Goodbye My Little Puff Ball T_T

I’m writing this very moment because I don’t know what else to do with this horrific feeling.  I’m sobbing uncontrollably and I’ve been screaming for the last hour, and every human being I know is at work, so I just don’t know who else to talk to right now.  This may turn into nonsensical crap, so, please bare with me.

This is my sweetness – River Zhu Li “Do the Thing” Song, Marquess of Pembroke.  A special cat deserves a special name.

She’s actually a good bit bigger right now, but these were her most photogenic moments.  My favorite pictures.

I just watched my River get her head smashed in and jaw broken off by a car doing 60 in a 25 (which is, unfortunately, a very, very common occurrence).  I can’t even get her out of the road right now because the cars won’t stop zooming by like it’s the Indy 500.

To try and make a long story short, we got flea infested and nothing would work to kill them.  I spent hundreds on drop, pills, powers, shampoos, carpet sprays, poisons, bug bombs, cedar chips, baking soda, and salted every inch of our floors, constantly vacuuming with a Dyson, and, to this very moment, nothing has worked to even reduce the number of fleas.  It was like everything we used was just encouraging them to breed more.

This has been a spare-no-expense battle, because that my son has a big allergy to fleas, and they flock to him above all others.  If you’ve never seen a flea allergy on a person, it swells up and looks like they have chicken pox.  We had a flea issue a few years ago, not anywhere nearly this bad, but a definite problem, and my son still has big, dark, deep scars from where he’d be bitten before.

To try and speed the flea fight up, I moved my cats to the garage.  I hated doing it, they hated being out there, but I was stuck between a rock and a hard place – and, as upset as it made me, I believe that picking your kids health over your pets IS the right call.

The fleas in the house started to die out, little by little.  But then the garage got bad despite our best efforts to keep them under control.  It got so bad that when my son decided to make a garage run to retrieve an item he needed, he put on socks, shoes, denim pants, and a winter coat to be “flea proof” and came back inside 15 seconds later covered in dozens of fleas on his bare skin.  In mere seconds they had gotten in his hair and all over his back, stomach, legs, and arms, and he had to strip and wash himself in blue Dawn from head to toe.  Those psycho fleas jumping off like crazy also re-infested our house and left my son looking like he’s the pox king, so I had to make a very, very ugly choice.  Flea dip the cats again, and put them outside…

I’m not a fool, I’m not a new pet owner, I knew that putting them outside meant a very real possibility that they would disappear, which would break my heart.  But, when you get in these tough spots where nothing is working and you have to choose between your kids and your pets, you have to pick your kids.  I was going to solve this flea problem and bring the cats back in before Winter when the fleas started to naturally die off.  That was my plan, and I so wanted it to work out.

That was about a week ago.  Everything had been going fine, even the fleas had lightened up significantly on the cats now that they weren’t enclosed as the only food source for the blood suckers.  Then I just saw River get smashed this morning, and I feel so sick and guilty about it.

She was my little, tiny baby, and I loved so very, very much.  She was always desperate to be my lap cat, and I failed her because I couldn’t control the bugs no matter how much money I threw at them.  River was the reason we got other cats, because she would get so lonely when she was home by herself.  She was so much younger than the other cats though, I had bonded with her, and vice versa, in so much more of a special way and I hate so much how this has turned out.  She was always so kind and friendly and purring.  Her mouth didn’t seal perfectly either, so when she’d purr this frothy, drooly spit would bubble out, and it was so gross, but she was such a happy girl.  She wasn’t even a year old yet, and I really let her down so completely that I just can’t even exhale right now, I hurt so much.  I can’t even make up a story in my head that she vanished because she’s in someone elses house and they’re loving her right now.  No, she died in front of me, and she’s laying, bloody and broken up, in the road, and I can’t even get her out to bury her.

Thank you for reading, writing this out allows me to process and deal with the issue a lot better than curling up in a ball and crying for days on end.  Although, I have to admit, I’m about to go curl up right now, because I feel very broken today.

When You Tell Someone “I’m Here for You…”

Recently, my husband and I have been teetering on bankruptcy.  He lost his job (mysteriously fired for undefined “incompetence” the day after he brought in a Doctor’s note that forbid him from heavy lifting) and, after three months of searching for a job, he finally found one that pays almost half of his last salary.  During all this stress, my husband’s family has continued to only come around when they want something.  Oh, I need a babysitter, or, oh, I’m having a shower, here’s my registry information, or, oh, can you make a three hour trip to drop me at the airport so I don’t have to pay for parking?  And, it’s a one-way street, where no help, time, or services are offered back to us while we struggle.  Plus, all the while, relatives had job openings at their works that they kept quiet about, and two relatives refused to speak with an interviewer when my husband said that he was indeed related to employees at a company.

My husband eventually made a Facebook post about wishing his family would treat him like family, which resulted in a flood of whinny replies of relatives saying “I love you!  I miss you!  You should call me!  I’m not like the people you’re describing!”  Then, as soon as they validated their consciences, they dropped back off the face of the earth.

When someone is having a rough time, friends and relatives acting this way makes that someone feel more isolated, depressed, and hopeless.  It’s like trying to dig yourself out of a ditch.  You know it’s going to be hard, but then you see more people show up with shovels.  You think they’re there to help dig you out, but, instead, they just start shoveling dirt on your head.

Enter:  Today’s topic.  A person should never use phrases like “I’m here if you need me,” “let me know if you need anything,” “call me sometime,” etc.  Why?  Because, if you are telling someone to come to you like that, all you’re truly saying is that you are too lazy to put in the effort to actually be there, to actually help them, or to actually call them yourself.

You are saying frivolous words to get yourself off the hook to do anything, because, more often than not, a person who does need support doesn’t know how to ask for it, or they may just not want to ask.  It’s essentially like a lady asking “do I look good in this dress?”  If they have to come to you for the compliment, then it doesn’t mean very much.  If you truly thought she looked good, you would have volunteered that comment on you own.  The same goes with relationships and saying passive, non-committal statements.

In the mind of someone who feels neglected/left out/depressed/etc, they do not feel important to you.  They feel like contacting you would bother you – it would put you out – and if you liked them at all, you’d already have been there for them.  They think you’re just being polite, and if it were anything other than that, you’d be the one putting in the effort to establish a relationship right now.

So, even if you mean it when you say you’d like that person to call you sometime, all you’ve done is absolve yourself from acting.  You’ve made calling the other person’s issue.  Then, you can sit back and forget about that person, because you put the ball in their court, so if they don’t call, it’s on them.  Not your fault.  Not your problem.  You offered, right?

NO!  If that is your behavior, you don’t care and you’re not being helpful at all.  If you really want to be there for someone, be the one who does the calling.  Let people know that you’re serious about them as a friend/relative and that you are interested in putting in the time it takes to get to know them.

Then, if they only call you back to get a ride/money/babysitter/etc, that’s when you might step back and re-evaluate whether this person wants a friend or free labor.

The same idea is applied to anything else.  Don’t tell people “hey, you should call me sometime and we’ll go to lunch.”  You should say something more direct that makes a plan instead of knocking the ball back into their court.  “Hey, we should go to lunch next week.  When are you free?”  Semantically, that makes you sound actually interested in having lunch.  Even if the other person doesn’t know if they’re free next week, you’ve thrown out a time frame for going to lunch and are working towards making firm plans.

Likewise, don’t invite people that you have a weak relationship with to an event you’re having.  You may think that you’re being so nice to include them in your Mary Kay party or your baby shower, but, it makes the other person feel like you only see them as a dollar sign.  Even I’ve gotten to the point where I throw away invites from people who either a) I never hear from, or b) they never reciprocate when I’m the one having something.  If you act like I don’t exist otherwise, there’s no reason to come to me when you want something.

The bottom line is that actions and efforts are all that matter – not the nice words you say in the moment when you’re confronted by a person.  Call, visit, text, show up at their door, send them random Facebook messages, and keep checking in on people if you want them in your life.  Caring should be an action word, and, as long as the other person is responding to you in a respectful and positive manner, you should keep putting in the effort – and that goes double if you know they’re going through something difficult.