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.
Trying to Mom 