For about the past year I have been part of a local mom's group (you pay dues, there is a yearly banquet with a "theme"...the whole thing). I am not much of a joiner but I had an idea that I needed to meet other moms who would understand what I was going through as a mom-person. Also, at the time I joined I had just read the wonderful book Mommies Who Drink by Brett Paesel and had a vision of women coming together in a bar once a week, talking raunchily about everything in life over a shot or Zinfandel or several. I thought knowing other moms would help me to feel less alone as a woman transforming from a regular person into a mom (it doesn't just happen when you pee on the stick or change your first diaper...); or that at least it would help make me feel like less of a fuck-up and less of a shut-in, excluded from everything I used to do in my pre-child life. Intead, almost every time I have attended an event, with or without my daughter Sara, I have felt horribly out of place like I am visiting a suburban neighborhood in the 50's or 60's as the Scarlet Letter woman or something (you know, with a big "A" or a sign reading "I don't breastfeed" branded on my forehead).
The problem with moms coming together is that you check yourself against the other people to see if you're normal and are doing things right. So if you happen to be in a group where the other people all do it a certain way that is different from you, you're going to feel defensive and like you have to put down their way of life. This is how I have felt, and I'm not necessarily proud of it. However, it is not a crime that they all have husbands and regular babysitter/nanny/au pairs and are stay-at-home (must be nice to have the option) and breastfeed for at least a year and co-sleep. These are just choices that are made as one goes along as a parent, and are based on many complex factors. What IS a crime is...the group members wanting to change the once-monthly Moms' Night Out to a Moms' Morning In. As is so often true in my life, it is here, regarding the convivial consumption of alcohol in an actual restaurant or bar outside one's house, that I draw the line and place myself firmly on the alcohol side and NOT on the brunch / board games / potluck side.
Yes, our little group had a quaint and, by me, beloved tradition of having 1 night per month when moms are invited to meet up at a local restaurant, bar or otherwise slightly hip, atmospheric place and grab a drink or dessert together. It was bad enough that these "nights out" started at 8 and were history by 10pm. Bad enough that some moms drank seltzer, not alcohol, and others couldn't stop talking about the cute habits of their child the entiiiire time. But at least there was a gesture toward the idea of mothers still having an adult life, doing things they had done before becoming parents, and walking a little on the dark side. Staying out until 9 pm! Having a glass of wine or...2! Letting someone else put your kid to bed! Maybe the conversation might stray toward sex or crazy things we did in college! (It never did.) Alas this dark side proved too much for the group and the Moms' Night Out, after several months of pathetic / nonexistent attendance, is now going to be held only every other month, to be alternated with a Moms' Night In of board games at someone's home. One person suggested that the Night Out be jettisoned altogether and replaced with a Moms' Morning In brunch, also at someone's house (not actually out at a restaurant; that courts the dark side of feckless, money-spending self-involvement, not to mention that you are then fraternizing among the enemy--i.e., people who don't yet have kids and thus, still appear in public and seem to be enjoying themselves, not tensely managing their screaming toddler).
I know I am not just a parent-hating freak who happens to be a parent because I know other moms, through different social channels, who feel the same way I do and are also wonderful, devoted parents. The most nurturing mom I know, who happens to be my child's daycare provider, refers to wine as "Mama juice." She gets it--how we need time to ourselves and pockets of our lives that are not owned by our child and our fierce protection of our child, fear for our child's future, and dismay at our post-child body and identity as a Mommy. I go to a bi-weekly dinner at a single girl friend's house, at which there is usually at least one other mom in attendance, and they all get it too and we have amazing, truly joyful nights of great food, free-flowing wine, fires down by Cayuga Lake, reading poems out loud, dancing, laughing hard, joint-smoking (occasionally). Sometimes someone brings her child and that is welcome, too but the child is never really the center of attention, they are just part of what the adults are doing in this harmonious, organic way. This happens to be my idea of good parenting--that you don't give up all your pre-baby interests and become severely domesticated, that you are a role-model to your child that a woman can have a life and interests of her own, that even if you spend 90% of your free time being with your child and on domestic duties, something is left over for just you and that something is NOT apologetic for wanting a night out or loving "Mama juice" and the fact that you still have your own desires, thoughts, and feelings that would not be appropriate to share with your child (until the age when she can have a glass of wine too...) or in a playdate situation.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Thursday, November 6, 2008
What are we here for?
This is what I'm wondering right now. You can't just exist; you have to have money and credit cards and a car, etc. and the bondage to all of these things. I spend my days sitting at a desk at one job or another, or running errands that need to be done (depositing money in the bank, mailing bills, going through junk mail, cleaning...). Is this what my childhood was preparing me for? Is it what riding my bike through the sweet blue evenings of childhood summer was leading to? And dressing up for dance recitals, posing for pictures in satiny skirts and bright pink lipstick, receiving shiny trophies at the recital every June (which didn't mean anything, because everyone got one just for making it through another year of dance...). By the time I get home from work I don't have energy for anyting, let alone hanging out with my poor toddler...I just want her to be quiet and removed somewhere while Mommy collapses on the couch with a book of poetry or a magazine or a burrito and a beer. And that isn't living either, it's RECOVERING. It seems only if you have money, a lot of money, can you actually have life--filling your days and moments with things you want to do and choose to do, living on your own rhythms. Imagine waking up, puttering over to a cafe and sitting there reading and writing for hours, then having a glass of wine over a leisurely gourmet lunch, then taking a long walk...but maybe on some level all these things, too are just things to fill time--the time of existing, which none of us can bear without filling it with something. But that is going way beyond where I wanted to go in this thought. I just wonder, what exactly is the point if all your moments are spent just paying for something you deserve in the first place--to exist, to take up space on the earth among all the other earth-inhabitants, and to feel what is meaningful about that existence, to look for meaning. I guess we're all competing for resources but the resources aren't actually scarce, it's the system that makes them that way. Like, it's not as if I have to spend my days making spears so that a wild boar doesn't kill me on the open plains. But spending my days making money is THE SAME THING.
People say to find a job you love. I think that's bullshit. Who loves their job? How quickly can love turn to hate when you have to do something over and over or else there will be dire consequences? I am burnt out and tired and I resent having to devote my best energy (all the daylight hours) to administrative tasks, to busy-work, to driving around and around through traffic to do other tasks. I feel a constant anxiety that whatever I choose to do with the rare free moment isn't good enough, because there is so little unoccupied, unspoken-for time. I'm even starting to nurture fantasies about taking this summer off from work entirely and making some kind of big change to my work life after that, since a recent inheritance gives me a financial cushion (but then, any use of such money feels frivolous). It probably is true that I need to make more money so there is less sense of living-on-the-financial-edge grind, and find tasks that feel less compromising, and that things would feel better after that. But I still think we all deserve, for no reason at all (not because of our status or amount of money, etc.), to have the time to exist and search for ourselves and have wild pointless sexual encounters that never go anywhere, and write poetry about it, and eat too much dessert, and visit a beautiful place and stay in hostels and just breathe, and let the garbage bags accumulate around the side of the house and throw the recycling out the window for deer to graze on! and spend four hours choosing a shade of lipstick or an outfit, and look through old photo albums and cry, and tell someone to fuck off and not feel bad about it, and not say "I'm sorry" when someone is blocking the aisle at the grocery store, and light a lot of scented candles, and make a sculpture out of pine needles and spaghetti that represents a lost moment of our adolescense.
People say to find a job you love. I think that's bullshit. Who loves their job? How quickly can love turn to hate when you have to do something over and over or else there will be dire consequences? I am burnt out and tired and I resent having to devote my best energy (all the daylight hours) to administrative tasks, to busy-work, to driving around and around through traffic to do other tasks. I feel a constant anxiety that whatever I choose to do with the rare free moment isn't good enough, because there is so little unoccupied, unspoken-for time. I'm even starting to nurture fantasies about taking this summer off from work entirely and making some kind of big change to my work life after that, since a recent inheritance gives me a financial cushion (but then, any use of such money feels frivolous). It probably is true that I need to make more money so there is less sense of living-on-the-financial-edge grind, and find tasks that feel less compromising, and that things would feel better after that. But I still think we all deserve, for no reason at all (not because of our status or amount of money, etc.), to have the time to exist and search for ourselves and have wild pointless sexual encounters that never go anywhere, and write poetry about it, and eat too much dessert, and visit a beautiful place and stay in hostels and just breathe, and let the garbage bags accumulate around the side of the house and throw the recycling out the window for deer to graze on! and spend four hours choosing a shade of lipstick or an outfit, and look through old photo albums and cry, and tell someone to fuck off and not feel bad about it, and not say "I'm sorry" when someone is blocking the aisle at the grocery store, and light a lot of scented candles, and make a sculpture out of pine needles and spaghetti that represents a lost moment of our adolescense.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Election
I work for a Buddhist publisher and this image was sent around the office today. Due to some sickness, my head feels like it is stuffed with old socks at the moment, but I felt I need to post this because to me it says so much. Even before I saw this image, I thought of Barack and the DL as having similarities as leaders because both seem focused on the happiness and wellbeing of other people (which is what I love about the democratic party in general, at least in terms of its basic ideology). I fell in love with Obama 4 years ago when he gave the speech about red / blue states--"We are not red states and blue states, we are one United States of America. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't want the government poking around inside our libraries in the red states..." (paraphrasing)
I hope that what seems at the moment like a severely divided country will unite in some ways (whatever ways are possible) with hope for the future--personal and social.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Real Age nazis
With an inkling that I should not go there, I just took the "Real Age" test created by Dr. Oz. Woah, was my ego severely deflated...I started with my calendar age--"33.3"--and found that my "real" age is "38.5." I'd better tell my boyfriend he's now dating a woman 10.2 years older than him. I'd better get a life insurance policy. I'd better floss more and find out my blah blah cholesterol levels, oh and probably not be so divorced (since it creates too much stress), according to advice given with the results.
Let me admit, I believed that this was one contest--the age contest--I could compete in (unlike most other ones). People constantly tell me I look young (maybe they're all lying, even the apparently shocked woman at the liquor store counter, and the cute 40-year-old who told me just the other day I could pass for 17 and that the lines on my face could only be seen "with a microscope"!!...I think she was flirting). I haven't eaten red meat, ANY, in 10 years. I eat veggies practically every day, sometimes in large amounts. I eat whole grains and fiber. My BMI is not in any danger zone...I'm sitting here in pre-pregnancy skinny pants as we speak. True, my loose, deflated post-baby belly is burping out over the waistband, but what can you do? (Situps?) I make an excruciating effort to eat desserts very rarely. I never have anything but skim milk. Etc. OK, I really belly-flop in the exercise department, but it will be a few years before this is obvious to everyone else and I have to run on a treadmill like a frantic gerbil just to keep looking the way I look now.
If you think about it, it is brilliant that our culture has done it again--come up with yet another way to make women feel ugly, inadequate, and unknowledgeable. Dr. Oz stresses that beauty is on the inside. So now I don't only have to worry about not looking like a slob on the OUTSIDE, I have to be gently reminded that I'm an ugly old hag on the INSIDE. And it's not bad enough that I'm actually 33.3 years old; I have to worry about how my body is invisibly collapsing in on itself, even all this time that I have stayed away from bad bad red meat, so that I will probably be 70 by the time I'm 40.
Of course, Dr. Oz makes valid points. Doing cardio is probably never a bad thing. Eating fruit is not the worst thing you could do, and flossing so that the dental hygienist doesn't have to spend an hour excavating down to where your sad rotting teeth actually are. I probably shouldn't drink the amount of wine I do every night (which I didn't even admit to on the test...and I was still scolded, in the results, for not practicing "moderation" in drinking). But I resent the idea that someone else out there knows exactly what I should be doing with my time and life (with all the flossing, fresh fruits, exercises of different types, etc., wouldn't that pretty much fill up your schedule?) and if I don't do it that way, I am made to feel like a bad and ignorant, not to mention ugly and old, person. I think this is a new strain of Puritanism. I think it is all harsh fluorescent lighting and a naked weigh-in in front of your classmates, with no nuance, depth, or sense of humor. So fine, I will begin my year of being 38.5, woefully ignorant about my pulse rate and cholesterol levels, neglectful of any kind of regular workout, and NOT (hell no) practicing moderation in drinking.
Let me admit, I believed that this was one contest--the age contest--I could compete in (unlike most other ones). People constantly tell me I look young (maybe they're all lying, even the apparently shocked woman at the liquor store counter, and the cute 40-year-old who told me just the other day I could pass for 17 and that the lines on my face could only be seen "with a microscope"!!...I think she was flirting). I haven't eaten red meat, ANY, in 10 years. I eat veggies practically every day, sometimes in large amounts. I eat whole grains and fiber. My BMI is not in any danger zone...I'm sitting here in pre-pregnancy skinny pants as we speak. True, my loose, deflated post-baby belly is burping out over the waistband, but what can you do? (Situps?) I make an excruciating effort to eat desserts very rarely. I never have anything but skim milk. Etc. OK, I really belly-flop in the exercise department, but it will be a few years before this is obvious to everyone else and I have to run on a treadmill like a frantic gerbil just to keep looking the way I look now.
If you think about it, it is brilliant that our culture has done it again--come up with yet another way to make women feel ugly, inadequate, and unknowledgeable. Dr. Oz stresses that beauty is on the inside. So now I don't only have to worry about not looking like a slob on the OUTSIDE, I have to be gently reminded that I'm an ugly old hag on the INSIDE. And it's not bad enough that I'm actually 33.3 years old; I have to worry about how my body is invisibly collapsing in on itself, even all this time that I have stayed away from bad bad red meat, so that I will probably be 70 by the time I'm 40.
Of course, Dr. Oz makes valid points. Doing cardio is probably never a bad thing. Eating fruit is not the worst thing you could do, and flossing so that the dental hygienist doesn't have to spend an hour excavating down to where your sad rotting teeth actually are. I probably shouldn't drink the amount of wine I do every night (which I didn't even admit to on the test...and I was still scolded, in the results, for not practicing "moderation" in drinking). But I resent the idea that someone else out there knows exactly what I should be doing with my time and life (with all the flossing, fresh fruits, exercises of different types, etc., wouldn't that pretty much fill up your schedule?) and if I don't do it that way, I am made to feel like a bad and ignorant, not to mention ugly and old, person. I think this is a new strain of Puritanism. I think it is all harsh fluorescent lighting and a naked weigh-in in front of your classmates, with no nuance, depth, or sense of humor. So fine, I will begin my year of being 38.5, woefully ignorant about my pulse rate and cholesterol levels, neglectful of any kind of regular workout, and NOT (hell no) practicing moderation in drinking.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Living forward
I am thinking, on this 35th wedding anniversary of my parents (who divorced 28 years ago...), and 3-year anniversary of when Jon and I first met, about living in the present--whatever that means.
In my recent past (which I now need to let go of...), I chose a man to marry, a beautiful person who was nice to me, and then spent our whole marriage still in love with a person from my past, or just with my past as a single tortured early-20's fuck-up in coffee shops and book stores, making $5 an hour, being scolded for not bringing the soup up from the walk-in cooler or for slumping on a stool daydreaming. What was so great about that? What was I really wishing for everytime I didn't (and don't) want to be "here"? I think rapture--like when you are dancing and have had a few drinks and forget your life and kind of rebel against your current life in that moment. I am good at rebelling against my current life. If degrees were awarded in this subject, I would have a 7-figure job in the field right now.
This weekend a tiny door opened for me in the feeling of "what I have now is good." Sara and I were at DeWitt Park, a beautiful park in the section of Ithaca with the oldest buildings, and she was shimmying all over the grass on her knees. I was sitting on one of her soft pink blankets watching her and feeling the good warmth of the sun and seeing the delicate spire of a church and the two maroon, shiny fallen leaves my daughter held in each hand ecstatically as she hobbled forward on her muddy knees. I saw the slender, mini gold leaves that had fallen all over like snow and I held them over her head and let them flutter down, which amused her to no end. I watched how happy she was just holding leaves and being in the sunshine, dirt, and grass. And I felt, maybe my life is OK and is where it's supposed to be. But it wasn't so much a thrilling revelation as just a small, fragile feeling that just started to kind of poke at me, like hey--pay attention to this--one day you will live here in this feeling, it will be your address.
In my recent past (which I now need to let go of...), I chose a man to marry, a beautiful person who was nice to me, and then spent our whole marriage still in love with a person from my past, or just with my past as a single tortured early-20's fuck-up in coffee shops and book stores, making $5 an hour, being scolded for not bringing the soup up from the walk-in cooler or for slumping on a stool daydreaming. What was so great about that? What was I really wishing for everytime I didn't (and don't) want to be "here"? I think rapture--like when you are dancing and have had a few drinks and forget your life and kind of rebel against your current life in that moment. I am good at rebelling against my current life. If degrees were awarded in this subject, I would have a 7-figure job in the field right now.
This weekend a tiny door opened for me in the feeling of "what I have now is good." Sara and I were at DeWitt Park, a beautiful park in the section of Ithaca with the oldest buildings, and she was shimmying all over the grass on her knees. I was sitting on one of her soft pink blankets watching her and feeling the good warmth of the sun and seeing the delicate spire of a church and the two maroon, shiny fallen leaves my daughter held in each hand ecstatically as she hobbled forward on her muddy knees. I saw the slender, mini gold leaves that had fallen all over like snow and I held them over her head and let them flutter down, which amused her to no end. I watched how happy she was just holding leaves and being in the sunshine, dirt, and grass. And I felt, maybe my life is OK and is where it's supposed to be. But it wasn't so much a thrilling revelation as just a small, fragile feeling that just started to kind of poke at me, like hey--pay attention to this--one day you will live here in this feeling, it will be your address.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Stripper
I am thinking about kinds of speech, and what they mean. I spend my days writing polite strategic emails and acceptance and rejection letters to people I will never see in person. This has not come easy to me, and after years of doing it, I still agonize over each communication. It is an interesting form because you have to completely disguise yourself. You learn to use words like "warmly" (actually, I am not usually daring enough to use that one) and sentences like "please let me know if I may be of further help" (which, after a few years, has now become the more brazenly casual "please let me know if you need anything else"). I wish all those people whose manuscripts I have had to reject as managing editor of a sociology journal knew how often I have been rejected in the poetry world, and with the same stingingly distant language--"I am writing regretfully to let you know that the judges for the ____ Prize have not selected you as the winner," "This does not meet our needs at this time." I wonder how I have ended up here in careful/discreet language land, spending my days on a computer. Why didn't I become a stripper or something more visceral?
Which brings me to my next dilemma: when people ask "how are you doing," I always feel like I say too much. I know I should just say "fine" and leave it at that, or think of some cute surface answer (a Tibetan coworker always quips, "I'm still alive")...but as much as I try to do that, something bursts out of me and then, depending on my audience, there is either a glossy, brittle silence until a more humorous topic is introduced (this happened today); or there is a genuine response that still may feel uncomfortable to me, like the person either feels sorry for me or is wishing I'd said something else. I feel like I am a stripper, verbally and I have had this problem all my life...starting at age 5 when I imparted sex-ed knowledge to everyone in kindergarten, everyone at swim lessons, etc. and told my grandparents that my mom was knocked up. At this point I feel like I may be defiling my private life by saying too much, or too many contradictory things, about it. I want language to be an agent of truth. I want people to tell me how the hell they are really doing (though not go on at length about goiters or nasal discharge or something, sure, no one wants to hear that for too long) and I want genuine connections to happen, but I feel like everything is such a social game. I keep deciding I should go on a kind of word-diet where I only say "safe" things that I will not later regret revealing or feel weird about, but much like real diets, they never work. Is something wrong with me, or is it the whole setup? Is there a culture I would be more at home in? Maybe my fellow Italians, when in Italy or certain neighborhoods in Jersey, are all inappropriately, wildly expressive to their coworkers too. Maybe there are places in Alaska where no one speaks for months (if so, I wish Sarah Palin would go there, NOW). None of this is helped by my head being full of snot right now (but I won't go on and describe it at length), so it is hard to think at all, let alone to monitor anything. Maybe one day we will all have self-censorship machines that will help us to always get the job and sex we are verbally angling for...
I don't necessarily think the problem is me (always), exactly, though I probably need to guard and respect myself more, in many ways, in this life where things can be misinterpreted. I also suspect many people hide what is really going on with them, and how they feel, until one day their life changes or breaks apart in a way that is unavoidably visible...and maybe these people think my life is fucked up because I talk honestly and confusedly about it, when really, it is quite normal.
Which brings me to my next dilemma: when people ask "how are you doing," I always feel like I say too much. I know I should just say "fine" and leave it at that, or think of some cute surface answer (a Tibetan coworker always quips, "I'm still alive")...but as much as I try to do that, something bursts out of me and then, depending on my audience, there is either a glossy, brittle silence until a more humorous topic is introduced (this happened today); or there is a genuine response that still may feel uncomfortable to me, like the person either feels sorry for me or is wishing I'd said something else. I feel like I am a stripper, verbally and I have had this problem all my life...starting at age 5 when I imparted sex-ed knowledge to everyone in kindergarten, everyone at swim lessons, etc. and told my grandparents that my mom was knocked up. At this point I feel like I may be defiling my private life by saying too much, or too many contradictory things, about it. I want language to be an agent of truth. I want people to tell me how the hell they are really doing (though not go on at length about goiters or nasal discharge or something, sure, no one wants to hear that for too long) and I want genuine connections to happen, but I feel like everything is such a social game. I keep deciding I should go on a kind of word-diet where I only say "safe" things that I will not later regret revealing or feel weird about, but much like real diets, they never work. Is something wrong with me, or is it the whole setup? Is there a culture I would be more at home in? Maybe my fellow Italians, when in Italy or certain neighborhoods in Jersey, are all inappropriately, wildly expressive to their coworkers too. Maybe there are places in Alaska where no one speaks for months (if so, I wish Sarah Palin would go there, NOW). None of this is helped by my head being full of snot right now (but I won't go on and describe it at length), so it is hard to think at all, let alone to monitor anything. Maybe one day we will all have self-censorship machines that will help us to always get the job and sex we are verbally angling for...
I don't necessarily think the problem is me (always), exactly, though I probably need to guard and respect myself more, in many ways, in this life where things can be misinterpreted. I also suspect many people hide what is really going on with them, and how they feel, until one day their life changes or breaks apart in a way that is unavoidably visible...and maybe these people think my life is fucked up because I talk honestly and confusedly about it, when really, it is quite normal.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Flowers for Gretel
Sometimes miracles come out of ordinary things. Not the kind of miracle where you have surprisingly good luck, and everything goes great and is the best it could be; but the kind that is steeped in bad luck, failure, sadness, and yet emerges from that.
My old cat, Gretel, who I have had for 4 years--through a marriage, divorce, and a cross-country move, etc.--had a stroke 2 months ago that left him completely paralyzed. I think only anyone who has a pet and no children, or is just a crazy animal lover like me, could understand what it was like for me to watch this happen. It was very quick. Around dinnertime, he began staggering around the dining room, and at first it looked like just one leg was affected, like he was trying to shake something out. By the next morning, he couldn't move at all, was like a boneless bag of jello when I tried to lift or pick him up, and was crying in confusion and frustration and covered in pee and crap (which I was not yet expert at minimizing / cleaning off). The first Dr. he saw (the emergency vet hospital) was completely worthless. She had no idea what was going on and told me it was probably a brain or spinal tumor and there was no hope; and that I should let them keep him overnight (for major $) and take all kinds of tests that would probably not help him. Then she tried to hand me an initial estimated bill for several thousand dollars. I said no, and took him home instead, where neither of us slept...but he was alive the next morning, and I could take him to his regular vet (oh and by the way, he has a girl name because I just found out 6 months ago he is a guy. Sorry, Gretel. And his liver is somehow in his lung cavity--don't know how or when that happened--and he's blind...). Said regular vet quickly diagnosed that he'd had a stroke, which is not as major as a tumor. Long story but mainly, she just listened to his heart and heard an irregular heartbeat, which I guess fancy emergency vet had somehow not picked up on. But instead of advising a lot of surgery and tests, she recommended some aspirin, other pills, and to take him home and wait.
Well, it is over 2 months later and I have done everything (feed, launder several soiled towels a day, pill, squirt medication into his mouth, etc.) for this cat ever since, often in a state of profound depression. When I first brought him home, he could not move anything at all, not even lift his head, and just laid there on one side or the other (I had to flip him). But he seemed tranquil, after the initial shock, was still interested in food, and purred when I pet him. This, for me, was enough to merit keeping him alive. (Why do many people think humans deserve recuperation time after major trauma, but animals do not?) I was told that cats can recover from stroke, sometimes better than people, and he might be back to normal in a few weeks. This is not what happened, though, and in a few weeks, my vet was cautioning me that the very little progress he had made (like, being able to lift his head a little) might not go any further, and I should now think about, you know. Especially since at this point, he wasn't even able to poo on his own (try not to think about what that entails). However, I still felt very clear in my heart that keeping him going was the right thing, and that there was no other option for me. He trusted me and I could not bundle him into the car, take him somewhere, and allow a needle to be stuck into him like that while he was purring and hungry.
I wish it was now the end of the story and I could say, and now he's back to normal! That's not really the case. But after some acupuncture (yup--I live in a hippy town) and physical therapy sessions, he has recently begun trying to walk again, taking a few steps a day. So I called his vet today to report this, since we don't have to go in as often...and they immediately sent him flowers (which he can't see, but I did let him smell them), which are sitting on my dining room table on top of a clear glass bowl filled with a few pretty red stones, water, and a little plastic goldfish, with a note congratulating Gretel on taking his first steps. The flower delivery person told me this was their first order for a cat. May there be many more.
My old cat, Gretel, who I have had for 4 years--through a marriage, divorce, and a cross-country move, etc.--had a stroke 2 months ago that left him completely paralyzed. I think only anyone who has a pet and no children, or is just a crazy animal lover like me, could understand what it was like for me to watch this happen. It was very quick. Around dinnertime, he began staggering around the dining room, and at first it looked like just one leg was affected, like he was trying to shake something out. By the next morning, he couldn't move at all, was like a boneless bag of jello when I tried to lift or pick him up, and was crying in confusion and frustration and covered in pee and crap (which I was not yet expert at minimizing / cleaning off). The first Dr. he saw (the emergency vet hospital) was completely worthless. She had no idea what was going on and told me it was probably a brain or spinal tumor and there was no hope; and that I should let them keep him overnight (for major $) and take all kinds of tests that would probably not help him. Then she tried to hand me an initial estimated bill for several thousand dollars. I said no, and took him home instead, where neither of us slept...but he was alive the next morning, and I could take him to his regular vet (oh and by the way, he has a girl name because I just found out 6 months ago he is a guy. Sorry, Gretel. And his liver is somehow in his lung cavity--don't know how or when that happened--and he's blind...). Said regular vet quickly diagnosed that he'd had a stroke, which is not as major as a tumor. Long story but mainly, she just listened to his heart and heard an irregular heartbeat, which I guess fancy emergency vet had somehow not picked up on. But instead of advising a lot of surgery and tests, she recommended some aspirin, other pills, and to take him home and wait.
Well, it is over 2 months later and I have done everything (feed, launder several soiled towels a day, pill, squirt medication into his mouth, etc.) for this cat ever since, often in a state of profound depression. When I first brought him home, he could not move anything at all, not even lift his head, and just laid there on one side or the other (I had to flip him). But he seemed tranquil, after the initial shock, was still interested in food, and purred when I pet him. This, for me, was enough to merit keeping him alive. (Why do many people think humans deserve recuperation time after major trauma, but animals do not?) I was told that cats can recover from stroke, sometimes better than people, and he might be back to normal in a few weeks. This is not what happened, though, and in a few weeks, my vet was cautioning me that the very little progress he had made (like, being able to lift his head a little) might not go any further, and I should now think about, you know. Especially since at this point, he wasn't even able to poo on his own (try not to think about what that entails). However, I still felt very clear in my heart that keeping him going was the right thing, and that there was no other option for me. He trusted me and I could not bundle him into the car, take him somewhere, and allow a needle to be stuck into him like that while he was purring and hungry.
I wish it was now the end of the story and I could say, and now he's back to normal! That's not really the case. But after some acupuncture (yup--I live in a hippy town) and physical therapy sessions, he has recently begun trying to walk again, taking a few steps a day. So I called his vet today to report this, since we don't have to go in as often...and they immediately sent him flowers (which he can't see, but I did let him smell them), which are sitting on my dining room table on top of a clear glass bowl filled with a few pretty red stones, water, and a little plastic goldfish, with a note congratulating Gretel on taking his first steps. The flower delivery person told me this was their first order for a cat. May there be many more.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)