Saturday 13 April 2013

You cat to be kitten meow! Part I: Birth


Mommy? Mommy, where are you? What are these dry grains of sand around me? I can't see. What is this large furless animal lifting me from dust and putting me under something wet? Am I going back into you, mommy? Oh, I wish I could go back there, stay with you safe and happy...
It turns out those were hands of the human mother that lifted me out of the litter sand, where my mommy had foolishly dropped me when her labour pains caught her unprepared. Oh, silly mommy! She was so inexperienced, we were her first kittens, her first litter. In the moment of panic, under the siege of unrecognised pains, she sought refuge in the place where no one could hurt her - her closed litter box. Thus, ironically, she dropped the first kitten of her first litter into the litter box. Then helpful hands picked me up and washed off the sand under warm tap water, only to give me back to my mommy, for her to finish cleaning me. Mind it, I still had the sac attached. She had to bite it off and eat it, as all feline mothers do. It was a distressful moment, I was wet, and cold, and then a new feeling kicked in. Hunger. The feeling that moves the whole animal planet around, makes us change locations and hunt, or for the luckiest of us, it means we have to whine for food and make friends with the humans. They are kind, most of them. Look how they helped my mommy when she didn't know what was happening to her and me.
Three more kittens followed me into this world, all looking  more like tiny rodents than felines. To an untrained eye we might look like four white mice with pink extremities and nearly bare tails, bearing no obvious resemblance with our beautiful mommy, royal in her posture and adorable in her shades of beige and brown, darker at the tips of her paws, tail and her nose, always kept slightly upwards. Our mommy is posh, she's a pure breed Siamese. The humans say her eyes are violet blue like those of Elizabeth Taylor, but I have no idea who that Taylor cat is. She must be really beautiful if she's anything like my mommy. 
The humans we now live with adopted her from other humans, who didn't want her anymore, they said it's either adoption or cat pound. So we've been lucky.
My siblings and I don't even sound like our mommy yet, not even like the little mice that we resemble at the moment. My voice is more like that of a hungry chirping birdie. How will  my mommy know that I'm her baby? Will she recognise and feed me? But I guess mommies always know.

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