Susan Senator

Last Thursday I discovered a litter of kittens in my shed.  They were golden-orange, just like the kitten Ned and I got when we were first married.  I called her “Kotyonok,” which means kitten in Russian, until we realized that her true name was Ballyhead, or Bally for short, because her head was shaped like a perfect ball (when you pushed her ears down).  Bally was a very wired cat, kind of crazy.

But when Nat came into our lives, Bally tried to bite him when he cried, and so we gave her to a shelter.  I was so sad about this that Ned went and got her back, but then I got scared for Nat again, and he took her back for the last time.  I asked him over and over if they would put her to death and he said “No.”  There’s a part of me that has always wondered if he lied to be kind, or if it was the truth, that Bally was adopted again and lived a nice life, crazy among some other humans.

The kittens in my shed felt like a second chance.  Karma.  I made a mistake with Bally Girl, and now, here were some new ball-headed kittens.I have become very attached to them.  But when we got back from a short Cape Cod vacation for Memorial Day weekend, the kittens and their mom were gone.  That night Max discovered them under our neighbor’s porch, and now the plan is to trap them with humane traps from the MSPCA and bring them in to be cleaned up, neutered, and vaccinated.  I want to keep them all, after they’ve been checked out, but unlike my Bally days, I’m now allergic to cats.  What does that mean, in terms of Karma, then?

I have been thinking more deeply about this, since the kiddenz showed up.  Something about them is tied to Nat in my mind.  Not just the fact that he was the reason I gave Bally away, but the way that he came into my life when I really needed to be needed.  That is exactly what I thought and wished to myself before getting pregnant:  I want a baby, because I really want someone to need me.

I got need up the wazoo with Natty.  But I want to make myself perfectly clear:  Nat was not sent to me because of my wish.  I do not believe that things happen For a Reason.  I don’t think the kittens came to me to give me a second chance with little orange cats.  I think that things happen all the time, but it is our own need that allows us to see them in a particular light.  I need some little orange kittens now, with my two older babies grown up and in the process of leaving to make their own lives as adults:  Nat is finishing school and moving to a nice home with roommates, and Max is going to college.  I need those kittens to fill the void that is opening in my heart.  But a different year, they would have been a curiosity, and I would probably have let Max deal with them.

It is more romantic, perhaps more satisfying to see the gifts in our lives as being Sent to us.  We want to feel important, unique.  We want to explain the singular occurrences in our lives, like autism and feral kiddenz.  But lately I feel that it is really just as good to merely be able to see something that is right there with us, and find that we are open to loving it and enjoying it.  Perhaps the gift is having the clarity to recognize a golden opportunity — or a golden kitty.