Body Dysmorphia, or, Sometimes a Cat Is Just a Cat

Minutes before the clock struck midnight to ring in the year 2019, I discovered that I was a terrible person.  I did an awful thing.  

I almost killed both my cats.  Or, to shift the blame a little, I almost let one cat kill herself and take the other one down with her.  And if we're being fully transparent in this judgment free zone, I already knew I was trouble, but this put my failings as a caregiver specifically and a moral human in general into stark relief.

What had happened was, whenever we go out of town, we leave the cats by themselves.  They have proven themselves to be responsible latch-key cats over the years, so we figured we could leave them some emergency money for pizza and call it good.  Charlie, on the other hand, is needy and has to stay at a farm or with his human aunt and uncle, who love him more than we do but only in small doses.   

Anyway, when we travel, we put out an extra litter box, top off the robo-feeder and the gravity-fed water bowl, and those dudes are solid for about two weeks.  It’s never been a problem and they kind of hate us, so leaving them alone for a week is a gift to them.  The bathroom smells like a porta-potty at Bonnaroo when we get back, but otherwise everything is fine.  

But not this last time.  

We went to Spain and spent nine blissful days pretending we were Canadian when anyone asked, "¿de donde eres?"  After such a lengthy absence, we fully expected to be hit in the face with the hot breath of cat anus.  Instead, we found a suspiciously clean, quiet apartment. 

No cat hair tumbleweeds rolling through the ghost town.  Little evidence that the litter box had been used.  No Hadley chirping and trotting out to greet us like a puppy starved for attention.

Had the cats been raptured on Christmas?  We always thought they were non-practicing Jews but you never know.

We began cautiously inspecting their usual hiding places, peeking under the couch and inspecting the comforter on the bed for lumps.  No sign of the cats.  That's when I turned around and looked through the bathroom to the closed closet door. The closet door that we habitually left open because Ajax liked to nap in Andy's laundry basket during the day.

That instant of realization was sickening.  Fuck Schrodinger, ok?  Fuck that guy because he left something out of his thought experiment.  He left out the possibility that if the cat was still alive in that box, the box was undoubtedly ruined forever with unspeakable amounts of urine and feces.

When I opened the closet door, the cats just blinked at us in astonishment, like the Chilean miners experiencing daylight for the first time in 69 days.  I couldn't believe they were alive and for a moment I felt a warm wave of relief wash over me as both cats staggered past me in search of food and water.

Then I was hit with a gut punch of ammonia and destruction.  The lower portion of the closet was destroyed.  The carpet in front of the door was shredded, fur everywhere.  Shoes and laundry baskets were peed in and peed on.  It took at least 72 hours, 2 bottles of cleaning chemicals, an entire box of baking soda, a whole bottle of white vinegar, and roughly 30 puppy pee pads to restore some semblance of order and odor control.   

We will never be able to reconstruct with total accuracy the events that led to the cats' R. Kelly-style entrapment.  However, given Hadley's history fucking with doors, she is the prime suspect.  We also don't know precisely how long they spent languishing in darkness, casually starving to death while Andy and I ate and drank our way through Madrid, blissfully unaware of their suffering.  We assume, based on a fecal census of the litter box, that they spent no more than the first 4 days of our trip liberated, and spent at least the last 5 days trapped.   

Both cats lost an alarming amount of weight.  Ajax was always a husky guy, tipping the scales around 18 pounds.  He looked like a pitiful husk of his former self, but we were glad he had the extra poundage to spare and hoped he would maybe remain somewhat svelte.  Surprisingly, his starvation diet seemed to inspire a lifestyle change.  He's a biggest loser success story.

Hadley was always petite.  She was a mere 9 pounds before the incident, and weighed only 7 the day she was liberated.  At first, I was a little jealous.  Girl, what's your secret?  Intermittent fasting?  I don't think you can call 5 days an interval, but you do you.  However, there's a curious thing that happens to some survivors of famine.  They start gorging themselves on food whenever it's available.  They go full Scarlett O'Hara at the end of Gone With the Wind and declare, "As God is my witness, I will never go hungry again!"  

Hadley has ballooned from 7 up to a garish 14 pounds.  I honestly think she carries it well, but she does look rather spherical from certain angles.  Andy, however, likes to body shame her.  I wince each time he calls her a fat whale.  I feel like he's calling me a fat whale.  That's irrational, right?  

I thought I was alone in this misguided feline transference of emotion.  I thought maybe my empathy for Hadley was stemming from guilt about not doing a better job of keeping the cats safe from harm.  Why didn't I just arrange for someone to check on them a time or two?  I blamed myself for the whole mishap, and by extension, for her subsequent weight gain.  

Then, yesterday, I was listening to Marc Maron's WTF podcast, episode 1053 with Danny Huston.  In the intro, he talks about his concern for his oldest cat's recent weight loss, even though it's always been a source of pride for him to have relatively thin cats.  He posits that he is projecting his own body dysmorphia and obsession with thinness onto his cats.

THAT'S IT!

That's.  It.  The only other time I feel so deeply seen by a stranger is when I pass through the full body scanner at the airport.

I'm not actually an empathetic person.  I'm not actually that wracked with guilt.  This is complete and utter self-absorption (see also: this entire blog).  It's all about me and my own insecurities.  I'm afraid of being unlovable.  I'm afraid of being the object of mockery.  I'm the one who is jealous of the cat that gleefully lumbers off to stuff her face every time the robot feeder lets down a bowl full of nuggets (honestly I'm jealous of anyone who has food placed in front of them at predictable intervals without any effort on their part).

I'm not one to write gushing fan mail to my favorite celebrities (not after I wrote to JTT in 1994 and that SOB never wrote back).  This was just too much, though.  I had to at least let Marc know how much I appreciated the free psychoanalysis.  He's a busy dude who surely receives more emails than he can possibly read or respond to, but I hope that one gets through.