mom for a night

05-03-00

I have been a mother, and it sucketh.

I'm writing this Wednesday entry around 7 on Thursday morning, but it counts because Thursday hasn't happened yet, and also because I feel like I haven't slept since yesterday. John wants to kill me, but that doesn't have much to do with what day it is.

I actually wrote two entries yesterday. The first was the pissed off, my day sucked and I'm going to whine entry, excerpted here:

I came home, stripped off my yucky, cleanser-soaked scrubs and headed for the shower. On my way there I heard a wheezing sound from the kitchen. Julia choked and squeaked and hacked for the next five minutes while I stroked her, tried to feed her some hairball laxative, and frantically searched for the cordless phone. (Elusive fuckers, those cordless phones.) She coughed up some blood. Her vocal cords must be irritated, causing her to squeak pitifully instead of meowing.

Think that sucked? I almost quit my job in the morning. It's a good thing I didn't, because I had to take Julia to the vet in the afternoon. They wouldn't have appreciated me showing up with my cat half an hour after I walked out on them.

Anyway, I was depressed, spent the afternoon chasing Julia around the house with a towel (she just has a monster hairball,) and I decided to let Fleck write an entry for me. That one went like this:

the reason Mom cried is because she is very upset about Fat Cat getting sick today. Fat Cat went BLEH BLEH HAAAAAACCKK BLAAAAAHHH all over the kitchen floor and mom sat on the kitchen floor and went OH GOD JULIA PLEASE DO THAT ON THE TOWEL. then Mom took Fat Cat to the place that smells like Mom where they keep barking cats in cages and cut pieces off them when they sleep. Fat Cat still had all her pieces when they came home but she made white puddles all over the floor all day and kept going HAACCHHHAACCK BLEH.

So anyway, I thought the day would never get better, but also that it couldn't get worse. Huh. After I'd been to work twice, they called and asked a huge favor of me, and of course I never say no, do I? Remember those kittens from last week? Well, they stayed at my house last night. I can't say they slept at my house, for there was very little sleeping going on. Three 10-day-old kittens (Gray Spot didn't make it through the weekend) who live to eat, sleep, and shit, not in that order. And cry. They cry constantly unless they're sleeping.

They're not easy to feed, either. They never learned to suck before they were abandoned. Two of them seem to have learned how, but forgotten. Feeding them means I'm sitting there pinning them down with my thumb and finger while squirting stinky kitty formula into their mouths, squirt squirt, and watching them gum it around until the swallow reflex kicks in. Once in a while they catch on and start sucking, and suddenly they're darling.

John won't go near them. He's afraid of getting attached. How can you get attached to something that looks like a furry wet alien with a disproportionately large anus? I guess working at the vet has made me tougher. Becky came over to get attached, too, and she's insisting to me that I must make Three Spot better. That's the not cool thing--while these kittens are doing fine, they still may not live. They didn't have their mother's milk, so they may not have functioning immune systems. I'm saving them one day at a time.

In the meanwhile, they kept us up all night. Fed at midnight, they woke for breakfast around 4:30. Chirp chirp chirp, wailing from the bathtub, where I stashed them last night. I thought, god, let them go to sleep, maybe they'll go to sleep, I can feed them when my alarm goes off. They went back to sleep until 5:00, when they cried again. Off and on until 6, John and I slept and woke, until they went to sleep finally, and at 6:30 I thought, shit, they're DEAD. I killed them. They needed food and I killed them. So I got up and fed the [not dead] kittens and now I'm here wondering when I will ever sleep again. And whether my husband will stop hating my guts sometime in the near future.

Fleck hates my guts, too. It's a cat hospital around here—we have one cat puking up hairballs all over the house, three babies trying to climb out of the bathtub, and one very depressed baby cat. I broke my little boy's heart. The kittens are going back to the vet today, he has a friend who's taking them, and I hope my cats will forgive me. I have to stop doing this.

I got a break from cat shit and went to Becky's to play tennis with her, Anna, and John. We played for a while when this little kid, maybe seven, showed up and told us he's an awesome tennis player, but he doesn't have a racquet or a ball so he uses a trash can top with a baseball. We had a good time playing around with him and we even let him play for a while, using a real racquet and everything. When he asked us our names, Becky told him her name was Bill, and I was John, Anna was Bob, and John was Jacqueline. The kid immediately said, "I know a nickname for Jacqueline! Jackal!" John was not amused.

We had a blast, trying to remember one another's names for this kid's benefit, until one of his friends came up and the kid introduced us as "Miz Bill, Miz John, Miz Bob, and that's Jackal." Ay, the guilt. It was pretty sweet playing tennis with a ballkid, though. I think I'm spoiled.

Now if I could just squeeze in a shower, I'd be happy. Maybe when I get home from work today I'll have time, and my tub won't be full of squalling babies.

For a while I've been wondering if anyone I know has come across this journal. I know plenty of people who were told to read it, either by me or by someone else, but nobody has ever just stumbled over it, to my knowledge.

So I was checking out the Book of Rob's new forum, which is odd in itself, because I generally ignore the whole forum thing on other pages. But there I was, scrolling down through a bunch of identical postings, and I saw a familiar name flash by. There can't be two guys with that name? I thought. Well, fuck if it wasn't this guy I knew at MSU, with a link to his very own journal. How bizarre.