Why having a pet is fantastic for your kids, even if you hate pets...
Ok, here I am, sitting next to my wife, and like every so often, she begins the sweet loving talk of... having a pet. | 110 DoW #26
Ok, here I am, sitting next to my wife, and like every so often, she begins the sweet loving talk of... having a pet.
A kitten, to be more precise.
"Let's get a kitten!" she says again.
Yes, kittens are cute, yes they are doodley fluffy balls, yes they make you all fuzzy inside, yes they even make this (sometimes grumpy) dude act like a child again.
But gawd, they shit and pee everywhere. Also, cat hair will be all over the place.
You see, I don't like taking care of animals. I mean, I enjoy interacting and playing with them, but not so much that I want to suffer the negatives of having an animal in the house.
"But the kids would love it! Pleaaase, just let’s get a kitten! Or two…”
And every time this happens, I'm like: "Nope." (Like Chuck Testa says it).
Now you may think, "Who is this Jibran, being all "Nope" about it? You should be "Dope" about it! Why would you keep your family from having such funzies in the house?! You even grew up with cats yourself?"
I must admit, I once said we would get a kitten when our youngest child would be one year old, but that was a while ago already. So I get that my wife asks for a kitten. The kids don't yet, though, so they're not missing out, right?
But there is another part of the story. Something between my wife, me, and a previous cat we (or I should say, she) had.
Poes (pronounced "poos”)
She had a cat; his name was "Poes," which means "Cat" in Dutch. Yes, very original...
My wife got Poes as a gift from a friend when she was a student (we didn't know each other then). I only found out about Poes after a few dates we had.
Poes had one minor problem, you see. He was deaf.
As a few of you may know, a deaf cat is unfortunate, to say the least. When cats don't hear anything—they typically have astounding hearing—they become a little… crazy.
And CRAZY Poes was. Oh, he was so insane!
He made the most f****d-up sounds you could imagine. The sounds Poes made seemed like a baby being in terror and pain. They were screeching and howling sounds when my wife wasn't in sight. Her even being in another room triggered this.
This behavior was even worse when my wife wasn't home; Poes would run from room to room, howling as if his life depended on it. It didn't matter if I was there in the house… I wasn’t “mother.”
Just going back to these memories makes my cortisol levels rise.
So, Poes didn't care that I was there. And at first, he even actively disliked me, which I can highlight through an interesting experience.
When my wife and I started dating, we did, you know, the sexy smexy things. Making good use of the bed, in that case, is essential.
But of cooooourse I hadn't thought about whose bed we were having fun on!
No, not my wife's (then girlfriend’s) property, oh no! The bed was like a totalitarian state owned by a dictator named Poes.
So it was no wonder that on multiple occasions, I got bitten on my foot while doing, you know, lovemaking.
Five years of love (of Poes for my wife) and hate (of me for Poes) went by before Poes died. After that, I could finally get a good night's sleep.
I did feel sorry for him, though. Poes didn't ask to be born deaf. And his terror howls—that he didn’t hear himself—were his only option for the fear he had of being abandoned.
So, maybe we'll get a cat after all—not a deaf one—and only when our kids can take care of it themselves.
I'll pour one for you, Poes. 🥃
Oh, I forgot
To answer the question of the title—why having a pet is fantastic for your kids, even if you hate pets—which I hooked you with but didn’t get into at all (sorry, not sorry 😉):
Kids learn what it feels like and what it means when something/someone they love dies...
Yeah, it doesn't sound great, but it is good to learn this early. And better to discover this for the first time with pets rather than people.
Note: I wrote this 3+ years ago. In the meantime, our kids got gerbils as pets, three of them, one for my wife and one for each of our kids. I didn’t get one, but am the one vacuuming all the sawdust these critters leave behind…
A little background
I found this story again accidentally, as I thought I had lost it! (I rewrote it a little bit, on a sentence level only, though.)
Some of you tagging along since the beginning of my writing may even recognize the story. If so, thank you for supporting and reading all that time! ❤️
As to how I found the story again:
Thank you for reading; I hope you enjoyed it!
Regards,
Jibran