Becoming a Stray
We have a new visitor. I know for sure he visits every afternoon around four pm, but I think he sneaks in likely several times a day. It's a cat with markings very close to those of Stinky above, another tuxedo cat. A stray, a very nervous stray that I see daily coming up over the wall, walking down the sidewalk bold as brass before sneaking though Stinky's cat door.
This new cat comes to eat the leftover dry and wet cat food. We've tried to keep an eye out, see if we can tempt him with treats, but so far he's been a little black and white ghost. Swift, careful to keep a low profile and utterly silent. Today when he walked up I was sitting in my rocker quilting, saw him look through the cat door, realize I was there and walk off. Later when Jim napped and I lay in bed reading he apparently did come and raid the food.
Stinky doesn't try to fight with him, and seems perfectly fine with this small stray sneaking in. The stray does not seem to be nearly as skittish as most I've seen. I have to conclude that perhaps at one point he wasn't a stray, but someone's pet. No matter, we're talking about trying to lure him into staying. It's going to be hard to tame him, but not impossible.
Which makes me think about strays, human and animal. Several days ago I was talking to my friend Cindy, and finding myself getting sadder by the minute. Something about the conversation brought back a flood of buried memories for me of my parent's divorce.
I found myself describing to Cindy what I'd lost when my parents divorced, and I became that throw away kid that mom only comes around every couple of weeks to give food money. The girl with no bedtime, curfew, or oversight. The stray. Alone and lonely.
Here it is, forty six years after my parent's divorce and I am realizing for the first time how incredibly hard the divorce was on me because of all the things I had to give up. Some of it seems trite now, like the big house with the tennis court a block from the country club. Country club membership, meaning I could not skip down the street to spend the day in the pool charging cokes and hot dogs to my father's account. My horse was no longer near enough for me to ride every single day, in fact my father got rid of my horse, sold him. Leaving our neighborhood, my Catholic school and everything else was traumatic. I lost my friends. That loss was almost the worst.
I was essentially uprooted from everything I'd known by the time I was thirteen and abandoned. My family could not figure out how I'd fallen so hard for my abusive ex, unable to see that relationship happened because I'd been abandoned.
Divorce is an ugly reality, but it does not have to be. I am thankful that now there seems to be better awareness of the issues kids can have when parents divorce, and that now leaving your kid for weeks on end alone in an apartment would mean you lost the child to CPS. Things needed to change. There shouldn't be either stray kids or animals out there.
I've had to forgive my mother and my father many times over now for being cast aside in the wreckage of their arranged marriage. It's too toxic to carry that rage around. So I was surprised that the grief was still there, that this was undealt with. I have some thinking and reflection to do obviously. Well, we cannot do much do much in this time.
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