You Cat to Be Kitten Meow! Part II: Eyes Widely Shut

When I was nearly ten days old my eyes began to open. At first only tiny slits of blue on my soft fury face. The more mommy washed my face the wider the openings became, till they were fully open. I couldn't see more than light and shadows, but it was better than orienting myself by the sound, the warmth of my siblings or the smell of milk.
On the day when my left eye was nearly fully open something unusual happened. We heard loud bangs and other horrifying noises at the window near the porch where we slept in the basket. Harsh whispering human voices and heavy booted footsteps hurrying around. Our human family never behaves like that. Their children make noises, at times very loud ones, but their voices are cheerful, full of laughter. The voices we were hearing now were bad, I can't explain how we knew it, but we knew something was wrong. Our mommy covered all of her babies with her body and was meowing quietly, but nervously, warning the strangers not to come any closer. I was petrified with fear and squeezed my eyes shut. When the heavy booted steps ceased running through the house and the noises came back to the broken window, a new sound added to it - the strangers were dragging a heavy bag, full of our humans' possessions. They were thieves! I was glad no one put me in that bag, I stayed where I was and our mother kept hovering over us long after the menacing strangers were gone. I heard the human mother cry a lot that day, she was keeping her children near at all times, just like our mommy did.

Volatile state of marriage

Today I had to go and wait in a rather long queue in a municipal office to obtain a copy of my marriage certificate, or as Italians call it "stato di matrimonio", the state of marriage. Everything sounds better in Italian, doesn't it? In the printed form one has to fill when applying for the certificate one must state the purpose for which the certificate will be used. Most of people in the queue before me were applying for the certificate in order to get a divorce, as I couldn't avoid finding out from the office employee who was routinely checking the correctness of each filled form in a carrying voice.
I don't know what hit me. The thought that the same two people who now want to be free from any bonds with each other just a few years ago wanted nothing but to grow old together, to close an eye on imperfections of each other, to support and to carry on carrying on. Also the fact that three out of five marriages end up in divorce. The fact that there are so many people who after divorce have to reinvent themselves and their social life accordingly, to search for comfort and support elsewhere, or to cry themselves into sleep every night because they keep failing at finding it and start losing faith. The fact that it's easier to leave than to be left behind. I've seen it all among my friends.
I also felt thankful (to myself?) that I haven't given up on the man who drives me bonkers more often than not, who at first sight doesn't seem to be willing to apply himself to make me happy, but is unhappy if I search for things that make me happy if it doesn't go along his daily routine. I want to adopt a dog, he doesn't. I'm not a cat person, yet I've ended up with dozens of cats he adopted over last decade. I am blabbermouth, he's the biggest introvert I've ever met. We're a living proof that opposites attract.

Just like pain threshold is different for each person, I suppose incompatibility tolerance level is different for each of us. Someone wouldn't tolerate things I've compromised, someone else tolerates much more than me and doesn't even wince. There is no moral to this story, just the fact that I keep chewing on it - why people stay together no matter what? And why others don't?

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.

12 things I learned in 2012

1. Safe as houses is the most untrue saying of them all. We were robbed last year. It still doesn't feel safe anywhere near the house. 
2. If someone tells you they don't believe friendship exists, don't expect them to show you loyalty and support.
3. A person can only give you what they've received and have in them. It works both on physical and emotional level. 
4. There is nobody else in the whole wide world that can give you the emotional range that your own kids can. 
5. No one will ever understand you the way you do, so don't expect them to.
6. Don't try to prove anything to anyone. 
7. Life is too short to still be bullied and manipulated by public opinion like when you were a child.
8. I have grown out of religious forms and into more need of God Himself. 
9. Sleeping sometimes is art, and sometimes it's science. 
10. Constructive criticism builds and gives you faith in your abilities. Anything else is plainly destructive, beware.
11. Sometimes we choose friends, and sometimes God chooses them for us.
12. We all need someone to believe in us.

En garde!

When a man tells you he (being a man) is just as bad at cooking as you (being a woman) probably are at maths you don't know whether to be offended, to take it as compliment or to empathise. Caught me unprepared and left me confused for hours!

Got your back covered

Only a man can offend you and then get offended by you being offended by what he just did. My husband has polished this art to perfection...
Kids asked him to put forward the recorded film so they wouldn't have to watch commercials. The remote control was on the table right in front of him. His reaction? Repeated yells about them needing to learn patience and waiting till he finishes to type in his game chat... How ridiculous is that? At that moment I happened to be passing by and put the film forward, saying there is no need to wait till after the commercials only to put the film forward when it doesn't need forwarding any longer. Another "rational" reaction from the other adult of our family? Rage and fury about me not covering his back. Really??? Do we live in the same reality and participate in the same events? More than that, he said that from now on he will not cover my back either. Ha!
Other pearls from life and works of my significant other? Once he grabbed a dirty spoon from the sink and ate something with it tasting the food along with the soap in which spoon was soaking. FYI, utensil drawer is right next to the sink. Let's see if you can guess whose fault it was? Nope, not his. As if it's normal to keep clean and ready for use spoons in sink among dirty dishes.
Another time he made me lose my sleep after he stormed into bedroom and accused me of being careless and not charging the battery of electric toothbrush (which was still charged and worked just fine when I brushed my teeth an hour prior to that). These are just some of his latest outbursts.
Why is he still with me if I'm pissing him off so easily sometimes? Because a man needs someone at hand who could be blamed for the vast range of small misfortunes that fall upon him.
Why am I still here beside him, you might ask? Because often I feel like I've won him in lottery, and you do not just throw away your winnings, even if it's just a green sponge in shape of an elephant!!!

42

Smell of freshly laundered bed linen. Warm feet. Warm knees, surprisingly. Earl Grey tea with a spoon or even two of sugar. Warm palm of hand pressed softly to forehead. A pillow, a teddy bear, anything soft and warm pressed against the chest near the heart. Deliberate absence of thought. That's my personal prescription for those moments when the bottomless hole opens in my heart and I can't see further than the black nonexistent wall right in front of me. We all have these moments. It's so human. What is the meaning of life, Universe, everything? It's forty-two, Douglas Adams would have said.