1. The cat is definately NOT Zelda, because the new cat is a boy. He is a gorgeous, friendly boy though and looks like he would like to stay. Z wants to call him George. Romany and I want to call him Fake Zelda.
Either way, I think I should stop the pretense that my house is anything but a poorly run cat hotel.
2. I am not pregnant. This is a vast relief to the rational mind what with my body being grateful for the longer chance to recover (what with the stress fractured pelvis of the last pregnancy* and other evils) and me having started the last two incredibly intense years of my training. So in almost all ways I am glad about this, but then I am also sad because the human heart is both irrational and ridiculous.
Matei still continues to look almost nothing like me, although we have the same mannerisms - the same smile, the same glee. In almost all other ways though he is a mini-Z and I was clearly just an intermediary in the whole affair. (Don't mind me baby, I'm just the woman who went through nine months of lugging you around and not eating any interesting cheeses).
Thankfully though Matei is so delicious that I don't really care who he looks like so long as I am able to nibble on his sweet sweet baby limbs. He continues to gobble up anything edible and to attempt to hurtle himself over any edge he sees. He is also becoming more self-sufficient by the day and is able to entertain himself for hours with destruction of self and property while I tag along behind him to invigelate and minimise collateral damage.
Here is a snapshot of today's busy baby day:
Step 1 - the dissection and disembowelment of the paper shredder.
Step 2- fortified by a light snack of cords and plugs, Matei is ready to festoon himself with shredded paper.
Step 3- Thus decorated, he decides to take a small stroll by pushing his buggy along.
My day so far has involved still being in my pyjamas, so everyone is a success story.
*I gave birth with a broken pelvis but without drugs. I think this is less a testament to my fortitude as to the incredible effectiveness of Hypnobirthing techniques.
1. ( The Maybe Zelda )
2. ( The Maybe Baby )
I have had no internet for well over a month, and attempting to catch up on your lives from friends list alone is clearly quite hopeless, so if you feel so inclined drop me a comment. Let me know what's new with you and if you feel so inclined point me towards any entries you want me to read.
xxxxx
a) she's enjoying hanging out on the feral side of life, decimating the local rodents
b) she's a teenage runaway who has escaped her house's oppressive regime of not being allowed to sleep in the baby's crib
c) she's vacationing in the homes of people who maybe give her tastier food treats and more attention and all the baby paraphenalia she can handle
d) she's lost and confused
e) she has forgotten where we live
Really considering it is Zelda - the Bai Ling of the feline world- it could be any of those theories. Or all of the above. But in either case, I feel a termendous sense of relief because she's alive and seems to be looking OK.
Having gratified us with a week of restful nights the child spent the past few days up to his old tricks of not-sleeping (waking up every few hours to be fractious and compel a parent to stroke his face and play sleepy hunt-a-dummy until he settles back to sleep until the next lost-dummy-oh-noes-oh-noes incident) and not-pooing. Then last night he slept more or less from midnight until 8am with minimal dummy-hunting and encouragement, woke up to feed, kick around, laugh at his reflection in the mirror and then he dropped off for another sleep where he has remained for the last 1.5 hours. This is glorious but also mildly worrying because the children, they are crazy, and I hang on to the semblance of routine and guard it like the most fragile china and when the baby starts sleeping crazy amounts there's a part of me that rejoices and a part of me that worries that he's dead or that he's used up his sleep quota for this whole week in one day and will not rest again until I crack.
The baby is stedily becoming more interesting company and divides his time practising his transformation from a swiper-to-a-grabber and practising his flirting techniques. He is sailing through an intensely social phase in which he is charmed by anything that moves and bestows many beaming smiles on his adoring public. They are a potent weapon, the baby smiles - a sort of cross between Ecstasy and Heroin which fill his parents with the Spirit Of Love and Forgiveness and wipe from their traumatised memories and his karmic record the first month or so of his life.
We had an exciting Easter mini-break full of socialising that culminated in Baby's First Wedding on Monday (I put on makeup! The baby wore a shirt whose collar kept riding up to make him look like Count Dracula!). It was an excellent occasion, and he behaved himself impeccably except during the most solemn bit of the ceremony and the reading in Arabic when my child chose to lose his rag like a mini-Crusader and commence the wailing that refused to be shushed. Having satisfied himself with embroidering Smallest Cutest Colleague's Precious Matrimonial Memories with his trademark wails Matei then spent the rest of the occasion showering all and sundry with his best gummy smiles and being enchanted by all the balloons! and poeple! and twinkling lights!
Ah, children. Constantly thinking up new ways to amuse and alarm so that my parenting stint seems like its a perpetual carousel of emotions veering between anxiety and joy, a sense of hope and doomful foreboding.
I've hung up posters (which some bastard keeps taking down) I've done the rounds of the neighberhood like a Jehovah's Witness, knocking on any door that opened, (I have even considering telling the Jehovah's Witnesses who come to my door that I will happily go to their meetings if they give me my cat) and I have wondered around with increasing desolation calling calling calling.
The absence of Zelda is palpable. It seeps into everything, erodes happiness and peace. It undermines my pleasure of the other two cats (because of the one who is missing, the third who is not there and who was secretly my favourite) every discarded black sock startles me, the emptiness of the doorway digs at me and over and over and over her life with me plays itself out in my head. Her brief kittenhood with her tiny self that used to dust the house regularly by crawling underneath the furniture, and that phase where she would only eat if Z was holding her in his arms, or the one where she would regularly go up trees she didn't know how to come down from, and her love of small spaces and her quest to fit into the tiniest of them (and the way I'd several times be startled when I opened the sock drawer and found Zelda sleeping there). I've had her since June 2006 and my heart aches with the loss of her because it is not enough. She was a healthy splendid cat, she could have been with us for years. Z says "at least we haven't had to have her put down, that would be much worse" except that for me it wouldn't. It would be terribly sad and awful in its own way but at least there would be closure. It wouldn't eat at me the way her dissapearance does. I wouldn't be constantly torn between my awful sadness and the terrible hope that won't let me rest
Physically I ache for her. For the sleekness of her body, for the splendidness of her tail, for the small wetness of her nose, for the company of her, for the way she used to gallop towards me when she saw me coming in the street, for her urgent mewling in front of the door. I miss the way she used to sit on the garden wall and preen to be admired, or the way she'd hold herself still to be stroked, the dainty way she'd sit on the edge of the tub whenever I had a bath. I miss the way she would accompany me on walks with the baby, running alongside the pram chirping until we crossed some invisible line that marked the frontier of her territory and she would turn back.
Some fools suggest: "Get a new cat." which - no. Firstly even the two remaining ones are quite enough to maintain, and secondly I don't want just any cat. I want her. Zelda was special. Not only was she the most gloriously beautiful animal I've ever shared my life with, but also the most endearingly stupid. Her determination not to learn from past mistakes, her fearlessness, her airheadedness, her sweetness, her passionate curiosity and seeming utter lack of instinct for self-preservation - all those were a tragedy waiting to happen much as they also meant I couldn't help BUT adore her. Zelda with her goldfish memory and flighty butterfly tendencies, whose daintiness permeated her whole being and whose sweetness oozed from every pore - my heart was forfeit from the beginning.
And each time I said goobye to anything I loved (from husband to cat) - each time they left my presence it was like pieces of my heart going away into the world to have their own adventures and each evening when they returned it was like being reassembled. Except now that there is a piece missing. Its loss shadows me and with each extra day that she is gone I have less hope of her return.
Z has a theory about happiness, that happiness is a jinx of its own kind. That if you become too happy, too gleeful, too full of your own joy this displeases the universe and it gets taken away. This is why he is quiet in the expressions of his happiness. He doesn't shout it out the way I do, to shelter it. But I'm not built that way. I can no more lie low with my joy than I can with love. Whatever emotion I feel is cast out, proclaimed into the world. And even though there is a part of me that fears that what I love will get removed from me simply because I love it so much, there's the other part that finds it impossible not to love to my full extent no matter how much I am tortured by the loss.
I dreamt a version of this dream for years after my father died. And as my heart wondered through its landscapes of loss and desolation this dream spilled into the daytime and half-consciously I'd be looking for him everywhere. In the broad shoulders of the man on the bus, in the blue eyes glimpsed in the crowd, in the footsteps of tall men everywhere, walking away.
Nowadays I dream the torturous dreams for Zelda the cat. She's been missing for over a day now which is not that long for cats but very unusual for her. We've had her for nearly two years and during that time she has never spent more than a few hours away from home. And now she's vanished and I'm devastated. I veer between terror that something happened to her (she's been trapped or hurt or run over) and anger that someone might have taken her (for Zelda never learned not to talk to strangers and spent a lot of time on the garden wall being an exhibitionist and she was so small and beautiful and sweet and would have been so easy to lure away because Zelda is as airheaded as she is gorgeous). Since I've many times previously lost Zelda within the house (thanks to her passion for boxes and cupboards and her talent for slipping into these unnoticed and then not crying out for help but being all "Oh hello! It's you! I lived here! And then I lived there! Isn't life funny?" when you found her).
For two days now I've wondered around the streets calling out her name, seeking her out in every cupboard drawer, hoping against hope that every black thing I see on the floor is her. But it never is. Zelda is AWOL, vanished, gone and I veer constantly between anxiety and devastation, chant like a mantra, beam out into the cosmos from the depth of my being: Please come back. Please please please. I love you. Return, return, return.
First Cat: I am so humiliated. I have never been this embarassed in my entire life. I must hide my face in shame.
Second Cat: I rejoice in your humiliation! However it also gives me vague feelings of dread. Or deja vu? Emotions are so confusing. So are memories!
Urchin Cat: I am so glad that my history of abuse makes me too fragile to be a candidate for this.
First Cat: Look at how well I blend with the floor! Perhaps, if I concentrate a bit harder I could just... disappear....
Second Cat: I am currently calculating the cost/benefit analysis of furthering your downfall First Cat. Or maybe chasing butterflies! It's hard to keep track! My mind it is so scattered! Pretty blue dish! It have food? No food! Life, it is so full of mysteries!
Urchin Cat: If I still had my womb I would totally lose respect for you as the Alpha Male, First Cat. Although perhaps gazing upon my daintyness will lift up your spirits in your time of need. Here, let me show you my ankles. I am a hussy like that.
First Cat: I have chased mice! And postmen! I have conquered shoes! I am MEANT FOR GREATER THINGS! I do not deserve your petty abuses! If only my mild nature did not prevent me from plotting all of your demises while you sleep.
Urchin Cat My sense of security enables me to look on this scene with curiosity and detachment.
First Cat: If only this wretched wretched flesh could but produce thumbs that bend and oppose I would rend this garment from myself! And then rend your flowerbeds! Even more than now!
And Milica, who can hear a fridge door being opened from three miles away and who never misses an opportunity to accompany you to the kitchen and attempt to ingratiate himself through seductively caressing your calf by winding and unwinding his tail around your leg. Or the way he falls over himself in his hurry to vault from our bed whenever any of us gets up, just in case we should happen to be, you know, going to the kitchen and he was going to miss it. Or the way he'll stand in the crossroads of the hallway with all of his body pointing towards the kitchenly direction all "Yes, I understand you just want to go to the loo. But may I suggest that a kitchen is a much more rewarding destination? And a better idea? So I'll just stand here, you know, helpfully reminding you of it."
They have thousands of delighful habits, the cats. Like Milica's obsessive attachment to my blue knitted sweater, or his way of curling up on your chest and mewling to be stroked and most of all how trusting he is (because this cat has allowed me to examine his eyes and poke him in the eyeball in an attempt to remove a stuck speck of dirt without so much as a hiss; also has consented to have helium balloons tied to his body).
The best thing though? The sibling fighting between him and Zelda. It's not bullying (there are no teeth or claws) and it's opportunistic in nature (say if she's sitting nearby when he's passing, he won't miss the opportunity to cuff her on the head; similarly she won't miss an opportunity to annoy him whenever possible, to provoke him with her nearness and the wavery of her fluffy fluffy tail).
***************************************
The weekend, it was good. Full of small successes.
On Saturday we slept late. And I used Filo Pastry and the enormous quantities of leek in the fridge to make my first pie. (My top cooking tip - chopping mountains of vegetables is made much better by being able to watch Strictly Come Dancing and X-Factor at the same time. Although Z felt that the way I was paying more attention to the Argentine Tango than to my chopping was hazardous for his taste). The pie came out rather nicely (like a low-fat version of a spring roll) and so buoyed was I by my culinary success that I want to make one with apples and raisins.
On Sunday we went to a birthday party and I got given The Most Comfortable Chair In the World and sat in it without pain for seven hours eating canapes and listening to amusing stories (Salmon and gherkin canapes! The new analgesiac!).
And when we came home the night was made of frost and cut-glass stars and I felt well enough to go for a short walk and all the iced-up cars looked like something out of a fairytale and I felt so buoyed by energy and good feelings that I inscribed hearts and stars and pleasant wishes on their frosted rooftops all the way down the street.
They took the cat today. They were gentle - it went with as little trauma as it could have done.
They think she's feral. As soon as she was in the box she started screaming and fighting, going wild. It was terrible to listen to her crying, but it had to be done.
"You already have two cats." I know, I know. But I want a third. Not just any cat. Her.
"You're going to have a baby." Yes. I know. It's insane. But it could probably be done.
"She will go to a good home somewhere." I know. But I love her. If she doesn't belong to anybody, I'd like her back, if I could. Because in the mornings she wakes me with purring. Because she rests her face on my shoulder when she is sleeping. Because each night she curls herself into the crook of my back or my arms.
"It would be so much work." Yes. But love is always a lot of work.
This is how love has always worked for me. In the unlooked for thing I did not invite, did not know I wanted until it came.
Maternity leave is GLORIOUS. I continue to sleep almost as much as the cats. In fact I think the cats and I are acquiring something akin to a Collective Mind whereby we all enjoy a leisurly snooze then maybe get up for something to eat and a bit of love and then sleep again.
I feared I might be bored, but truthfully I haven't been awake for long enough for that to happen. Currently there's nothing I don't love about being home, from being able to play on the internet whenever I want to it being perfectly socially acceptable to combat pelvic pain by walking around while clutching my crotch and moaning.
And to prevent myself from feeling like a complete wastrel I have packed my hospital bag and even though I've tried to take the minimum of stuff I still feel like I'm preparing to go camping/survive the Apocalypse.
This morning I noticed that Urchin Cat is looking a lot more of a belly then when she first came, meaning that a) either I've been feeding her more than I've realised or b) she's pregnant. And I was immediately seized by a terrifying and nightmarish vision of attempting to tend to a baby while ankle deep in kittens, a vision so dreadful that I realised my 'i will take her to the vet when she stops being so scared of getting into a box' was not going to cut the mustard anymore. So I called Cats Protection League, who are coming to pick her up today or tomorrow. And I have spent the intervening two hours crying.
Partially because no doubt the hormones, they are raging. Partially because I've grown so attached to her that I will miss her desperately when she's not around. But mostly because I know how batshit-insanely terrified she is of people-who-are-not-me and even more so of being put into boxes. So the thought of someone coming to stuff her into a box and then into a pen- it breaks my heart. Even though I know this is so necessary (after all she needs to be vaccinated, and neutered and checked for microchips and all that, but I still feel like I'm handing her over to be tortured). And when she shows me her delicious strokable belly and bats and melts under my touch and lovingly headbutts me all full of joy and trust I feel like even more of a Judas.
And I thought I was so hardcore because I didn't snuffle watching Animal Hospital.
And on the subjects of additions, a beautiful little tortoiseshell cat has spent a week living in the garden before she overcame her terror of Anything That Isn't Milica The Cat and has spent the last five days ingratiating herself into the household. Asylum Seeking Cat is absolutely adorable and her main interests at present appear to be: 1) Gadding about through the garden with First Cat 2) having her face stroked 3) purring loudly while curled against some crook of my body 4) eating. Nevertheless the majority of her time is still spent in Hiding Under The Bed because she appears equally torn between her hunger for interaction and her terror that We Will Do Something Horrible To Her, because the moment one of us does anything as irresponsible as say speak, or move across the room she flees. We're waiting a while to have her calm down a bit more before we stuff her into a tiny box and take her to the vet to scan her for microchips but I am suspecting that she doesn't want to return wherever she came from. Z and I are still firmly in denial over the fact that we are becoming a three-cat household (for the added vet bills and insurance would surely make us weep and I'm sort of hoping that another loving home may be found for her.
And in line with my determination Not To Think Of THe Sad Things, I shall talk instead about the fact that my dearly beloved friend Susan is here, and that I am on Annual Leave and that I had a perfectly delightful weekend, enhanced by the company of
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webofevil and the 5000 pancakes Z had whipped up.And finally, happy birthday to my shiny honey
humanfemale!I hope a glorious year awaits you, and I heart you and miss you and you should try strange foods while in Australia and continue to not get killed.Similarly I cannot last remember when any trip to the toilet I made was not inveigelated by at least one cat, with First Cat preferrably assisting in the operations by curling up on my lap.
And if there is one thing which cannot stand, one thing which maddens and wounds him it is the concept of the closed bathroom door. If I happen to be in the loo without him he will spend the entirety of my sojourn there by standing and crying outside the door. I'm sure you'll agree, the actions of an entirely logical mind. Because who knows what I could be doing there on my own?
He is very possibly being cheated out of lap time people! Or I could be drowning in the bathtub without faithful cat's attempts to fish me out. Or maybe it's even worse than that. Perhaps I too am using this opportunity to draw complicated mandala patterns in the litter tray with my paws! Or hogging all that delicious toilet water all to myself.
My nefariousness drives me crazy too, just thinking about it.
And although the sight of the cat's denuded, shrunken jewels fills me with sadness somewhat the change in him has been deeply pleasant. He no longer devotes his leisure time to gang warfare and bullying small kitten and romancing my arm. Instead he has taken to investing himself in cuddling up to me and Z (he was always more affectionate of the two cats, but now that the fighting with every other cat/fox/lifeform in London is less of an urgent matter it's like he's decided he has more time for snuggling love). He also seems to no longer view Professional Kitten as quite as much imposition on his rightful space in the world, and the two spend portion of each day playing (ie. chasing each other around the flat/garden/sofa) like maniac. The lawn has sprouted wild and lengthy weeds and grasses which no one has cut yet because the sight of our cats playing 'periscope tails' and 'stalky lions in the savannah' trumps tidy gardens.
Finally here is a picture of First Cat rekindling our intimacy of yore.
Lookit his little leg on Z's! If that doesn't make you go AWWWW I don't know what will move your shrivelled souls.
And now, on to buzzums.
My body has gone berserk. Not only have I spent the past three days engaged in nostop vomiting (just as fun as it sounds! I've taken to tapping my abdomen and pointing out "Oi! Don't trash the place! You're just renting."), but I'm also slowly ceasing to recognise my anatomy.
My bosoms clearly take the baby business seriously for they aren't messing around. In the last couple of weeks they have enlarged and transformed themselves from innocent womanly curves into some kind of firm, loaded weaponry laughing in the face of my previous bras and refusing to be neatly contained by shirts.
Oh bosoms! To think you had been lulling me into a false sense of security all those years! When all along you had been biding your time to run away wielding your own crazy agenda.
On the other hand, compared to my fiercely swelling chest my baby bump looks positively svelte. And I'm torn between horror and fascination thinking "I wonder whatever will happen next?" (Although the answer to that is probably vomiting).
And yet this exercise in Weeness has the fine-tuned and absolute commitment to killing of a T-X. Not content with terrorising the garden's populations of bees, snails, frogs and mice yesterday she brought down a pigeon - a creature roughly half her body size AND equipped with wings. I was impressed and apalled in equal measure.
It may have involved the discovery that the computer parts did not come equipped with the right cables, and the discovery that no one had the right cables, and the discovery that the best way to remedy this was to drag LSAYLAU wife on another tour of the Godforsaken Places with Electronics Shops.
He might have then spent four hours of his life bent uncomfortably over various Computer Parts scattered all over the floor, handling them with the utmost care and latex gloves, cradling each one carefully as an infant and protecting it from the deadly static electricity of the cats (the very same cats whose curiosity made them circle him like sharks for hours and hours and hours). He might have then lifted out his motherboard and realised that a teeny tiny teeny mini bit of it had come loose in transport and snapped off and that in fact it was ALL FOR NOTHING and that once a new motherboard arrived he’d have to do all of it again. He might have (with a wild gleam in his eyes) hit upon the idea of welding the teeny tiny teeny mini emancipated component back onto the motherboard before realising that his idea was useless and undoable. He might have manfully resisted the temptation to cry, although not so much the temptation to relate his troubles to LSAYLAU spouse several times.
He might have then realised that on account of Easter his motherboard replacement would not arrive until well into the next working week, tainting all his endavours with a terrible yearning and frustration and sadness, the sadness that shouts at him whenever he passes the sad, non-working carcass of his almost-built computer on the living room floor, or indeed one of the mountain of boxes that housed computer parts, currently piled next to the sofa and incrementally increasing the various sadnesses of everyone except the Cats.
Speaking of Cats, here’s the latest instalment of the pet related soap operas in which Max (a fat, imperialistic neighbourhood tomcat more akin to a furry turkey than a graceful feline) attempts to corner the Professional Kitten and sexually abuse her. Professional Kitten manages to slip in between his paws and runs to the door of her house where she stands squeaking to be let in while Max corners her again. On the other side of the sadly-shut front door First Cat is yowling and growling and scratching in his eagerness to get out and protect her virtue and let loose some pheromones. The scene is saved by Z – the kitten flees through the open window and Max slinks off in a state of unrequited love but with a backwards glance as if to say ‘One day I’ll get you, Professional Kitten! You’ll be mine!’
Leading us all to wonder Whatever Will Happen Next? Will Max ever get his way with Professional Kitten or will a well aimed projectile find him first? Will First Cat ever succeed in defending his territory against insurgents? Stay tuned!
First there was the episode with the spiders, and today I woke to First Cat giving me The Burning Eye of Longing and gently biting my arm while attempting to seductively embrace it. The removal of arm was met with the cry of desolation/frustration from The Cat who proceeded to intercede with more Burning Eye and Lovesick Meow even though I was having none of it.
This disturbing event brings me right back to childhood and Evil Jimmy The Dog during whose reign of humping terror no leg (whether human or furniture) was safe.
If the cat keeps this up he's going to get neutered so fast it will make his head spin.
Cat keepers on my flist is this normal? It's never happened to me before but then again this morning is the first time The Cat came upon me in bed while I was alone - the sneaky bastard.
First some men came to fix the leaking roof and they trod all over the garden not respecting at all the Time and Effort he had spent staking it out with macho wee.
The trespassers! The upstarts!
Obviously the cat could not take these insults sitting down so instead he paced the length of the windowsill and scowled at their ladder.
And just now he's come running into the house howling about the fact that a raincloud of monumentous proprtions had emptied itself all over his head.
Ah, the horror and the indignity!
Ah, the misery and wretched cruelty of life!
I feel that the gravity of this situation can only adequately be conveyed by The Eyes of Pathos:
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