Cat Lessons

Funny what you can learn from a cat.

The orange kitten, Kody, has come home. Immediately my fat Malone and grouchy Max began a chorus of hisses and snarls that are the soundtrack as I compose this blog.
I didn’t expect to learn a major lesson and that not one word of it would be delivered by a human.

Kody is 3 pounds of adorable marmalade fluff. My old cats don’t think so, especially when he eats their vittles and constantly searches for play. Max has become a chew toy for Kody while Malone is hardly benevolent. She puffs up to the size of a rabid raccoon and growls in a chilling manner.

My old cats didn’t ask for a kitten for Christmas.

I became a reluctant referee. I swoop Kody up when the others come into sight. I plead with Malone. I chide Max. I even designated the second bedroom into Kody’s panic room. Harmony, after all, is the soup du jour. It’s what I’m good at.

So I think.

Epiphanies are born under strange circumstances, like this feline power struggle.
I don’t speak ‘cat’ very well but on Christmas Eve morning it clicked; this was how they communicate. How they salvage their space. How they devised their tenuous pecking orders. How the point gets across. All things I don’t do very well with humans and my vocal chords are more advanced.

The one thing I cannot accuse my cats of is hypocrisy. They stand by what their needs are. The cat tower top belongs to whoever is there at the moment. So is the foot of the bed and my grandmother’s patch quilt. And my poor old cats have never attacked Kody. Max and Malone make it quite clear when he needs to back off. It is he, in his kitten cuteness, that breaks the rules and wreaks havoc ]]]]]]]]]]]]\--sorry, that was him walking across the laptop.

Friends told me to let the cats be. Let them chisel out their pecking order. They don’t need my help. Hell, why would they want it? My whole life has been spent trying to avert confrontation. In some instances it means me sucking up something I don’t like.

It doesn’t work all the time.

I’m going to try and stop sugar- coating my problems. Speak up when something may not be right. Tell others when I need my space and remind them when they invade it. Because when I don’t, (and I often don’t) I ended up hating the person scarfing down my kibble.

Whether it be at home, at work or a ride on the metro link, I need to take the lesson my cats taught me to heart:

Say what you mean.
Mean what you say.
And chalk out those lines in the kitty litter.