pyewacketsworld

Part 2:

Okay here I am to continue my story…FINALLY.

One has to read the first part to be able to follow this part, but in brief summary, my mother, who had hoarder tendencies created an overpopulation of cat problem that was to begin in 1992, and in 1993, the first litter of kittens were born…and more litters kept coming until it got so out of control. By 1996 there must have been at least 40 cats total due to all the litters of kittens. Since both my mother and I were on fixed incomes, she on Social Security and pension benefits, and me on SSI disability, now it was the cost factor of trying to get the cats fixed on time…and as you can guess, it became a losing battle. As for putting the extra cats up for adoption that also wasn’t possible, since no animal shelter will take pets for free. So the population kept rising.

By 1996, I had to completely stop all my photography work. Despite my own disability of panic disorder and agoraphobia, I was a successfully published photographer, mailing out portfolios of my images to magazines and calendar companies. I also developed my own black and white film and prints at home. That all completely stopped since now I was spending all my time cleaning the apartment to keep it as odor free as possible…a losing battle. It also didn’t help that my mother must have been in some kind of denial that one, we had too many cats, and two, she never seemed to smell cat odor, but then looking back I’m really realizing how much she was wrapped up in her own world and living in some kind of twilight zone.

By 2001…uh, don’t ask how many cats there were, suffice to say way, way too many. It was in March of 2001 my mother and I were hit with our first eviction issue with our landlord. Now technically speaking one can actually have as many pets as they want, at least according to the various pet laws here in NYC…HOWEVER…as long as they don’t provide “nuisance” problems, such as maybe a dog constantly barking, or as you can guess odor problems. But in our case, despite the so-called pet laws, it’s one thing to have say ten cats, yet another as many as we had. We managed to get a good lawyer, and we also had a number of pet advocates helping us out…it was one pet advocate who had contacts with the media and got our story out there in the hopes of people becoming interested in adopting the cats. We had teams of TV newscasters interviewing us, channels 2, 5, 7, 9, 11, 47, and even Jeanne Moos of CNN came and did a feature of us…also newspapers covered our story. This did indeed spark interest and many people did come to adopt many of the cats. Even an ASPCA mobile unit came and in one day, managed to spay/neuter many of the cats.

Our lawyer gave us very specific instructions of how to deodorize the apartment, but after awhile she became exasperated and fed up with us..why? Once more due to my mother. Our lawyer became feed up and dumped us, no longer representing us—She had expected that the two of us, my mother and myself to do a round the clock, virtual 24-hour a day cleaning thing to fumigate our apt. out. My mother continued to do nothing as she had done all along. She never helped out once to help clean when the cat population started to grow, and she sure wasn’t helping now when the clock was ticking against us and possible eviction. So it was up to me, to not only clean every waking moment of the day and night, and at the advice of our lawyer, to get rid of just about everything we owned, anything that might be retaining pet odor–So I was getting rid of books, videos, furniture, etc–plus painting up the apt. from top to bottom. Getting rid of the furniture was no great hardship, save for my filing cabinets–for some reason these were the favorite target spots for the cats to have accidents on–yes, I did clean them out periodically, but to no avail–so not only did I have to get rid of them, but the contents within them—hundreds and hundreds of black and white photos I had printed up over the years since 1976, when I first started printing up photos, plus all the magazines, newspapers, calendars—all my prized published work. Nice huh? I felt a part of my soul being ripped out. And once again my mother was in the twilight zone, and would watch me bundle up all my prized possessions, my books, photos and all she would say was “Oh, what a shame.” A shame? My photo work, my life’s work…throwing it all like trash a shame?

Well anyway, yes, many people did come to our apartment to adopt a lot of cats…but not enough. On one court appearance my mother made on June 11, 2001, she signed a stipulation agreement that would allow us to stay in the apartment, but only if we had two cats…Uh, well, as you can guess we had a lot more than two cats despite all the ones that were adopted out. For the next five years I was to live in chronic fear that we would be found out that we had more than just two cats…My fear was reached in March of 2006, when once again we were hit with an eviction notice.

I’ll continue my story next time of what happened. Once again you may wonder how “great” things fell in place for me. Well, believe it or not it did…as you’ll see in my next entries of this “saga” of mine

©2009~Melanie Neer aka pyewacket

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