My wife thinks I'm crazy for talking to my cats but what am I supposed to do when they ask me stuff -- ignore them?
Cutie decided that she had to be on my desk. Although it's full of wires cords, and stuff, she plopped down. She looked so uncomfortable that I got a towel for her to lay on. Cutie is hard to take pictures of because she's black, but there really is a very old cat lying down between the two monitors, behind the fake cat. Okay. She turned around, so you can at least see her head in this one.
Today, I was sitting on the couch using my MacBook rather than my iMac in my office, and Ella was on the back of the couch. She started licking my hair, as if she was grooming me. When she and Cutie go through the mutual cleaning ritual, it nearly always ends up in a fight so I don't know if she was being nice to me or trying to pick a fight. By the way, this often turns into a fight when cats do it because the act of grooming another cat is something that a mother cat might do, so it is viewed as a sign of superiority, while being groomed is the subservient position, so when one alpha cat grooms another alpha cat, it often turns into a fight.
I just remembered an episode with Cutie and Lydia's mother, who was named Baby Girl, who had several litters of kittens in her life, all of which were beautiful and whom I had no trouble finding home for. Cutie and Lydia were from her last healthy litter. She did have one after that, when she was about thirteen years old, but only one was born alive. That's not the story, though. Baby Girl lived to be twenty-four years old, when she got a fast-growing cancer in her mouth, but she suffered from what might have been feline senility for her last few years. She didn't seem to suffer from it, and both Cutie and Lydia were great daughters, particularly Lydia, who just doted on her mother. They both treated their mom with the respect that a mother would like to have from her children, and I was pretty happy with that. One day when Cutie was at least six years old, and well into her adulthood, Baby Girl seemed to have forgotten that her daughters were adults, and got it into her head that she needed to carry Cutie somewhere. She grabbed Cutie by the nape of the neck, as a mother cat does with her kittens. Since she was about the same size as her mother, she couldn't pick her up, so she tried dragging her away. The look that Cutie had on her face was indescribable. It was like she realized that her mom was out of her mind but, at the same time, she didn't want to be disrespectful. So she kind of moved along with her mom, as she dragged her into a back bedroom. Later, they were both lying together there, with Baby Girl grooming her daughter. It was kind of sad, but kind of funny at the same time. If Cutie hadn't been cooperative, it probably would have just been sad. Instead, Cutie let her be the mom. Baby Girl wasn't that bright when she was younger, though. She was very attentive however. When one of her kittens meowed, she would come running. When her kittens were actually still kittens, she had chosen a place under the bathroom sink, so I put a box in there for them. One day, I had taken the box into the living room, and was petting the kittens. Baby Girl was upset with me because the kittens were supposed to be under the bathroom sink. One of them meowed. Then, although Baby Girl was right there, inches away from the kitten who had meowed, she responded to the call by running into the bathroom, where they would ordinarily be, but weren't.
I've never seen or heard of a cat grooming a person @Ken Anderson. You definitely must have part "cat" in you somewhere. I did not like cats in the past because they seemed so independent and haughty...or completely crazy. My oldest granddaughter loved animals and she had at least 3 young cats who would suddenly spring up and run around their house like they had lost their minds! The rest of the cats I have known just pretty much ignored everyone and if they did look at you they always had their "nose up in the air". The only thing I thought was okay about them was the fact that they did groom theirselves. Then a few years before my Mom died, she found a tiny newborn kitten soaked from the rain in her front yard. I had never known my Mom to like pets much less decide to have one. But that newborn kitten was a "baby" to her and he had no "moma"....so my Mom became his. And for the rest of my life I will always remember the special bond between my Mom and Smokey. They loved each other and I think they needed each other too. This cat behaved like a human being with my Mom and it was seeing their relationship that made me change the view I once held about cats. Thank you for sharing about yours...your stories always make me smile and bring back cherished memories of Moma and her Smokey.
Cats don't tend to impress people who don't have one. Many of them will relate only to those few people who they know and like, and for a lot of cats that's only one person. When I'm not home, my wife tells me that Cutie and Lydia ignore her completely. Ella, on the other hand, is her cat -- although she likes me well enough too. Cats who aren't shy around strangers tend to annoy them.
When my Mom died I was at her home for a few weeks taking care of things she left behind and Smokey would come and wrap himself around my legs and purr....so somehow he knew Moma was part of me too.
I got home before ten this morning, after being away a week, and Cuties has just now, eight hours later, got over being angry with me, and made me spend a half hour petting her. Now that she's deaf, she insists that I look at her while petting her. I used to be able to talk to her while I petted her but now she wants to see that I'm looking at her and not at the television or the computer. I knew she was happy I was home because I could hear her purring from across the room, but she always get mad at me when I go away. Sometimes she hisses at me when I get home but she didn't do that today. When she decides it's time for her to have attention, she just climbs on up and I have to stop whatever I'm doing.
The first time she did this, I posted about hanging out on the couch with Lydia in this post. Since then, she's done that a few times. I have been on the couch with her for several hours now, since this morning. Fortunately, I have my MacBook with me so I am still online. She is 27 years old and sick, and I have spent more time alone with her in the past month than in the first twenty-six years, since she hasn't been the most sociable cat in the world. The best thing is that she ate a whole lot of real chicken that I cooked for her this morning, and she hasn't thrown it up yet, so that should help put some weight back on her. Otherwise, she is curled up next to me. She starts purring whenever I put my hand on her, even before I begin petting her. She hissed at her sister a few hours ago when Cutie decided she wanted to be up here too, making it clear that this was her time. Cutie sleeps with me most every night so I don't feel bad about it. It is hard for me to work from the couch though, so I haven't gotten much done as far as my job goes, but that's okay. I have a whole week to put thirty hours in.
It's sounds like you are her "security blanket" @Ken Anderson and she's needing that security in this season of her life. I know you will be there for her...just as she has been there for you.
Just a moment ago, without even touching her, as she was curled up with her eyes closed, I said, "I love you," and she started purring.
Of course, I'll remember many of her pain-in-the-ass moments too since she put a lot of work into being a pain in the ass over most of her life, so it would be a shame to forget... that she once spent a full week sleeping under the neighbor's boat, probably knowing that I didn't yet know my neighbor well enough to cross over into his yard; or that she moved into an empty trailer next door to the one we were living in temporarily, claiming it as her own, ignoring that fact that I had been walking all over the place calling for her; or that she would routinely ignore me when I called for her; or that she crapped in my wife's shoes, and then in her purse, during the first week that we were married, and that was just the beginning of a long campaign to put an end to that marriage. She put a lot of work into some of this stuff so it would be a shame to forget it. I have been married for seventeen years now and, although she has quit crapping on her stuff, she still doesn't like my wife.