Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Some Like It Safe (AKA Two Tight Paragraphs on Kittens)
(Prologue Note To Reader: Good God, this post was an attempt to write about something safe and non-controversial. A total failure. Maybe I just don't have it in me?)
Kittens are very cute and cuddly. I have always liked kittens. When I was a little girl, I rescued a sick kitten at my Grandma's farm in Saskatchewan. It was broken and bruised and I called it Tipsy Topsy Turvy because of the way it couldn't quite walk. Every day I brought it food to the shed and made it a bed in an old doll carriage. My mom even helped me learn how to clean her eyes which were both infected. Everyone in my family thought I was crazy for falling in love with something that was so clearly doomed. But I did, fiercly. Holding her close to my chest, I sang to her and fed her milk with an eye-dropper because she was so small. Someone told me that she was the 'runt' of the litter and that her mother had abandoned her because of it. I had never heard of anything so awful and I swore I would never leave her alone. I spent day after day after day in that shed, only appearing when TTT became strong enough to be brought into the living room of the main house.
Then, one morning, I woke up and couldn't find Tipsy Topsy Turvy anywhere. She wasn't in her bed in the living room, she wasn't it the shed and she wasn't under the couch where she would sometimes go when she got scared. My aunts and uncles had not seen her and my 8 year old self became panicked. I looked everywhere. At some point, I think I knew in my gut something awful had happened while I was in bed the night before. That is when my mother found me or I found my mother, I don't remember which. My mother sat me down and explained that my Grandma had killed Tipsy Topsy Turvy very early that morning because the kitten was just too ill to survive. My mother tried to explain to me that my Grandma was a farm woman who had a certain bitterness about cats due to their rampant reproduction and over-population on the farm. She tried to explain that my Grandma just wasn't the kind of woman who saw the point in keeping alive another cat, let alone a very sick and very weak one. I was to even learn that day that one of the methods that my Grandma used to kill litters of kittens on the farm was to drop them into a rain barrell full to the brim and let them drown. I am not sure if that is how she did away with Tipsy Topsy Turvy. I am not sure I was told. All I knew was that I had allowed my kitten to die.
I cried. I raged. I was confused at the cruelty. I was confused at the heartlessness. I felt so different from my family. I learned that to have a heart was to have it break. I learned I was weak for caring about that which was labeled 'doomed'. For the rest of the trip I walked around the farm house like a lost soul instead of an 8 year old. Jesus, what a horrible memory.
As an adult, I don't much like cats. They shed fur and ruin furniture.
Kittens are very cute and cuddly. I have always liked kittens. When I was a little girl, I rescued a sick kitten at my Grandma's farm in Saskatchewan. It was broken and bruised and I called it Tipsy Topsy Turvy because of the way it couldn't quite walk. Every day I brought it food to the shed and made it a bed in an old doll carriage. My mom even helped me learn how to clean her eyes which were both infected. Everyone in my family thought I was crazy for falling in love with something that was so clearly doomed. But I did, fiercly. Holding her close to my chest, I sang to her and fed her milk with an eye-dropper because she was so small. Someone told me that she was the 'runt' of the litter and that her mother had abandoned her because of it. I had never heard of anything so awful and I swore I would never leave her alone. I spent day after day after day in that shed, only appearing when TTT became strong enough to be brought into the living room of the main house.
Then, one morning, I woke up and couldn't find Tipsy Topsy Turvy anywhere. She wasn't in her bed in the living room, she wasn't it the shed and she wasn't under the couch where she would sometimes go when she got scared. My aunts and uncles had not seen her and my 8 year old self became panicked. I looked everywhere. At some point, I think I knew in my gut something awful had happened while I was in bed the night before. That is when my mother found me or I found my mother, I don't remember which. My mother sat me down and explained that my Grandma had killed Tipsy Topsy Turvy very early that morning because the kitten was just too ill to survive. My mother tried to explain to me that my Grandma was a farm woman who had a certain bitterness about cats due to their rampant reproduction and over-population on the farm. She tried to explain that my Grandma just wasn't the kind of woman who saw the point in keeping alive another cat, let alone a very sick and very weak one. I was to even learn that day that one of the methods that my Grandma used to kill litters of kittens on the farm was to drop them into a rain barrell full to the brim and let them drown. I am not sure if that is how she did away with Tipsy Topsy Turvy. I am not sure I was told. All I knew was that I had allowed my kitten to die.
I cried. I raged. I was confused at the cruelty. I was confused at the heartlessness. I felt so different from my family. I learned that to have a heart was to have it break. I learned I was weak for caring about that which was labeled 'doomed'. For the rest of the trip I walked around the farm house like a lost soul instead of an 8 year old. Jesus, what a horrible memory.
As an adult, I don't much like cats. They shed fur and ruin furniture.
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