child' group, but don't diminish a present claim like you're some fucking clairvoyant of their self-expression.

That being said, I'll break into another short topic: memoirs. I could easily fill a fat book with my stories now. In fact, my life might be incredibly dull in the next thirty years and have nothing more to contribute to it. However, I'm willing to bet that some things age better with time. No, my past won't change, but my impressions and understanding of it may. I often gather pieces of my journey along the way, look at how life made my view of things change. It's not that we can't write them when we're still young. It's just that the most captivating parts are how we come to grips with our hardships and triumphs, how they mapped out our lives. The longer you can wait, the more opportunity for depth and epiphanies you get. Also, sometimes you just want to see if you can outlive anyone who might take issue with it. I know that's morbid and we don't like to think about it, but a memoir is never just our story. There are sometimes casualties we never meant to drag through our truths.

Whatever you take away from this, sometimes you just have to trust your intuition and be okay with people not understanding the depth of your emotion. There will be people who only see the shiny bits you put on social media (or the gritty ones) and judge without really knowing where you're coming from. And that's okay. Sometimes we mean to say something simply and get interrogated when, no, we don't quite understand what we feel. Sometimes you just have to walk away, contemplate, try to develop the vocabulary and try again. Words will just never be able to convey it all. Try anyway.