A Story of Our Cat

"I can't find the cat I told you about on the phone, but let me get a different one for you," Colleen motioned upstairs. A minute later, she was back downstairs with a dejected cat in her arms. "This is Tiger Lily! She was hiding under our bed." Tiger Lily was a dark tabby cat with little splashes of orange coloring on her back. 

I was so ready for a cat, any cat, that I gently pushed Tiger Lily into the cat carrier, and thanked my friend for giving us one of her several house-and-barn-cats. I already loved her. 

On our way home, Jake and I renamed her "Hen Wen," after the future-telling pig from The Black Cauldron. It took Hen Wen three weeks to venture out from under the couch regularly. When she had an eye infection that needed care, Jake and Quinn had to lift the whole couch up for me to retrieve her. 

I recall the day we moved, five months after bringing her to live with us, I had to seek her out in the farthest recess in the farthest room. She came out when I called, sheepish, because she and I both knew she was just so scared. 

At my in-laws' house, where we were moving, Hen stayed in the basement for a week or more. Hugely pregnant, I sat with her in the basement for long periods. I found an old wooden chair and tried to reach down to  pet her over my belly. She didn't even see where we slept for a month, since it was past many rooms where many people roamed. She was just so scared. But how far she had come! One day I even found her lying on our bed, out in the open, sunning herself. She loved lying on our bed. 

You hear it, right? The past tense that is not just a one-time event, but the habitual turned perfect tense? Because two weeks ago, Hen Wen just wasn't eating much, then nothing at all. It took me forever to realize that she was having trouble breathing. After putting Tessa to bed and leaving the monitor with my in-laws, I took Hen to the emergency vet. It just so happened that Jake was away for the first night since Tessa was born, and I felt like I was on my own on this one. It seems like it all happened very fast after I decided to take her in. The fluid around her lungs was a hopeless matter. I walked in with her in the cat carrier, and I walked out two hours later with a heavy heart and an empty cat carrier. I cried in the car for a while before going home. 

On the exam table, I held her still while the vet tech took her vitals. Hen Wen rested the weight of her head on my forearm, too desperate to be scared now: trusting and tired and laboring to breathe, and maybe also glad to have such full attention from me. It was a rare thing that I turned my whole attention to the cat after I had Tessa. Hen just had to find those moments to snuggle when things were quiet, overcoming her fear and finding me. Here she was snuggling with me a few weeks after Tessa was born.

Summer Berries

 On my clothes this summer have been blueberries, blackberries,

peanut butter, 

and other marks from the mouth of my baby daughter, 

who likes to blow raspberries.

She thinks putting her tiny baby mouth on my skin or my shirt and making fart noises is a good way to pass an afternoon.

And it is. 

We sit on our blanket in the grass and laugh and laugh. 

Bridal Showers and Baby Showers

 I think a cool addition to bridal showers and baby showers is storytelling. I know it happens without planning it... but does it? Or do we spend the entire four hours catching up and never get to the event? I'd love to attend a bridal shower where we the gift-giving is optional but the telling of a story is expected. That's the thing you bring. You wrap it up in a little forethought, and you limit it to three minutes or so. A bridal story shower, or a bridal telling (and a baby telling!). I want stories of real life more than I want the stuff. (Thank you for the stuff, I needed the stuff, too, though.)

Stories are the gift that grows the courage to step forward into the next part of life. 

There isn't room in our houses for all the photos and letters and journals of our forebears. But we can tell the stories. 

For a bridal telling, I would want my one friend to relate the story of their first night together, in all its honesty and heartbreak of disappointment. I would want my other friend to tell us about how she burnt dinner very often during her first two years of marriage, and served those meals wearing only an apron. It was a fun thing, not sad. You have to hear her tell it. 

I would tell about our honeymoon in all its hilarity and spice, things that don't belong on a blog future employers may find.

For a baby telling, I would want my mother-in-law to talk about breastfeeding, how every time her first child latched, a white hot pain shot through her; every time, and she didn't give up. And Shelby to tell of her two c-sections, one traumatic, one peaceful. 

I would tell about my fears, and almost suffocating Tessa by accident when we co-slept and she was swaddled. I shudder to think about it as I write. I would tell about how after nursing and nursing AND nursing on and off for hours, right around 9:30 PM one night, she fell asleep so deeply that I could lay her in her bassinet, and there she slept for hours. It happened all at once, just as I was about to despair, she surprised me by being a growing human being. I tell you, in the first month, I was exultant and miserable all at once, and didn't know if I was loving her. I was just trying to keep up and to take care of us both without hurting anyone's feelings in the meantime. 

There is something pretty important about being surrounded by other women when you cross these thresholds. So we buy stuff. We go to Target and get gifts and wrap them, then bring them to the party to be unwrapped and suddenly all that paper is a burden and we throw it away, and pile up the goods in bags, after all... These are important items for life, yes. But our stories are our treasures. 

Social Security Numbers

"I see on this intake form that you're asking for my social. Why do you need that, though?" I asked the secretary politely.

She conferred with the secretary next to her, who had heard the exchange. "Tell her we need it as a secondary identification."

She turned back to me, "We need it as a secondary identification. You would be surprised how many people have the same names." 

1. You have no idea what would surprise me. 

2. The only people who need my social security number are people who are paying or lending me money. When the eye doctor starts paying me money instead of marking up eyeglass frames by 400%, I'll give 'em my SSN. 

3. Fact: As of this writing, no one else has my name. 

So I didn't give it. But the secretary I was not talking to said, quite audibly to me, "Tell her we at least have to have the last four digits." So I wrote my birth year there. 

This whole scene was irritating to me, a person with a social security number. But what was merely loitering in the back of my mind came dashing to the front: people who are here without documentation would start to sweat in this moment. This tiny fit of solidarity does not move the needle on justice for folks who have come here for legit reasons, and I know this. 

So what will move the needle toward justice? I'm not currently seeking out ways to help dismantle and re-create the immigration system. I suppose I'm waiting for a chance to fall into my lap. But if I wait, it will likely look like standing up for the little guy. Standing up for the little guy, as a little guy myself, is sure to land me in trouble. I'm just gearing up. I'm getting myself used to a little bit of trouble, making a little bit of noise, trying to see how the little guys would be treated if they were there, so I can stand with them. 

What I Do When She Naps

NB: Please. I know how privileged my experience of Covid is. I'm not suffering here. I know my brothers and sisters are. I don't write here, though, in order to express a need for sympathy. I write in order to find this post again, perhaps on a snowy afternoon in February 2025, when my baby is four and a half years old and taking her afternoon nap, and we've come home from a church service. I'll read this and remember. 

Covid was simultaneous with my pregnancy and the birth of our daughter last fall. We had already decided that I would take a year off of teaching to be with Tess, and Jake already had a sweet deal where he worked from home four out of five days. When we look at our life changes, it's hard to see what changed because of having a child and what changed because of the pandemic. 

I miss smiling at strangers, going to church, meeting for coffee, going to restaurants, birthday parties, and any parties. In fact, church is its own category of things I miss: singing together, passing babies around, standing in the kitchen and giving hugs to anyone who happens to come in, seeing kids grow up, and hearing a sermon the whole way through, without lag and with an open mind because it's not just more content—it's someone's thoughts who I know, who feels real. All of that is strictly pandemic loss. 

How do I even begin to narrate the losses you experience when you have a child? Let me just say the hardest thing for me is the two together, the losses that result from having a baby during a pandemic: I can't share my baby. I can't sit in the church service while you walk around the back of the room with her, a long-held West End tradition if ever there was one.  

And you can't come over for coffee and give me a hug and tell me how sweet this stage is and to soak it up because it goes by so fast. I wish you could, because while you tell me that, you could hold her in your arms and smile at her and notice the birthmark at the nape of her neck. You'd see what wonderful, toothless smiles she will give back. You'd hold her in front of the mirror and laugh as she talks to herself, delighted to find another baby who she understands exactly. Because there aren't very many babies for her to hang with just now. 

When Tessa is taking one of her four naps a day, I get a few sets of 30-45 minutes to do things that require two hands. If I don't come at those time periods with a plan, it's very likely I'll mope about how many things I miss. She's napping right now. I'm moping right now.