I Used To Be A Cat Lady
My pet doesn't respect my boundaries and it hurts my feelings.
One recent morning, I woke up feeling like shit. The evening before, we’d celebrated my younger son’s second birthday, and we went HARD because my boi likes to party. He loves shakin’ that ass and his hips don’t lie. The point being, I chalked up my “tummy ache” to too much beer and a homemake cake that called for three sticks of butter. But as the day wore on, my hangover did not dull to an unspecific sadness, like they usually do. Still, I fought it, because I find it so existentially grim, so cosmically unfair, to contemplate caring for children when I am ill for reasons I did not inflict upon myself, that I try to avoid the situation by simply refusing to accept it. Then, sometime late afternoon, my two-year-old started puking. Shortly after, I joined him. I find the only thing worse than caring for healthy children when you’re sick is caring for SICK ones when you’re also sick. So I was in hell. And hell smelled like vomit.
And yet, I persisted, because that’s just the kind of badass bitch I am. I parented the shit out of that sick baby, despite my own grave condition. I even let him vomit on me directly several times, because why not? We’ve got a washing machine. We’ve got soap. Make it rain baby! Also it didn’t occur to me to get something to catch the vomit until my husband suggested it. Finally, after what felt like the longest afternoon into evening of the modern era, my husband put the kids to sleep — I would have helped were I not vomiting at the time — and I crawled into bed, sure that with a good night’s sleep, I’d be well by morning.
But a good night’s sleep is not what I got. And not because my kids were calling out for me, or because I was running to the toilet. It was because of a gentle, then no so gentle furry pat on my face every hour on the hour from midnight to 5am, which wouldn’t subside until I stumbled out of bed and refilled my cat’s nearly full bowl of food. I’m sorry, cat, is this a diner? Am I your waitress? Am I supposed to top off your coffee every time you take a sip? This asshole, who I RESCUED off the STREETS, who would be DEAD without me, couldn’t give me one night to let to power of sleep restore my aching gut. That hurt my feelings.
Before I had real babies, I had fur babies. People called me cat lady. They’d see cat socks at novelty stores and think of me. I wasn’t trying to make an identity out of it, but yes, I liked cats! I still like cats! And before I had a human family, I considered my cats my family, and I swore to my precious little guys that no man or child would ever change that. But then I got a man and children, and it’s not like my cats stopped being my family, but scooping the litter box after feeding, bathing and putting two boys to bed started to feel like more of a burden than it had before. Then we bought a house, and all I could think about was how the smell of our corn based all natural litter was probably lowering the property value. Then the cats started losing weight, which led to trips to the vet, which led to higher medical bills than both times I’d given birth put together. Somewhere in all of this they got fleas, rendering them actual vermin. Plus, they may have been neutered, but they were still contributing to a dominant MALE vibe at home, which I did NOT need. I’d joke ‘we’re just waiting for the cats to die! Lol! Jkjkjkjkjkjk! Not really! But kind of!’. I felt like a guy on my second marriage. Sure I still loved the kids I’d had with my first wife, I just wasn’t at all interested in them.
The thing I’d lost sight of was that these were not children, these were cats. They weren’t supposed to be training wheels for parenting, or a substitute for human companionship. Why was I thinking of them as a phase I’d grown out of? How could living creatures possibly be that? Honestly, I blame the culture. What cynical Petco VP invented the term ‘fur babies’? Surely it only exists to guilt us into paying for Bobby Flay-grade cat food. As any animal lover already knows, animals give us something humans can’t, which I find hard to put into words because they do it without words. Earlier this year one of my cats got very sick very quickly and we had to put him to sleep. My husband and I cried a lot, and my oldest child couldn’t sleep because he feared that he would also die. Guiding a three-year-old through his first existential crisis is no joke. As my husband put it, “now I get the point of organized religion.” But privately, I also felt entitled to more sadness than the rest of my family, for all the years before some of them even EXISTED that it had just been me and my cats, and all the feelings there were no words for because we felt them in silence.
Here is another thing animals have given to me. A few weeks ago, my sister died suddenly and unexpectedly. As people who love me try to console me, words have been both helpful and insufficient. No one says what I want them to say, but when they say nothing that angers me too. Comforting words break through in moments I don’t expect, from people I don’t expect, and before I hear them, I couldn’t have told you that I wanted to. My sister loved animals. She preferred them to humans, who generally made her uncomfortable. And so the other night when I lay awake thinking about how my sister is gone, it was almost a relief to hear the soft trot of my one remaining cat, coming to annoy me about filling up his stupid bowl. Only instead of smacking me across the face as I’ve come expect, my cat curled up next to me and went to sleep. His offensively loud purr was a lullaby, the softness of his fur, finger ASMR. And as I sank into the ineffable calm that animals give you, the one my sister sought from every animal she encountered, I felt closer to her.