A Visit From The Stork

The family reunion was this weekend, and it actually went very well. No major issues and everyone put on a happy face and avoided ripping heads off.

So on Friday I was packing my things to get ready for the weekend. We were scheduled to leave my house when Hillary got here from work (a 2 hour drive for her) and then be on our way, taking separate cars because there wasn't enough room in one car for everything. I get a phone call from Hillary half-way through the day saying that one of the feral cats at school (Hillary works at our college now) had kittens and the maintenance staff was giving them away. So I called my mother to see if we could bring one home, if and only if she could look after the kitten until January and we would bring the kitten to the apartment with us when I got back from London. The madre agreed, so Hillary went and got a kitten.

Possibly the worst mistake of our lives, though also the cutest investment ever. This was the tiniest kitten I had ever held. She is a calico, who loves to run around like a banshee and things fingers and toes are the coolest chew toys ever. We took her to the vet on Monday and they determined that she was between 6-8 weeks old, so the bottle we had been feeding her every 2-4 hours since Friday evening was unnecessary (she seemed to really enjoy the bottle though).

We didn't get very much sleep at all the first few nights with her in her pink rubbermade bin complete with blanket and catnip mouse. She wanted to be fed, then she wanted to play, then she wanted to go to the bathroom and then she wanted to sleep, but she wanted to sleep on our chests. So we took her to the vet and they determined her age and told us what we should be feeding her, so we started her on a wet food/formula combo in a bowl and she took to it pretty much right away. I put her in a litterbox that same day and she did her business in the litterbox immediately, she's so damn smart.

Little did we know that when the vets gave her the de-wormer (fearing that, since her mom was a feral cat, she would have worms and fleas and earmites) she would have explosive diarreah for two days straight. She actually didn't have worms, she was just bloated with a big baby belly, and she didn't have fleas or ear mites either. She got a clean bill of health and she is a perfectly healthy and happy little kitten.

At this point, she is eating dry food and loving it, drinking water by itself (finally!) and going in the litterbox to do her business instead of all over the cat carrier where she sleeps. Right now she is attacking my laptop. It'll be sad to leave her in September, just like it will be sad to leave my cat and my dog and my rabbits. Hopefully she will quickly be able to defend herself against my five cats, the dog loves cats and will probably just lick her and annoy the hell out of her.

In January, she can move into the apartment with Hillary and I and we can be a happy little family. The kitten, whose name is Julie Andrews (as my six year old niece exclaimed when I explained who Julie Andrews is: "Fraulein Maria!") will be spayed probably sometime in midwinter, she'll be an indoor cat and she'll never be declawed as long as I have a say in the matter because small animals need a way to defend themselves. Hopefully she'll be a good pest-hunter in the new apartment.

And I Pointed My Dreams North

Packing sucks.

My room started out the summer looking rather like a storage closet, with everything I know piled up all over the place. Getting from the door to the bed or the closet quickly became impossible. I basically lived out of laundry hampers all summer, and never really gave a second thought to having to move back to school.

And here it is, the Friday before I go back, and piled all around me are boxes of clothes, sweatshirts for the Massachusetts winter, baskets filled with God only knows what, pens and pencils, computer stuff, instruments, a cat and a dog.

I wish they could come with me. Kitty has placed herself in the box for my desktop, and scrunched herself down so she is just peering over the edge and watching me type. She knows I'm going again, and she knows I'm probably going for a long time. It's hard to leave your best friends behind. Like most things in life, I wish they could comprehend how very much I love them.

Puppy is laying with her paws under her chin and looking up at me with her big brown eyes. She looks pretty pathetic, I'll admit. If I could find room for them in one of the bins and hide them away in my dorm, I so would. But they are happy here, where they are room to roam around, and all the treats and love an animal could ever dream of. They certainly aren't lacking for anything.

But it will be hard for them when I'm not here to go swimming on warm afternoons with Puppy, or lay in the sun with Kitty on my chest, or hold them both close when there is a storm. The three of us get along pretty swell. They grew up together in many ways. They're always growing up with me, and I was there to watch them grow up.

The madre and I will be happy to part ways for a while. She has her life and I have mine. When they intersect for too long a period of time, we tend to argue a lot. There are so many things about me that she doesn't know, and as I get older the things she doesn't know build and build, until eventually I feel as though we're strangers here. Strangers sharing a house, sharing a family, sharing a town and a little life we created. And yet, she is the person who understands me the best in the world. The silence between us isn't defeaning, it's a silence of understanding. We both know each other, but at the same time we understand that there are things about the other person that don't need to be discussed. The mystery in our relationship is good and healthy, for the time being.

I'm sure somewhere in her heart and in her mind she knows. She watched me grow up, she watched me struggle when being a tomboy wasn't okay anymore. She was there for every boyfriend, every failed relationship.

I remember driving in the car with her after I had recently broken up with some little boy. I think it was the seventh grade. I said to her "Mom, I don't think I can date one boy," and I tried desperately to articulate how I was feeling at the time. I always felt lost and confused, like all the girls were dating boys so I should do the same. No one ever even told me that how I was feeling was normal and okay, maybe it wasn't normal and okay. I had no idea that feeling the way I did was just the beginnings of trying to figure out who I was.

Being a kid is so hard. If everyone was just born a girl, or born a boy, and that was that everything would be so much simpler. But people aren't born that way. There is no ideal girl or ideal boy, and there never was. We're all different, whether it is due to nature or nurturing. Why can't people just accept us as we are?

Why couldn't someone just tell me it was okay? Why did I have to abandon who I was and who I would always be, and pretend to be someone I never was and never will be? Does society make us do this? Or do we put that pressure on ourselves?

I'm a firm believer that, at the end of the day, you and you alone are the only person in the entire world who matters. If you don't love yourself, no one can love you. How can we be expected to love ourselves if from every direction we are being told we are fundamentally wrong, we are being told that there is something wrong with us that we have no control over?

This is what I'm thinking about while I'm packing my clothes, my possessions, my memories, into boxes to be packed away in my car and hauled up to school.

It's hard to leave the ones you love behind, whether it's your dog or your cat, your mom, your friends, or the you you left behind so long ago. Some day we'll get there.