Probably not the best night to split more than a single bottle of wine between two people. Really, it wasn't. I'm supposed to go meet with mortgage bankers tomorrow morning. I am going to regret every sip tomorrow as I drive in the morning sun.
I've been pondering when to have a cat-based blog post again. Like an entire night devoted to nothing but cats. Maybe a night when the red wine is in control is the best time to wax poetic about the little fuzzy ones. I'm happy to notice a sea change with Athena, and it makes me wonder whether I should have watched more carefully at the timing with the other kids. I remember someone telling me, right around the time that Elsa joined the family as a not-quite-puppy, not-quite-adult-dog, that for the first two years, labs are horrible animals, but somewhere around their second birthdays, they suddenly mature and become great family dogs. Elsa needed to make it closer to her third birthday, but eventually she did calm down a lot (and stop chewing everything frantically) and became pretty cool, albeit still an insatiable eater. I have seen this gradual maturation in a lot of my cats too. Most of them, especially the males, seem to be little poopyheads for the first couple years of their lives. The adults who have to live with them do so very reluctantly, with much protest. A few cats have had more trouble with this transition than others. Torden, the little old man we lost in the summer of 2014, had the added difficulty of a TBI (a ladder fell on his head when he was a young kitten) making him act like a little shit, in between episodes of grand mal seizures. But by the time he was around three years old, things changed. He found himself an only cat after the death of my first cat Berkeley (first since I left home and went to college), and the seizures started happening with increasing frequency. I adopted three kittens all at once, the famous GKs (Godzilla's Kittens), and when Torden got to be Uncle Poo to the kids, his seizures all but stopped and he grew up all of a sudden. He became everyone's favorite cat. One of the GKs was a little feral tabby boy named Rio. He was the absolute worst as a baby, most likely the reason the three little terrors earned the label as the destructive beasts that Godzilla would have kept as pets if he had been (a) real and (b) a pet parent. He took serious, concerted effort, and constant reminders not to give up on him. He was so mean and so intentionally naughty that it would have been easy to turn away from him. But right on time, he turned into a sweet, cuddly boy, and even now, my daughter lives with him and gives him all the loving he came to expect during those high maintenance years.
Now it's Athena's turn. She is easily the most bi-polar cat I have ever met. For two full years, we did not spend a single day together when she did not bite me at least once, usually many, many more times. Every day, while we were having a perfectly pleasant conversation, she would reach out and snag me with those sharp needles on the ends of her floofy paws (trying to clip her claws is a certain death sentence), and bite me over and over, just to the point of breaking the skin, but not digging deeply into the tissue of my hand. And it was always my hands she bit. She was awful to the other cats, stalking, ambushing, and generally being horrible to everyone. She still wanted my attention, and would come out of nowhere to stand on my collarbone, purring and begging for affection. But snuggling with Athena was like being on a Japanese game show. Fun for a few minutes, but you knew that any second someone was gonna get hurt. I called that game show "Happy Kitten Snuggle Time," and just tried to minimize the damage that she did when she flipped the switch and got mean. But I refused to give up on her. Just like Rio, I gave her as much space as I could to be herself, and to accept her on her own terms. I praised her for being exciting and interesting, as much as for being cute and sweet (when she wanted to be). She's now just a few months away from her third birthday, and the same miracle is happening to her. Happy Kitten Snuggle Time is happening a lot more often, and in the last two weeks, everything has suddenly stopped ending in Band-Aid moments. We might be coming out of the most dangerous era of her development. Some relationships are extra work, but the payoffs can be extra sweet because of all that effort. Athena may end up being one of my biggest success stories. Boy, is she worth it.
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