Our family is the proud owner of a 6-month-old chaos goblin.
He claws carpets, snacks on our holiday decorations, and treats me like a couch. He is — in a word — a kitten.
My son selected him from the local humane society where we volunteer. He spent weeks assessing each new admission for chemistry. His words: he was looking for a “click.”
Then a batch of kittens with seal-point coloring arrived and my son “clicked” with the litter’s goofball. He named him Smudge, because the cat’s face looked like a toasted marshmallow.
The aggravation began immediately.
Within hours of arrival, he’d ascended to the top of our cabinets and knocked a stack of laundry into his litter while doing it. Smudge screamed for rescue. When we got him down, he immediately climbed back up.
He also slashed our screen doors. The only way to dissuade him was to cover the screens in aluminum foil. Now it looks like we’re trying to stop the aliens from reading our patio’s mind.
Now, I have a pretty high tolerance for nonsense. I can handle a double shot of bedlam. (In this case, the double shot refers to my son and daughter.) But I underestimated how much pandemonium a 4-pound kitten could wreak.
For example, Smudge is a nipper. And he’ll wait for the worst possible moment to do it. You ever tried to meditate with a cat gnawing on your big toe?
The sensation is the opposite of transcendental.
But Smudge is a valuable object lesson for my kids. For example, he is teaching them:
- That love and annoyance aren’t mutually exclusive. You can love somebody very much, but also still be mad at them.
- The frustration of being woken up at 2 a.m. …just because…
But Smudge saved his most important lesson for the morning he disappeared.
It started with curiosity. “Hey, have you seen Smudge?”
But it graduated to annoyance. “Where’s he hiding this time?”
And eventually blossomed into anxiety. “You don’t think he ran away, do you?”
Spoiler: He didn’t run away. But it took the whole morning (and a can of wet food) to find him. Sneaky Smudge slipped into a storage closet and fell asleep.
While the scare was modest, my children appreciated Smudge more afterward.
And this was Smudge’s (unintentional) lesson: As caretakers, we know that our loved ones can be regular little smudges, but the thought of being without them is unbearable.
Ultimately we don’t love our pets — or kids — because they make our lives easier. (Ha!) More often, we love them despite the work they create.
But what matters isn’t the work, or the annoyance…or even the tiny slashes in our upholstery.
It’s the love.
(But, seriously, Smudge needs to leave me alone while I’m meditating.)
