a kitten is born

Tonight, while we fed corn and cucumbers and green noodles to our reluctant children and their sweet friend Nicky Noo, a kitten was born in the depths of a weathered LL Bean canvas tote bag, half-filled with diapers, raincoats, decaying snack bars, and a dusty water bottle.

From nowhere, a kitten emerged last night to yowl and claw and pound at our windows, begging to be loved and let in. Our real cat, orange Waylon, had to be restrained and cajoled and distracted with mice so that her subsequent yowls would not wake our sleeping children. Blase and I took turns carrying the kitten outside the fence and depositing it in the driveway in hopes that it would disappear to some happy reality elsewhere.

The next morning, the kitten continued to rush the door. When it was time to leave the house, she jumped into the car. I carried her 20 yards away from the car and then sprinted back to drive away before she could outrun me. She outran me anyway and jumped on top of the car. When we got home, she was trying desperately to climb into the house thru the dryer vent. Seemingly exhausted, she settled for curling up in our tote bag, leaning against the front door.

It was there that the kitten gave birth to a kitten. Of course, when we realized that she was a homeless underage mother, we moved the canvas bag containing her and her strangely small litter of one into our guest room. Within an hour, she had moved her baby into an open dresser drawer to hide amongst inherited family silverware.

She seemed to be wildly disinterested in the baby whenever we would tiptoe into the room. As a lactating mother, I began to worry about their breastfeeding trajectory. The kitten clearly wanted to nurse with its blind, high-pitched searching squeak-meow and clumsy big pawed groping. The mama cat, just a kitten herself, seemed aloof. I inappropriately intervened and repeatedly put the baby to the mama’s ample supply of nipples in hopes that this amateurish lactation consultation would allow the baby to latch on get fed.

I had forgotten how small kittens are… I never see them anymore since spaying and neutering became all the rage (hallelujah). When I was a little girl, a wild cat that we knew only as a feral blur in our forest suddenly appeared in my room in the middle of a balmy summer night. She pushed through my ajar second story bedroom window and made a ruckus in my closet. When I crept in my nightgown to spy on her, I found her with three bloody and furry little animals on my sweater pile. Horrified, I yelled, “mom, dad come quick!!!! That wild cat is in my closet and she’s eating baby mice!!”. Groggily they came and corrected me, “jenny, those are kittens.” I lived with that cat until she was 23 and I was 29. She even went with me to college.

Shark Trauma

One more trip down. This time, I decided to challenge myself by going to Washington State solo with the kids while nursing a stress fracture in my foot and a herniated disc in my neck. Despite a brief but tasteless pain-induced meltdown in the security line at the Arcata airport (my meltdown, the kids were very well behaved), our flight to Seattle was largely uneventful. I guess uneventful is always what you want airt ravel to be, whether you are traveling with kids or withoWhen I was a kid, we raised angora rabbits and, for a couple of years, we often took bunnies on the plane with us to transport to various relatives on the east coast. Flying with angora rabbits is infinitely less eventful than flying with two children under the age of 4.

Manama, Poppy, and I took the kids out on the boat to do a little fishing. Ossian was very excited. Nola slept through most of it on my back. Within 5 minutes of putting our lines in the water, Ossian and Manama had bites and struggled together to bring in a glaring dogfish. Somewhere along the way, Ossian heard someone stupidly say that dogfish were small sharks. This changed her enthusiasm to anxiety and concern. She was wearing an enormous shark-tooth necklace we’d gotten her at the farmer’s market just the day before. Shark teeth, she noticed, were big and sharp and could probably bite pretty hard. Her trepidation was met with cascading grown-up reassurance…”oh, they aren’t like real sharks, sweetie. They don’t even have teeth” and…” they just suck on their food“… and “ they are really, really gentle animals“.. and “they are shy and just want to go back in the water“.. and “they don’t hurt people“. Her face relaxed and she seemed to resume her comfortable interest in the animal. As I removed the hook from the first dogfish’s stoic mouth, I was painfully reminded of the poisonous barb on their dorsal fin as it punctured my skin and sent blood dripping down my arm. Ossian began crying. We again coaxed her with our lies. “Oh, mommy is ok,” gurgled grandma…”I just got poked by the fishing pole, how silly!“…”look at how gentle this guy is”….”why don’t you pet him softly to see how his skin feels before we put him back in the water“.. and on and on. We just dug ourselves deeper and deeper until she finally calmed down again and momentarily touched his gritty head with her soft little finger and then recoiled before saying goodbye dogfish as I sent it back into the water.

The brief period of calm was quickly interrupted my a grumpy tug on my line… I reeled in another bucking dogfish, this one bigger than the last. Ossian was reluctant to look at it and could not be coaxed into interest this time. I removed the hook with my still bleeding arm and tossed it back as Manama’s line s with the hit of dogfish number 3. She pulled up another mini-shark, still larger than the last and de-hooked it before tossing it back to the deep blue sea. Ossian was catatonic in her little strappy life jacket at this point. If we could have stopped we would have but two more came on faster than we could change activities and we bossed the junior sharks aboard. I worked to free number four while jiggling sleeping Nola on my back as Ossian’s wide eyes filled with tears. Manama simultaneously wrestled Poppy’s culprit on the bow and suddenly yelped, “AHHHHHH, it BIT me!” Lots of people started moving quickly to find absorbent things to soak up the surprisingly large volume of blood squishing from grandma’s wound. Manama, true to her reputation, neither slowed nor stopped her work with the shark despite her husband’s grey faced attempts to bandage her bloody finger.

Ossian was shrieking now and Nola was seeking the comfort of a boob in response to the loud screaming that woke her up. I hugged Ossian close in my herring scale and blood spackled arms as Nola squirmed to get glimpse of the action on the bow. Manama ultimately won the battle by retrieving her hook from the gullet of that poor “dogfish”. She gleefully joined us in the cockpit with finger wrapped in gauze. My traumatized and betrayed 3.5 year old was beyond platitudes and grown-up minimizing. We were liars and shark seeking crazy women and she needed safety. To the cabin she went with her Dora backpack full of colorful books. Manama wrapped her in the same bally plaid blanket that she used to wrap the little girl me in when I would wake up sea sick on stormy ocean crossings. It was my barf blanket as a child and it brought nostalgic tears to my eyes to see my little monkey wrapped in it on my mother’s lap. They read and read and read and read until the sharks were far from her mind.

Manama refused to look beneath the bandage to check on her mini-shark bitten finger until the kids were asleep. She did not want to upset Ossian. As soon as they were asleep, she confessed that it was still bleeding after 9 hours. That’s our Manama… raised on the “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” mantra, she can completely deny pain and suffering for untested lengths of time.

Now, we are home. Ossian and I had a little date and she asked if we could get a toy shark. So we did.. she swims with her little shark in her festive kiddie pool and talks about being a fisher woman. I owe a big deposit to the “future therapy for our kids due to the damage we’ve done fund” for her after the shark trauma incident.

Pre-shark

budding shark concern

recovering from shark trauma

post sharks

poorly photographed shark bite

poorly photographed puncture wound from poisonous dorsal spine