We always had cats in the house when I was growing up, and something that puzzled me from the earliest fogs of childhood memory was having to peep from a distance into a quiet, dark room when the cat was giving birth, after finding the cat to have disappeared for a day or two. The first challenge was always finding the thing when everything started, but my mother always seemed to know, and she would be the one to determine the distance at which we could peep. She would dictate sometimes from the floor beside the wardrobe or the chest of drawers the cat had chosen to hide in or under, sometimes from the same door we were peeping in from. She always seemed to know when the cat wanted someone near, or wanted space.
This was the beginning of wonderment - my mother ran her and our lives with the cool managerial style born of skin-of-the-teeth survival necessity, and this led to rarely showing the animals undue affection. Who has time to coo over kitties when making two inventive dinners out of one can of mushroom soup, and working three jobs? The cats were never neglected, just never coddled. Coddling is for the children and animals of supported and unstressed caregivers. But my mother would always know when the cat’s time had come, and when to intrude and when to step back. All the normal pressures and essential tasks that dictated every day would magically fall away without fallout, and the kittens would come under my mother’s surprisingly calm eye. Every cat we had (of which there were a few) had short, successful labours with multiple kits and without medical intervention, and would appear downstairs from whatever lair they’d created a day or so later, bored of nursing and feeding next to the kittens and needing a break.
“But why does she run away?”, I would ask with as much confusion as a six-year-old can contain. In my mind, this is exactly the time you crawl into someone’s lap and mewl for assistance, try and get them to do the hard part for you, or at least make it better somehow. Answers never satisfied me - ‘cats just know what to do’, ‘it’s instinct’, ‘they prefer peace and quiet’. I didn’t get it. I wanted to see the kittens, and I wanted to understand how something that every living being, even humans at six years old, knows in their gut to be a brutal physical experience, was preferred to be endured alone.
Today, shifts of understanding have begun to move me, along with the heaving and straining of the baby trying to get comfortable within my hipbones. Last night T woke me by pulling at his forelock in his sleep, tearing his hair into split ends. A habit or reaction to stress, we debate regularly and fiercely, I hate it for it’s destructive ripping sound. The sound of someone I love’s distress. It doesn’t often wake me, though.
Last night was different. I needed water. I needed cool air. I needed to pee for the sixth time that night, and more than anything I needed to not be near anyone. Without even properly waking up, I saw to my more immediate base needs before instinct gripped the reigns even more firmly and led me directly to the other bedroom, and the other bed. I barely remember it and I definitely didn’t question it, and I fell instantly into the deepest sleep I’ve had in a long time whilst my poor abandoned husband slept on. The guilt didn’t come, however, not even in the next morning when I awoke and instead of getting up to start my day, I lay in bed for an hour doing nothing. I listened to T wash up and potter and talk happily to family, and didn’t obey the nagging feeling to get up and participate like a good sister-in-law. I just... rested. By myself, in the peace and quiet. And nothing bad happened. On the contrary, when I did eventually get upright and stumble to the bathroom, I was hugged with contented, unquestioning love and put in the shower without any fuss. After getting clean, I started to dry my hair, but that petered out into just sitting in a towel in the comfy chair gazing into space in the empty, silent room. Suddenly, coffee and honeyed toast appeared next to me, in the hands of a smiling husband. The elation of being fed and watered without any effort surpassed my wedding day. Even better, I was left in peace without comment to munch and sip through my quiet reverie whilst he watched baseball in the other room.
After putting a load of washing in the machine, I joined T on the sofa, drawn in by the fantastically bewitching Japanese adverts I’ve not seen in a while. When the latest weight-loss powder tea advert finished, I skimmed my parenting book. T shifted beside me. The dip of the sofa tipped me slightly. The children shouting outside grated. I didn’t like the light. Once again my feet moved without my input and I retreated without drama to the comfy chair in the other, empty room. I wanted to be by myself. My own time is coming.
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