View from the North 40: Re: life, the universe and my cat

Sometimes the Universe stops orchestrating ironic life twists — and creating cracks in the sidewalk of life just to laugh at seeing you trip and fall — long enough to do you a favor. A real favor.

Sometimes that real favor feels like a sucker punch to the solar plexus. You’re just lying there in the dirt with your mouth gaping uselessly like a fish on a dry bank waiting for the clubbing that’s sure to follow to put you out of your misery. The knock-out blow doesn’t come, but the air does, eventually, and that means you gotta keep living.

And then one day you’re stuffing your half-feral shop cat into a pet carrier to take him and his wounded leg to the vet, and the cat’s thrashing around in the crate hard enough to make it rock while yowling in half-manic fear until he settles down. But “settles down” simply means that the whole time you’re driving him to the vet he’s meowing plaintively while staring into space with a glazed-over, wide-eyed look that never quite manages to focus on anything. Even you.

And at that moment your heart — which is pumping pure stress adrenalin — hurts so badly for terrorizing him and not being able to make him magically, instantly all-better that you’re pretty sure you might die before the Universe has time to give you that mercy blow upside the head.

And the cat won’t let you comfort him (which might not be so bad because you’re not entirely sure that he won’t come out of this trance just to rip you up like an old rag shirt, but you ache to cuddle him anyway). And all you can think is “Oh my stars and party girls, I’m this freaked out about a distraught cat? I am so hugely, immensely, crazily, gratefully happy I never had children.”

Or maybe that’s just me.

I remember people disagreeing with me all those years I said “there ain’t no way I am ever going to have children, ever,” and those few years dealing with a biological clock hammering away at me when I said “y’know, it’s better that we didn’t have kids. Really. It’s OK.”

“Oh, you’d be a great mom,” my family and friends would say. Nope.

No.

I knew better. Even when I wanted them, I knew: This is a bad idea.

I had pets and if pets do nothing else for you they do teach you valuable life lessons. I learned early I would die of heartache or a heart attack or spontaneous internal combustion, if I were a parent. Or be thrown in jail.

Professionals in the child welfare system would say, “She seems pretty much normal, or normal-ish, as a whole, but her parenting skills themselves seem to be bipolar. Is that possible?” because I would swing like a pendulum between the extremes of manic anxiety and euphoria, with a whole world of benign neglect in between.

Child protective services would have me on speed dial to say things like, “Um, Ms. Burke, your son was picked up for shoplifting again — yes, his diapers again — if you’d just remember to buy them, and then use them. Or maybe you could pay attention long enough to potty train him. He is 10 now. Yes, time does fly. You can pick him up at the detention center.”

But I would have the hospital and all the doctors on speed dial. I would install a signal-blocker in his car so I knew for sure he couldn’t text and drive — and a sensor that would alert me if he got past that technology. I would make him wear a helmet and full pads just to play tennis. And I would lick my finger to wipe a dirt smudge from his face and kiss him goodbye 10 times when he was trying to leave the house just to walk next door to his friend’s house to play video games for an hour.

Then he’d fall and break his arm and I’d be, like, “What? What are you whining about? Suck it up, little man, and get back to your chores. Mama’s busy.”

And then he’d hold up his arm, or try to as his compound fracture made half of the arm just flop over like a dead fish, and I would drown — mouth gaping open and shut — in the instant flood of guilt and horror. In the ER I would hand him off to a nurse then promptly drop to the floor like a fainting goat, only dead from the overwhelming stress of trying to live as a parent without sufficient emotional competence.

Sometimes the Universe saves you from a fate like that.

Or maybe it’s just me.

(Thanks, Universe, and my cat is doing much better at [email protected].)