pyewacketsworld

Part 1

This is what my one friend from California says to me just about every time I talk to her on the phone, to the point I want to strangle her. But then when I sit back and think about, I think to myself, you know, she’s right?

I think everyone goes through a “winner” year. You know the kind, where it seems to be one thing after another after another, and not necessarily positive either, in fact, most of the time that snowball effect of events is downright negative. Well, 2006 was my winner year, and believe me if I could survive that, I think I can survive anything else life will toss in my direction.

It actually began earlier, since in 2005 my mother was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. It wasn’t only her physical health that was deteriorating but her mental health as well. Now my mother had created a “problem” in our lives, to put it mildly. Among her many mental issues she had hoarder tendencies. When her financial situation changed instead of hoarding things, she turned to pets. We had always had cats but at a reasonable number…that was to change beginning around 1992, when we had nine cats including an unfixed female. I kept after my mother to take the cat to the vet to get spayed but she didn’t as she claimed that we weren’t going to get anymore cats. Uh, right. Now I wasn’t able to take the cat myself to the vet, as he was a distance away, and I was suffering from my own problem of panic disorder with agoraphobia…there was absolutely nothing preventing my mother from taking the cat to be fixed.

Some months passed and the doorbell rings. It was one of our neighbors holding a fully grown black male cat and asking us to take him. I kept saying “No, we can’t have anymore cats.” Well both my mother and this neighbor are staring me down, and saying, “Oh, it’s only one more cat.” So I gave in. It didn’t take long to realize that this male cat wasn’t fixed either..so great we have a unfixed male and female cat…like duh? And yes kept urging my mother to get the cats fixed. She didn’t and you can imagine what happened…kittens. Now if it had stopped at that first litter of kittens it still could have been manageable, but it didn’t…kittens kept being born. My mother would only occasionally take a cat to be fixed but not fast enough. By 1996 we already had a really large population of cats. It was truly getting out of hand…why didn’t we take them to a shelter? People are under the impression one can take pets to put up for adoption for free, nope, no can do. All shelters expect money, at least $50.00 per pet that they take in. With my mother’s Social Security and Pension plus my SSI benefits it was just too expensive to take the cats to adopt them out.

The bottom line is by the time 2001 rolled around the number of cats we had was staggering, and it wasn’t as if I wasn’t trying to find homes for the kittens that kept being born.

Well, I think I’ll end this Part 1 and continue my “epic” tomorrow…from what I’ve written so far, you just might be wondering…how in earth did things fall into place for me. Well I plan to reveal that…all in good time, but one needs some background information and that’s going to take awhile.

©2008~Melanie Neer aka pyewacket

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