It happened with the gerbils, and I wasn’t surprised. After all, they have brown eyes and fur, like my middle son.

It happened with the goldfish, and I was shocked.

I never imagined I would feel responsible for the Tamagotchi.

My youngest son got a virtual pet the other day, a tiny little electronic toy encased in an oval case (Tamagotchi is Japanese for “cute little egg”). These virtual dogs, birds and baby people are now the hottest toy around.

Though the pets “sleep” for 10 hours a day, responding to the timer inside them, they need tending during their waking hours. Press a button, and they can bark, eat, play, take a shower and even go poop.

But if you yell at them too much, they’ll run away. If you neglect them, they’ll die.

That was the problem.

Martin, of course, lost his cyber-kitty the first night he had it.

He was asleep when I heard, somewhere in my room, the beep sound for hunger.

Using a flashlight, I searched. I went back to bed. The beep sounded again and again, in shorter intervals, indicating that the kitty was growing more desperate. I tried to ignore it.

My assistant Michelle suggested I take a hammer along with the flashlight. “You’re never going to be able to turn that thing off,” she warned. “You can’t even set the oven timer.”

Finally, I woke my 8-year-old from a sound sleep.

I pretended it was like the time his older brother lost an electronic musical card in the house, which played “Fur Elise” for three days straight while we hunted for it in desperation.

But it was not the same.

The thing that psychologists warn about Tamagotchis — that very young children, who cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality, could experience stress if their pets “died” — was, in fact, happening to me.

Now, Martin, who can distinguish real from pretend, advised, “Forget it, Ma. It’ll starve to death in a few minutes.”

“Get up this instant!” I hissed at him. “How can you be that way?”

Groaning, he complied, but grumbled, “All you’d have to do is press the reset button and it would get reborned.”

Well, I don’t know how to press the reset button, and I didn’t want the cursed thing to die — unexpectedly if virtually — on my watch. This is why I can’t cope with pets.

When the gerbils gnaw at the bars of their cage, I believe they’re dreaming about the Australian outback.

When the ferrets’ water bottle gets upended, I, too experience pangs of thirst.

If we had a dog, I’d probably have to bring the dog for counseling.

For three hours one night, I obsessively bailed and replaced scummy water from the bowl of Michelle’s ornamental goldfish — the filter had conked, and I could not locate Michelle — until they finally went belly up, one by one.

When Michelle came home, I was crying, and I was furious. “I don’t like fish!” I told her. “I don’t like live things of any variety! I can’t have them on my conscience!”

Since worrying about the interior lives of the few actual pets we have exhausts me, Marty’s Tamagotchi was probably a good idea.

Right away, he taught me all the functions, showing me how virtual critters “live” an average of a month before they need to be “reborned.”

So, when Martin went to the swimming pool, I kept the kitty on my desk so I could look after its needs, feeling (and this is something I should probably discuss with a good therapist) not at all like a fruitcake. When Patch (its given name) lived through the day, even though I once had to give her a shot, I felt tenderness — for the equivalent of a digital watch.

Once, my friend Gayle and I had to dispatch her son’s hamster, which had a broken spine.

It wasn’t pretty, and we tried all kinds of anesthetics (from vodka to gasoline) before we simply flushed Henry.

Afterward, I needed vodka and gasoline myself.

“How do you manage?” I asked Gayle. “Living with all these fragile little live things?”

“How do you?” she asked, gazing at my five kids.

But there, I don’t even want to begin to go.

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Jacqueline Mitchard is a syndicated columnist from Tribune Media Services.