cat sitting

A friend is out of town and I am taking care of her cat. It’s an easy kind of care. Today it took about 25 minutes of driving, round trip, and about 20 minutes out of the car. The cat’s old, more like an antique pillow than a companion it seems to me, so it’s low maintenance. This is the perfect dose of caregiving, I think. A short, easy bit of time, and it got me out of the house as a bonus.

My oldest daughter came along. I felt grateful for her company - I love her of course and like to spend time with her - and just for any company at all. I asked her about the book she’s reading. It’s something I’ve not read, some kind of magic library or something. I listened but didn’t retain. Her voice turned down the volume on my internal monologue - internal chorus, really - which is especially welcome in the dark and when few other people are around, as it can get pretty… well, not pretty.

We held hands and walked across the parking lot and I made sure not to let on that I was scanning the area repeatedly - I’m told it’s called hypervigilance; it comes on in the night time a lot - as I don’t want to transmit this to her. On the way up I kept asking about books. In my friend’s apartment, my daughter petted the cat and fed it - her request, she thought it’d make the cat like her more - and talked nicely to it. I mostly looked at my friend’s bookshelves, sorting them into books I’m impressed by, books I’m intimidated by, books I read and was bored by, books I’m sure I would be bored by if I did read them, books I judge in a snobby way, and books I love and hope my friend loves too. I began to imagine various conversations with my friend about these books - I say “I began to imagine” but it felt more like a thing that happened to me than a thing I did; if I get a foot cramp it is, in a sense, something I am doing since my foot is part of me after all but really it is a matter of that part going rogue and inflicting itself on the rest; these imagined conversations were a similar rogue affliction. What if my friend loves the book I snobbishly look down, or looks down on the book I love? There are so many ways for conversation to misfire, so many wet floors and folded rugs over which to trip and fall when grasping to connect. My mind sketched a few via the writing prompts offered by my friend’s book collection while my daughter tried to get the cat interested in being petted. What she achieved was “well, she’s tolerating me petting her, I mean she’s not purring but her ears aren’t back either.”

Cat given fresh food, a new bowl of water, and human contact to rebuff, I showed my daughter around the not much more than one room apartment, encouraging her to imagine living in it. I told her about the many apartments her mother and I rented before she was born when we moved into a house. She told me she plans to move into an apartment after a few months - I laughed, “a few months after you turn ten this summer?” and she looked offended, “no, I mean years from now, a few months after I’m a grown up” - and that later she might move into a house in another city when she finds one she wants to live in. I told her about how I moved out at 18 and never moved back in, how her mother moved out later and did move back in briefly, said she can live with us as long as she wants to and can move out as soon as she’s ready to; “you get to choose when the time comes, and we’re on your side.”

I started that conversation on purpose. I wanted her to imagine options; I never felt I had any. And she did imagine options, and spoke confidently about them. This goes on the list with her riding her bike around the corner. She was very afraid when she started riding and I tried to be encouraging and comforting, and soon she was confidently riding out of sight before I was emotionally prepared. It takes work not to jump to all the disaster scenarios that could play out once she’s out of sight, and to keep those to myself. I can imagine getting myself an old lap cat once I am an empty nester, to have somewhere to put the caregiving urges and to dial down all the worries about what my kids are up to in their houses in other cities.