THAT’S MESSED UP

Cat Roulette

When Your Mom is a Pathological Pet Owner

My mother is a serial pet monogamist.

I swear on my favorite childhood pet’s grave (RIP Woody, the affable and fat orange tabby of ‘85-’95) that, post-divorce, Mom has had somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 cats over the span of twenty-odd years. One or two at a time.

That’s a whole lotta cats.

Okay, so maybe 30 is an exaggeration.

The perverse part isn’t her feline fondness. Hell, even though over the years I have developed allergies to the tune of Will Smith’s face in Hitch, I used to fantasize about a Millions of Cats scenario.

I totally would’ve scooped up every kitty-cat in sight — ability to feed, house, or physically tolerate them be damned. Everyfuckingbody can relate to that.

It is the bare fact that she keeps killing them!

Lest you think I am joking, I spent my teens to early twenties wondering how in the hell is my mother not on some sort of pet-adoption blacklist? I wonder it still.

Animal shelters are not flush with cash or tech, but there has got to be some kind of database for this f*ckery. Sure, the mysteries of the universe are not mine to understand. But I suspect the apathy has something to do with the fact that there are WAY too many domestic cats out there killing the wild birds of the world, which turns into a pretty big species-diversity problem.

We also collectively euthanize far too many innocent, healthy pets. A lack of ecological balance may be our destiny as red blooded, cat-loving Americans. But seriously! A future of only cockroaches kinda pales in comparison to the bleak enormity of letting people like Mom continue to blow through cute animals.

She euthanizes cats like it’s going out of style. Barfs on the carpet a few too many times? Euthanize. Pees on her dirty laundry (which, due to her being a nurse, smells like cooter and ass anyway)? Dr. Catvorkian’s a-comin’ to town. She needs a new one then and nihilistically pops by an animal shelter — never the same shelter twice. Like some of the drug-seeking patients in the ER, she is the worst kind of “frequent flier.”

My husband doesn’t believe me.

“That’s more than one cat per year!” He protests. Yah. It is. Maybe 30 is a high estimate, but it’s definitely been at least twelve. And it’s plausible — probable, even, that she gave some of them away. Fancy, the long-haired gray tortoiseshell she let me keep when our calico had babies, wouldn’t come out from under the bed often enough. She went into the recycle bin of pets and was gifted to our interior decorator.

At least she wasn’t one of the disposable ones.

I’ll be the first to admit it: some of these pets were more “remarkable” than others. But that doesn’t excuse what happened.

One time Mom picked up a pretty Norwegian Forest Cat — a highly collectible breed — who had a bad case of giardiasis from its life on the streets. Kisa Marie Presley had a middle name, for fu*ck’s sake.

She wanted to kill that one too. But the vet volunteered to adopt it herself, not wanting to waste a perfectly good status symbol.

Some of my cynicism around this issue may come from the way my allergies took on a life of their own in my adolescence, while Mom kept right on acquiring.

My dad had very few pets, mercifully, as he was the kind of owner who would have played the “cat bagpipes” with them and actually — no shit — set our hamsters free in the backyard when they grew tiresome.

So at Dad’s (primary-custodial) house we had a home free of pet dander. Then, when I would make a visit to Mom’s every few weeks or whatever, I’d be breathing in a cat-infested apartment again. For us non-allergists, this is called sensitization; you can eventually get more and more sensitive to certain allergens over the years.

Contrast this inane scene to that of my friend and former neighbor, who tragically lost his wife to cancer and was left with their four devastated kids. This had just happened when their hamster (when it rains it pours) also got cancer and he very responsibly brought it to a vet to have it put down.

“We’re not going to discuss end-of-life scenarios,” scorned the veterinarian, at a man who was absolutely haggard from nursing his terminally ill wife for the previous year.

Nobody wants his loved ones (even a hamster) to suffer a drawn-out death, and that is precisely what the real Dr. Kevorkian was getting at. I guess some vets aren’t down with hastening a compassionate, quick end to everyone’s suffering. But my mom took an incredibly broad interpretation to it.

My husband and I got our kids a “guilt” kitten for Christmas after having had a hellish year. I wash my hands and face every time she looks at me and she does NOT rub her asshole on my pillow or whatever those cats at my mom’s used to do. Holly the Christmas Kitten is (hopefully) here to stay.

Unless somebody gets to her first.

Join Laurel B. Miller on Medium, subscribe, and follow Sweary Mommy for more biting condemnations of Dr. Cat-vorkian.