A Hamster Named Tinkerbell and What She's Taught Me



Tinks! Apparently it looks like I'm suffocating her but she is quite hard to keep still.

I've been falling in love. She's my sister's girl but her cuteness suffocates me. She's just so soft and cuddly that I can't help but melt and lose myself when I'm with her. She's a hamster.

Her name is Tinkerbell (we call her "Tinks"). My sister got her about a week ago, filled with one of her weird urges. My dad, to my surprise, agreed to buy a hamster for her despite the wishes of my mother.


I thought it was a stupid idea too, one of my sister's strange fantasies. What can I say, though? I've fallen for her too.

When she first came here, she was terrified. She came in a Petsmart box and I could hear her clawing like crazy in there. There were holes at the side and sometimes she would put her nose up in there. My sister told me to watch over her as she went to buy a new cage for her (the one she had was too small). So I watched over her as I sat in the computer room.

She was clawing so much that I kept checking to see that she was alive and not having a heart attack. She wasn't. However, when I picked her up, her heart was hammering like a hummingbird's and she kept fighting me.

Eventually, my sister put her cage together. She told me that I had to ask her to pick her up and that she would be very upset if I let something happen to her (to say at the least. My sister would never speak to me again). Of course, she had to remind me of an incident with her fish a few years ago which I take full responsibility of and still feel quite guilty of. My short attention span and thoughtless actions do put me at quite a risk to do something that could hurt her.

In the beginning, she would fight us when she would take us out. I remembered trying to learn how to hold her and how she bit me in the beginning (I do admit that I was squeezing her. It was quite a stupid thing for me to do).

My sister told me that she would have to get used to us and to be patient. Yet I could tell she was upset when Tinks fought her off (I told her that she fought me off too, which she did. I, however, kind of forced her out). At one point, she told me to go in there and pet her and that we would have to hold her a lot so she would get used to us.

I don't know why I'm starting to grow attached to her. Lately, I've had random bursts of affection for furry creatures, my dog included. I just take them and start to hug them and then I start to feel all relaxed. I've even gotten attached to a beaver puppet that my mom got my sister as a gag gift after this weird movie we watched.

I think it's because she's just so small and fragile that I feel I have to protect her. She's just so furry and soft and easy to snuggle with. And when I feel her tiny heart pound when I hold her, it's just enough for this really odd feeling to come over me.

I think Tinks is teaching me how to be tender and how to let go of my worries and everything else. She's teaching me how to take responsibility of something (okay, Rachael's taking care of her because she paid for her, I admit, but I feel obligated to check on her and play with her every night anyway). Oh, and I've been getting better hand-eye coordination from the few times that she has escaped my grip or has leaped off of the bed that we're trying to get her used to (which, despite my clumsiness, I actually seem to be quite good at. I suppose that's from all the computer games I played when I was younger and all of the computer time I use now). She's also forced me to take risks and to think on the spot, both of which I find very difficult to do.

It's also kind of fun getting her used to the outside world. We're trying to get people to hold her so she can get used to it and we're trying to get her to crawl on my sister's bed (it's controlled and we block her when we see her going to the edges) so she can get out of the cage without having to go into her little ball.

Best of all, I think my sister and I have been bonding over her too. Despite her being only a year younger than me, we don't have that much in common so we don't talk much and she's completely different from me. Sometimes I feel that she overpowers me and I resent her sometimes for that. However, Tinks has forced us to work together and with her, we have one common goal. It's quite nice, actually.

Unfortunately, she only has a two-year lifespan. That means she won't even get to live to see my graduation from high school. This worries me but I refuse to think about that now. Tinks is forcing me to live in the moment.

Yep, I'm falling in love. Who knew it would come this soon?

Her cuteness will kill me one of these days.