No bats about it

My niece informs me that her older brother and his friends won’t let her play basketball with them because she’s too little. I receive this like a call to arms, parables and fables at the ready.

“Your size is just right,” I say. To illustrate, I share with her the relatively little known and little understood Aesop’s fable about the bat and the weasels.

“Back in the olden days, bats were a new item. The world was mainly filled with your basic animals – cows, horses, goldfish. Animals were a pretty conservative lot and so mating between species was frowned upon. Creatures like centaurs, pegasuses, platypuses – and bats – were rare as they were the spawn of only the most radical and forwardlooking animals.

“Two such radical forwardlooking animals were a freethinking pigeon and a politically-minded mouse. After a brief courtship, they birthed a daughter. No one knew what to make of her.

“‘Maybe we messed up,’ said the father looking at their newborn’s long, thin, black wings as they slowly opened and closed. Her mouse mother taught her to forage and her pigeon father taught her to fly. So as not to arouse hostile curiosity, he encouraged her to fly at night when she wouldn’t be seen.”

“That’s why bats fly at night!” my niece says.

“I guess so,” I say. “When other animals asked what she was, she’d simply say, ‘I’m Hillary,’ since it was her given name.

“One night she found herself captured by a weasel.

“‘Weasels hate birds,’ said the weasel menacingly.

“‘I’m not a bird,’ Hillary responded, feeling disloyal to her father.

“‘Then what are you?’ asked the weasel. Trembling, she answered that she was a mouse. This satisfied the weasel. He released her. Sadly, she was captured by a second weasel.

“‘I’m not a bird,’” said Hillary pre-emptively. ‘I’m a mouse.’

“‘I have contempt for mice,’ said the second weasel.

“Hillary sputtered out: ‘Bat... I’m a bat.’

“She was trying to say, ‘but,’ on her way to coming up with an excuse, but her ‘but’ turned into a cry and the word ‘bat’ emerged.”

“What’s the moral of the story?” my niece asks.

“I guess sometimes the thing that you are hasn’t been defined yet,” I say. “And the only person who can define you is you.”

“I’m Hillary,” she says. For now, that feels like progress.