You little a**hole
What a beautiful, bitchy cat taught me about love
Note: Some of you may have noticed my extended absence this summer. I’m drafting a novel, and doing a bit of traveling in the van while Ian has some time off work. I’ll be back regularly in the fall; for now, I’ll pop in whenever I have a little time. I’ve missed you guys! How’s your summer going? Report your misadventures in the comments!
—L
Many years back, when I first started therapy, I had a therapist who asked, “Can you give your inner child a hug?”
I don’t know what my facial expression was in that moment. I imagine it was the kind of disgusted grimace that results when someone pulls milk out of the fridge, asks, “Has this gone bad?” and then shoves it under your nose. I’m fairly certain that I physically recoiled. I know that I replied with a conclusive, “I don’t do that.”
Honestly, all these years of healing later, and I still feel that way. No, I can not give my inner child a hug. I don’t want to say soothing things to my inner child. I find the very idea of an inner child that requires parenting from me to be innately repellant.
I’m not saying I’m right. I’m saying that’s how I feel about it.
Ugh.
Through these recent years of grappling with my shit, I have desperately needed a different metaphor for enacting retroactive emotional healing, and as far as I know, no one has come up with anything. So I’m left trying to understand that my emotional issues (said in the hissy British way with a soupçon of disgust… issss-yous) stem from the experiences of a kid whose family failed to love her, and now I was failing to love that kid, because ewwww.
The thing is, if you read the literature, when a kid grows up in a family that fails to love them, things get pretty fucked. The prognoses stretch all the way from, They’ll never allow anyone to love them to They’ll grow up to be a serial killer. Luckily for me, I’ve landed closer to option A. I’m fine to love other people—I can love other people all day long—but I struggle to let them love me, and that means that I fail to recognize real love when it’s offered, and if I do recognize it, it makes me hellishly uncomfortable.
Which is odd, because about 90% of my damaged personality has been deeply dysfunctional people-pleasing behavior and self-abandonment in a desperate attempt to make someone love me… but if they ever did, I wouldn’t know it, because I never understood what actual love looked like, anyway.
Now, let’s talk about the cat.
I have a cat. Her name is Zoey.
She’s kind of an asshole.
I adopted her when she was 12 weeks old, from a rescue in Kentucky, across the river from where I was living in Ohio. I was deep in the middle of a divorce and one day decided I wanted a Maine Coon kitten and that was how Zoey was thrown into my orbit.
They told me she was a barn cat and had been found in that barn alone—no mother, no sibs. At the time, I didn’t understand what that meant, that she was feral. I didn’t know what feral meant. My entire thought process at the time was I’M SO SAD MUST HAVE KITTEN.
I was able to understand that she was scared; they put her in the office with me alone for a few minutes, and for most of it she hid in the corner. But she was cute, and she was a Maine Coon, and I desperately needed a kitten to allay my sadness, so I signed the paperwork. I paid for her to be vaccinated and spayed, and a week or so later, I took her home.
Now, here are the basics about feral cats. If there’s little to no emotional bonding with humans in the early months, they tend to be pretty indifferent to us, to our emotions, to the affection we try to give them. This “indifference” can present as true indifference, or choosing violence. Zoey landed somewhere in between. My general approach to animals is that I will give them all the love they want, but they have to come up to me and ask for it. The second they indicate they don’t want to be touched, I stop petting them.
The problem with Zoey was that she was running on pure instinct. She clearly liked affection. I’d pet her and she’d purr and push her head into my hand, and then turn on a dime and suddenly swat and bite my hand. Then, when I pulled back, she’d look at me like, Why’d you stop petting me?
Now, to be clear, these swats and bites were usually corrective, not violent; she made me bleed a few times, but that was only when I’d gone too long between nail clipping. The scratches were light, and she never broke the skin with her bites. She was just communicating, and I did what I thought she wanted; I left her alone.
I didn’t understand at the time that feral cats need loads of attention and affection in their early months in order to work past it. Because I was deep into enthusiastic consent with animals, I wasn’t giving her the conditioning she needed. I just figured Zoey was a hands-off cat, and I respected that.
Sadly, at about two years old, Zoey was deliberately disappeared by a Truly Terrible Person. I KNOW, but trust me when I say that’s a very long story for another time. The fast-forward; I got her floofy butt back two years later when a vet finally ran her microchip.
Now, if I thought this cat was twitchy before, two years dodging rabid coyotes in the Ohio wilderness hadn’t improved things. She would still swipe and bite if I pet her too much, then look highly aggrieved when I stopped. She got along well enough with my other cat, Hermione, although Zoey did and still does have a bad bullying habit when she gets her furry little pantaloons in a twist. While I was recovering from the other things the Truly Terrible Person had done to my life, Zoey sat guard duty on my bed, ready to scratch some eyes out if the situation required it.
A few years later, I found myself in a new relationship with my now-husband, Ian, a man whose approach to animals was way different from mine. He snuggled and loved up on them regardless of whether they seemed to want it, always making it clear that they could walk away from him at any time. If they pushed or squirmed, he let them go immediately, so they knew they were in charge. But he picked the cats up and snuggled and cuddled them whether they asked him to or not. They didn’t have to ask for or earn his affection; they just had to exist in his orbit.
The change in Zoey was amazing. Her biting and swiping, as I understood later, came from a feral cat’s skittish instincts, which were probably what kept her alive while surviving the wilds of Ohio. She got overstimulated easily, and when she did, she instinctively bit and swatted, and then looked aggrieved when I stopped petting her. Ian, however, never stopped petting her. He loved that furry little asshole so forcefully that he raised her threshold for affection. To this day, she doesn’t swat or bite me much at all. She can endure all the affection I have to give, and this man keeps loving up on her regularly to keep her endurance high. It’s made a big difference in Zoey, which is good because he brought his cat Josie into our little mix, and now Zoey has two cats to bully. Being able to fill her up with love that mitigates her crankiness works to everyone’s benefit.
Zoey is seventeen now, which puts her at about 85 in human years. She is deeply in No Fucks territory. She’s slowing down. She sleeps a lot. She’s developed an allergy and often sneezes directly into our faces. It’s really gross, and I think she deliberately situates herself facing one or both of us when she feels a sneezing fit coming on. If she gets evicted from the bed, she turns around and comes back immediately, then gets offended when we say no again. When allowed to sit on the bed, she sits at the edge in the middle, so she can swat at any other cat who tries to gain access to us. Sometimes, if another cat passes by and she’s in a mood, she’ll start a swat fight just for shits and giggles.
She’s a bitch and a bully and, frequently, also an asshole.
And I love her so much.
Here’s where I’m going with this.
I spent most of my life trying to figure out my relationship to love, slicing off pieces of my genuine self and abandoning them in order to obtain a love I’d never be able to recognize, or feel that I deserved. I’ve been working on it, it’s been getting better. I’m at the point where I’m able to intellectually accept that I have people in my life who genuinely love me, but I still struggle to understand what it means to allow that love actually inside, to feel it and read it as real and even depend upon it. For me, love has always flowed one way; outward. Now, I feel like a robot trying to figure out how to write a sonnet or properly season food. I can see how it’s done, kind of, and I can mimic the motions but…
… I don’t really get it.
One day a week or so ago, I was sitting on the bed working. Zoey was lying on my legs. I shifted my position to be more comfortable, and she swatted at my retreating foot and released a whiny meow of complaint. Once I resettled myself, she immediately laid down on my legs once again and snuggled in.
“You little asshole,” I said. I gave her a forceful pet on the head and felt a sudden and powerful wave of love for her.
And that’s when it hit me.
Zoey doesn’t have to be anything other than herself for me to love her.
She doesn’t have to be perfect. She is not.
She doesn’t have to be endlessly kind. She is not.
She doesn’t have to put others first all the time. I don’t think she’s ever considered the feelings of another living thing, ever.
She doesn’t have to slice off pieces of herself and then abandon those pieces in order to earn love. She would never even consider doing such a thing.
I love her because she is Zoey, and that’s that.
Okay, for those of you who grew up with a family that loved you, you’re probably like, Yeah, Lani. 2 + 2 = 4. We get it.
But for me, a kid who grew up into a girl and then a woman who couldn’t really understand how love could apply to me, I still have to stare at the wall and squint for a while to wrap my mind around what this means.
Zoey doesn’t have to earn my love. She just… has it.
I don’t need to earn the love of the people in my life. I can be imperfect; and they still love me.
She can swat and bite me; I still love her.
I can make a simple mistake or say something I didn’t mean to say. They’ll still love me.
She can bully another cat. I still love her.
I can have a bad day. I can show up as something less than my best self. I can be a catty bitch sometimes.
They will still love me.
They might call me out on my behavior if it gets out of hand, but they’ll still love me. As a matter of fact, holding up a mirror to people we love and giving them an opportunity to repair any damage they might have done is one of the most basic acts of love.
I can make a mistake.
I can be wrong.
I can fuck something up, and not lose everything.
Stare. Wall. Squint.
It’s so hard for me to understand. I always assumed my family didn’t love me because I did something wrong. I spent the rest of my life, up to and including now, trying to figure out what that thing is and never do it again. But the thing is… this was always an illusion.
I had never done anything wrong.
It was never about me, not even once.
It was a sudden flash of insight, and I’m not gonna tell you I’m changed forever. I am not. The understanding that I grasped for that one fleeting moment in time skittered away pretty quickly. I still have to stare at the wall and squint as I write this, but I’ve got a sense of it now.
2…
+2… =….?
4?
4.
Huh. 4.
I’m taking it in. Maybe, someday, I’ll be able to sit with the kid that I once was and help her understand that if a cranky asshole of a cat can be loved unconditionally for exactly who she is, so can she.
I mean, not today.
But someday. Maybe.
Life is full of surprises.