“And the Mother of the Year Award, 2020, goes to…”

She tears up the pre-sealed envelope with the finesse of a five-year-old, shredding up their Christmas gifts.

My name.

The camera would immediately zero in on my face, just to capture that disbelief forced out of my well taught humility in a Chinese household as I try to fix my hair tangled in gushes of hormones and self-consciousness, all while I smile the way my grandmother taught me to – apparently, it makes me look a whole lot more approachable. As I rise to hug whoever was sitting next to me, cut, the camera flashes to me running to hug that friend who lost to me in the same category, and switch, the shot shifts to bitter expressions from people whose names I have never heard, and finally, the camera does a close-up of my teary-eyed parents who are both clutching a piece of crinkled Kleenex.

Though I knew my award was well-deserved, I also know for a fact that my mom deserved to receive the mother of the year award when she bought me that long-awaited pet on my 10th birthday. By my dictionary, a pet is, in official terms, “an alive quadruped that I could dress up in Pinterest aesthetics”, and because frogs are absolutely too repulsive for the frog-phobic -- or ranidaphobic, a word I learned just a few days ago -- Makayla four years ago, I added the phrase ‘with fur’ to that definition.

I stared blankly into Vanilla’s pearl eyes. “More? Please? With carrots on top?” The ball of fur stared, hoping.

“Nuh-uh.”

Aesop’s fable, “My Sister’s Rabbit,” taught me: never overfeed your rabbit. You see, my mother had fed her poor rabbit noodles just so my picky sister would eat her dinner. After a day of high-calorie intake, it was found bellied up, a hideous mistake that I had promised my prudent self never to make. So, I took matters into my own hands, taking the responsibility of feeding the rabbit away from the mother that believed a Chinese rabbit could stand feasting on Japanese Udon noodles.

The first night Vanilla came home, my mother and I sat next to his cage, staring at him closely. After spending the day nestled in that bucket of existential grass, his majesty finally deemed the surroundings to be somewhat satisfactory for sleep. He gaited closer to us, his nose twitching with curiosity as he stood to smell the two gigantic beings. With a soft, contented sigh, he then tucks his paws under his body as his ears lowered gently

and slowly, so ever slowly, his eyelids began to droop with caution, as if he was missing out on some exciting activity of tasting carrot, grass and, well, carrots.

My mother and I exchanged glances, chuckling gently at the bunny’s unwillingness to give up the fight. His tiny body sank deeper into the mesh grid of his cage as his fur rose and fell with his tiny breaths. But the weight of sleep was too heavy for such a little bunny to resist, and with a final flinch, his eyelids shut completely.

It was with surprise and confusion that I found him lying on his side one night as I slurped on a disturbingly sour tomato, since his majesty was never one to grow trust in such a short amount of time. My meticulous methodology of keeping up with his healthy, noodle-free diet was “working wonders.” But his breath was erratic.

Then it twitched. It’s body twitched, stretched out the way he stood up to smell us, except that he was laid out on the floors of the cage. His paws were drawn out as if reaching for something far, desperately. Suddenly, his muscles jerked as his sense of consciousness wiggled its way out of this limped body. Though I had never seen a person go through a seizure before, it was the word most close to the convulsions Vanilla was going through.

He tried to stand, but fell to the floor, landing on his side, his head still jerking uncontrollably and randomly. As fast as Vanilla entered this unconscious phrase, he went into a trance-like state, staring disorientedly at the borders of his cage as I was ragged in breaths choked by tears.

My mother was quivering. “We need to send him to a hospital now. You eat your dinner; we send him to the hospital.”

“What about me?” – Mother was already choosing an old white jacket I had grown out of to cradle his limp and pale body on the way to the nearest animal hospital.

I turned my gaze back to Vanilla – hauntingly still and rigid after a series of tiring twitches and thrashings. Each one of his breaths was visibly a struggle, his now sweaty body still trembling from the episode. With the last remnants of his energy, Vanilla slowly lifted his tiny head and fixated his gaze on my familiar face, as if trying to imprint it in his memory. His head rested on the floor with a tiny thud. He had finally given in to the exhaustion.

The pet ICU had promised me Vanilla would get better. Upon two shots of dextrose to counteract his low blood sugar, they miraculously managed to get Vanilla back to consciousness -– his body was showing signs of life. After another oral dose of glucose, he had enough strength to nibble on some grass. But without warning, an hour later, he once again plunged into a state of unconsciousness; by midnight, after relentless procedures with names I had not learned in Biology class, he was back on his feet, and we were assured that he would be ready to come home the next day.

But he wasn’t. He wasn’t, despite my care for his nine pieces of grass, one treat, and noodle-free diet for the mere eight days I had with him. We had already had our final farewell -- one that I could not comprehend at that moment.

As I came to find out, Vanilla was cremated with the white jacket that bore my childhood dreams of being just like the other single mothers of pets -- an eight-day dream that felt so profoundly real, yet so fleeting.

Moral of the story? Perhaps we should just leave the rabbits to the fields.