We Are Family

Though I don't call my pets my children and I don't approve of people who do, you wouldn't know it from the way I've been acting the past two weeks. My cat is unwell and that has thrown a shadow over everything. I'm like the protaganist in the old song, "when something is wrong with my baby/something is wrong with me". I have been, quite literally, wringing my hands.

She looks like I grabbed her by the tail, hung her out an open car door and dragged her down a gravel road. I didn't, though we have had many fierce fights in our 13 years together-the vet speculates it was a bite of some sort on the face that caused an allergic reaction. Not a life threatening thing-more like a pesky, expensive, hard to heal kind of thing. (You try getting a cat not to clean a wound till it's raw.)

Joe says just because they aren't your children doesn't mean they aren't your family and that feels just right when the nostalgic flashbacks start: how she grabbed me and pulled me to her cage when I was walking down the row at the Anchorage Animal Control, how when she flew from Anchorage to Philadelphia when I picked her up at the airport her meows were at first happy, then angry and how, when we had a sudden change of circumstance and moved from a 3 story townhouse to an apartment I not-so-fondly called "the Brown Motel", she gave me a look that said 'what the fuck just happened here?' plainer than any words.

She's a beast alright-I can't count the number of times I've threatened to punt her across the room when she wakes me up in the middle of the night but when we were at the vet's and she just stood there, uncharacteristically silent, pressing her head in my belly, like a family, all was forgiven.