What Ants And Children Have in Common

I have a morning routine of making coffee, meditating for 10 minutes and then writing several pages before I get up and make a mad dash to get ready.

This involves making sure my son is up for school, getting into the shower and then the mosh pit of e-mails and work calls. Maybe some media calls. Maybe ... if I’m ambitious. Making breakfast and/or lunch for both of us, which usually one or both of us leaves behind.

Sometimes, I get up to make coffee and find myself doing the dishes from the night before. Worst-case scenario: I face the army of ants that makes me feel 100 percent defeated.

I want to run screaming out of the house, and I remember my older sister telling me, when I first moved to L.A., “Pack a bag and come over.” This was in response to my calling panicked over the ant invasion. 

Now the ants are sometimes so bad that I’m shaking them off me as I either silently clean and curse my son for leaving a welcome mat of Kool-Aid and honey on the counter, plus a full garbage and a whole stack of dirty dishes from some little late-night snack.  

Sometimes, I text my good friend Katie, downstairs neighbor and the apartment manager: “Help! Being carried away by armies of ants. S.O.S., repeat, S.O.S. …”  This is when I feel most alone: facing the armies of ants. 

Thankfully, Katie arrives with Raid in hand, ready to do whatever is needed. Sadly, the Chinese chalk we once bought has long been banned.  Had to be something bad—it’s the one thing that caused ants to keel over just looking at it. 

But it’s a battle that continues relentlessly, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the abhorrent behavior of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department.  The ants have more staying power and reinforcements than I ever will. 

I realize that, at some point, I must make my peace with them. They can’t be controlled—they will always outnumber me. Then I remember the ants in other parts of the world that are capable of consuming a baby, like they did in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

And what if they become like the killer bees, brought into the country in someone’s luggage, arriving and mutating with our more benign species.  They could create a hybrid of killer ant right here.

I’m from Seattle. We have slugs. Or the occasional bumblebee wou'd step on barefoot in the summer. Here, I have to adapt to the idea of black widows, rattlesnakes, and coyotes, such as the ones that attacked our favorite “therapy cat,” Mamacita. I’m just thankful that we don’t have a hot tub where bears and skunks can frolic. 

Then one day, when life feels copacetic, I observe the various ants wandering about the house and am fascinated by their cooperation and communication. Good, or evil? Surely we can learn something from them. Are they more like the Third Reich or an ant kibbutz?  

The thing is, they all toil for a queen ant, carrying huge chunks of discarded food that weigh more than 100 times their weight. I’m impressed by their tenacity, even if they aren’t socialists. I realize that we could have our own little ant farm here, and young children can come from far and wide to observe.

But then they just keep coming, more and more, like "Trouble with Tribbles." I am back to feeling that ants and teenagers have a lot in common.  I have to admit my powerlessness over controlling the ant brigade and head on over to “Ant-A-Non.”  

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.