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Tuesday, June 26, 2012

midsummer growing and letting go dilemmas (with one brief, over-indulged and spoiled American rant)

Is the summer slipping away? I feel like the summer is slipping away. I wish winter felt this way. Winter always seems to stick around, like a house guest who comes for a 2 day visit and somehow is still there 2 months later (I've never actually had one of these kinds of house guests, but I've heard about them in scary urban legends).

Growing Dilemmas

Little Miss M has had a big change in her schedule: she is now a member of the EL-2 class at school (a promotion from EL-1), and has been slapped with a Great Life Growing Up Dilemma at a tender 3 years old: To be a big girl or not, that is the question. On the one hand, she wants to continue her babyhood. And, really, who can blame her? I'D like to be right back at babyhood--free milk on demand, back rubs, and no home mortgage worries. She wants to sleep with mommy and daddy at night, drink out of sippy cups, and make sure we'll absolutely kill all the bears if necessary (we've moved on from Big Bad Wolf fears to just a preternatural concern with....bears? Too much Goldilocks...blast you, Brothers Grimm!). On the other hand, she wants to dress herself, do everything herself, and basically is just desperate to do everything (I quote) "the tall people" do.

I do empathize with her--I feel this way about working. On the one hand, I thoroughly enjoy having a real reason to get out of the house each day, having a schedule that keeps me on my toes and focused, and getting a paycheck every now and then. On the other hand, I would like to just lose perpetual focus and vegetate in my house everyday, perusing Pinterest and Google all day long while half-listening to The Doctors and The View, scoff at the thought of these ludicrous, creativity-crushing things called "schedules," and......okay, fine. I'll always love getting some money every now and then. Money is good. Living beneath a highway underpass is not--that's not the kind of schedule scoffing and lollygagging I like to do.

Letting Go Dilemmas


I've been having midsummer insomnia; I think I wrote about that before. Anyway, last night I was an insomniac again and, at some point, maybe around 2:30 AM I realized: I have not seen Tasha in quite some time.

Our cat basically lives upstairs right now; it's where her litterbox and food/water are, and she can puke on the carpet to her heart's content without me freaking out on her. So, currently, upstairs is not my favorite. My friend Lisa (who never lollygags and lives a highly motivated life) says our house is perfect, and wishes she had it. We do have a cool, walk-in pantry, I'll give her that. I'll miss the walk-in pantry if we ever move. In my next house, if I don't have a walk-in pantry, I'll have no idea where to throw junk fast when I don't feel like putting it where it really belongs. But these compliments from Lisa came well before Melissa forced her upstairs to see Melissa's underused bedroom, of course. I'm sure Lisa had a much different opinion of our house after the Upstairs Viewing.

What I'm trying to say is: if I'd known then what I know now, I'd have bought a ranch on a basement. And made sure there were granite counters in the kitchen with under cabinet lighting, because that's what HGTV does. And I'd have insisted on all tiled tub/shower set-up with a built-in tiled shower seat with grout that never mildews and double shower heads, possibly an overhead rain shower nozzle (or three).

Did you know my mom has a heatilator in her bathtub so her bathwater never gets cold? (I would like to note here how horrified and amazed I am at what I'm typing down right now--horrified at the fact Americans are so spoiled and overindulged and no wonder people around the world roll their eyes at us a lot; some people in the world don't have walk-in pantries or even food and they certainly don't have bathrooms at all--some of them squat over dug out poop holes in the ground and don't bathe for months--and a lot of them can't even access clean drinking water. And here we come with our jetted tub heatilators and whining about not having granite countertops or undercabinet lights in our kitchens. But then again, I'm totally amazed because, helloooooo! Your bathwater Never. Gets. Cold. We've come so far since our Neanderthal days when just having a really big cave campfire was a home upgrade.)


Okay, so I'd be happy with just a one-story house. Maybe even a condo. But with a bathroom that was totally mildew resistant. But mostly: noooo stairs. I hate stairs. I realize they're good exercise, going up and down. But quite frankly, they're a piece of work to clean (which is why I never clean them...I just casually run a lint brush over the bottom three steps occasionally and only fully do a full-on vacuum job when we have non-family guests over and even then I don't focus that hard on the hard-to-reach middle steps). So basically I never go up there unless (a) I can smell cat box and realize: oh yeah, I guess I need to clean that, or (b) I need something and I can't re-create it downstairs. Melissa refuses to sleep in her bed (bears and wolves), so she never ventures upstairs either. Even if she needs a toy from her room. But this isn't due to sheer laziness like me; this is due to the fact Melissa is certain Something Sinister lurks up there. And I've sometimes wondered that myself, too; it gets pretty creepy up there at night. So I'm sure there is Something Sinister up there, and we should all just stay where it's safe: downstairs.

Plus, who the heck wants to hang out in an area of the house filled with cat hair and cat gut contents? (C, that's who--his home office is up there, and he works from home most days of the week.) I realize I'm painting an incredibly horrifying picture and scaring off potential overnight house guests. It's probably not that bad, or I'd hear about it from C in great, pleading detail. Really, I just hate climbing stairs. I'm going to look into how much installing an escalator would cost.

At any rate, here's my point: at 2:30 AM last night, I realized my cat had been missing from downstairs for days on end, which meant she'd been hanging out with Something Sinister upstairs. So I found my courage and ventured up to her lair. So shocking, what I found. She's just not the cat I've known for the last 18 years. Over the last year or so, she's started to wither. She was once a HUGE cat, a cross between a small, black jaguar and bobcat. Now she is, quite literally, skin, hair, and bones. She's still eating and drinking just fine, and doesn't appear to be uncomfortable...other than, you know, she's about 126 human years old approximately. I know how I felt when I tried to do the splits at the gym last week at 40 years old, so I can get a pretty good idea of what it would feel like to try to go up and down stairs at 126. I'm sure I'd puke my oatmeal mushy breakfast up, too, every day. And sleep in a warm, sunny spot a lot.

So I'm facing a dilemma of my own: do I let nature take its course? Or do I take her to a doctor? I know what the doctor is going to say--I'm an internet doctor, and so I've already diagnosed her (just like I diagnosed myself with hand skin cancer that one time I had ringworm--if you ever have a medical question email it to me, I'm totally legit). She's in renal failure, which is how many if not most house cats tend to go when it's their time. So I think a doctor will just tell me what I already know: your cat is really old, and she's got renal failure (or maybe just ringworm), and she's going to die. And then I'd say, handing over $XXX, aren't we all, Dr. Veterinarian? Aren't we all going to die.

(On a side note, I'd like to share that, once--and this is way before the days when you could be a Google internet doctor, because I think my mom would have made a really fine Google internet doctor--my mom took both my brother and me to our dog's vet to ask if we had chicken pox. We kept getting some chicken pox-like rash/fever, and she thought you could only get it once. We had it about 4 times. So, knowing the vet's wife, and knowing they had 3 children who'd all gone through chicken pox, she scheduled an appointment for us to be looked at by our veterinarian, who announced we did indeed have the chicken pox, and we should be good and set for life immunity against that disease. ....And then he called his wife to talk about the crazy lady who brought her kids to a vet, and his wife called my mom laughing, and my mom was all: "Um, yeah. That was ME." See how cave campfires, bathtub heatilators, and Google/WebMD have upgraded our lives?)

So clearly, Tasha is on the downswing. But she's not suffering, and pretty cat-happy upstairs with her poopy litterbox and her fresh water/food and her warm sunny spot by the window. But we're headed to the beach soon. Do I really want to come home to dead cat/dead cat house smell? And, more importantly, I don't want her to die alone--she's a people cat, and I don't want her to be people-less when she goes. I sense she feels abandoned when we leave her alone for long periods of days.

Or maybe I'm humanizing her too much. No, no wait. NO, I am not. Because this is Tasha, who has been with me through thick & thin, as long as I've been a teacher. I've had two important pets in my life: Sassy, the little black dog who saw me through thick & thin and childhood; and Tasha, the big black cat who saw me through thick & thin and growing-up-adulthood. She's my Arizona cat, who suffered through a tranquilized daze of a terrifying plane ride to move to Georgia with me, and she's been there through at least ten of my Psychic Growth (aka Crazy) periods of life, walked me down one marriage aisle, was my pregnancy bedrest buddy, and is the only sister Melissa has ever gotten to have sibling rivalry about. Tasha is family.

And so dilemma solved: unless she starts showing signs of discomfort, I think I will let Nature take its course, and pray that she survives her Beach Trip Abandonment Period, and also gets through one more course of holidays. Winter (the hour of our discontent) would be a much better time for Nature to take its course.

I am going to go pat her head and tell her this.

A bigger Tasha and a smaller M sharing serious thoughts about big life dilemmas


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