A flat-out rotten day

Originally published May 13, 2010

Before you read this, I want you to imagine a little experiment. 

For those of you who have given birth, you already know this -- feel free to skip this part. 

For men and those few friends of mine who are women without children, imagine this: Take a nice, long, soft strip of fabric. Tie it around your waist. Then tuck a 14-pound bowling ball into the front of the fabric, as if you were pregnant. Sit down. Get back up.

Sit down again. Get back up.

Then kneel down. Try to get back up. It’s impossible without something to hold onto. The center of gravity is all wrong. You can’t get from a kneeling or squatting position with a heavy weight at the front of your body.

So. Here’s the story:

We’ve had a long couple of weeks and the boys have been cooped up in the house with a grumpy, tired mother. My pelvis has separated, not completely, but enough that both halves don’t work well together. I am not, shall we say, graceful. I would use words like flop, heave, hoist and flail when describing my movements.

Not pretty.

So I decided to cheer the boys up by letting them pick out some chicks. I was going to get three- or four-month-old hens, so we could have eggs sooner and they’d eat more bugs, but day-old chicks are $4 each, and laying hens are $10-12. Not a huge difference, but when you’re buying a dozen, it matters, and all children love chicks. Great big old pooping and pecking hens, not so much.

So I heaved my way to the car, shooing my old mean cat, George, out from under the van as we got in, and sat for a minute and made a list of errands we had to run, er, waddle, since we were out of the house anyway.

Then I noticed a bunch of cars stopped on the street in front of my house.

They were stopped because mean old George, who's 18, was lying in the street, half-dead. We had just shooed him out from under my van less than five minutes before, so either he got hit by a car in those five minutes and we didn't notice, or he had a heart attack or a stroke right there.

So I ran out to get him and got a blanket from the back of my van and scooped him up, and there was no blood, but it was obvious he was dying -- his mouth was open and he was gasping, and one pupil was bigger than the other. I was sick over it, and started waving the cars to go around me. He was so obviously in pain and miserable that I knew I had to get him to the vet as soon as I could -- I knew he was dying but thought maybe it was something like a seizure that could be fixed.

One of the girls who works in my back kitchen had seen the commotion and came out to help, and I told the boys to get in the van.

Then I handed George to Stacey, the girl who works in the kitchen, and I tried to get up. I was on my hands and knees, and got into a kneeling position. Nothing. Put one leg up, foot on the ground, and heaved. Nope. Got into a squat position. I could squat. I could crawl. I could kneel. Couldn’t stand up.

So I'm standing in the middle of the fucking road with this lady holding my half-dead cat, and I can't get off the ground to take him to the vet.

I felt like one of those poor upside-down turtles that you just know is going to get hit by a car by the time you pull over and rescue him.

Hello.... I need to take my cat to the vet. He’s dying. Legs, stand up please. Now!

We gave the cat to Sawyer, and Stacy tried to pull me up. She weighs 30 pounds. I almost pulled her on top of me.

And it wasn’t a weight thing, anyway. The center of gravity was all wrong, my pelvis was just not cooperating, and I couldn't get the right balance to get up.

So I finally had to crawl off to the side of the road while Stacey went to get a chair for me. I was able to use the chair for leverage to get off the damned ground.

Took George to the vet, where he died within five minutes. The vet thinks he was hit by a car. I don't know -- doesn't really matter at this point.

This was my "single girl" cat. I got him when I was 27 and single and determined that I was going to live alone and be on my own and travel the world, just George and me.

He lived with me in a 300-sq-ft apartment in Galveston and I was crazy about him. I used to come home from my job at the newspaper at 4 a.m. and he'd be there, waiting for me, with a dead lizard in his mouth as a gift. Sometimes it would just be the bottom half of a lizard. Lizard pants, my best friend and I would laugh. He brought lizard pants in homage.

He kept me company in my first garden, and kept the boogeyman away in the first place I lived and slept alone. He ate bugs from the first roses I ever planted. He slept on my bed, among piles of books. I’ve never been so comfortable or cozy.

I’d never had a pet of my own. I never wanted one. I’d raised my three sisters, did auntie/nanny help for my aunt with her three kids, and now for the first time had no one but me to worry about or take care of. 

I got George from the shelter at three years old, where they called him “YaYa.” I came home on my break from work to make sure he was all right. I gave him baths, God help me. I really did. He was all I had.

I named him George because of George McGovern, of course, but also because of the line in the old cartoon, “I’m going to love him and squeeze him and hold him and call him George and never let him go.”

He never forgave me for getting married, and hated me for having kids.

About five years later, when I was in the hospital, pregnant with Sawyer, they put me on an awful drug called magnesium sulfite. It made me loopy and crazy, and all I could think of was that I wanted George to hold and snuggle with me. I begged Mark to go get him and sneak him into the hospital. To Mark’s credit, he didn’t do it.

Lately, I knew he was old. For a cat to live 18 years is a long time, and his bright orange thick fur was looking mangy, and he was getting even more crotchety and mean, and in the last two years he never left a 20-foot circle near my driveway. He just sat and kept watch. Wouldn't come in the house because the kids he hated were here.

But I had him longer than I've had Mark!

And now he's gone.

Sigh.

That's it.

I'm tired and grumpy and I hurt like hell. I’m embarrassed at being caught like a turtle in the middle of the road.

And I miss my cat.

And I wish I could go outside and scoop him up and have him snuggle on my bed to make me feel better.

And baby makes five...

Originally published June 8, 2010

Oh, God. Just writing out the fact that we now have five people that I’m responsible for feeding and taking care of is almost overwhelming. Five people? Really? My cat died a few weeks ago, and I’m sure it was my fault. Who put me in charge of three kids, and what were they thinking?

Anyway, she’s here!!!

Her name is Scout Evangeline Stone. That’s the first time I’ve ever typed it or written. It fits. Evangeline is not my all-time favorite name, but if she hates Scout and has an identity crisis when she’s 13, she can call herself Eve, or Eva, or Angie, or Ellie, or Lina. Or maybe she’ll just hate everyone and go for Crash Panther, and all my hard working plotting to make her life easier will be in vain.

She was 7 pounds, 12 ounces, born yesterday, June 7, at 10:39 a.m.

She is, of course, beautiful and perfect. And since she’s a newborn, she’s also funny looking and alien-like with skin that’s like no color you’ve ever seen, unfocused eyes and funny hair.

But mostly gorgeous and perfect.

Birth story: Mark was supposed to go deliver a speech yesterday in California. I didn’t want him to go. He said it was important, and he’d leave Monday night and be back Wednesday. He’d be gone 36 hours, and the chances of me having the baby were slim.

So he was leaving Monday afternoon.

Apparently, the baby wanted him here for her birth.

At 4:30 a.m., I woke up to feel my water breaking. Weird, oozy, feeling, followed by a “what the hell do I do now” feeling.

Woke Mark up, called the doctor, took my boys to my friend Courtney’s house, (yes, at 5 a.m. -- thank God for Courtney, because they went willingly and cheerily,) and went to the hospital.

Came in, went into labor on my own, started to hurt and within the first minute suddenly the repressed memory of Sander’s labor came flooding back.

Labor hurts. Not a little bit. Not like cramps. Not like, “Ow, this really hurts.”

Labor hurts like someone sticking their hand up inside you, grabbing your guts and squeezing really, really hard while you scream for them to stop. Then they stop for a moment, just to let you catch your breath, and do it again while you scream obscenities and the nurse says, “Oh, just breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth and you’ll be fine.”

There is no pain like labor pain. I’m astounded and amazed that the human race has survived. However, it’s really hard to remember in the middle of good sex, which almost feels like the opposite of labor (if you’re doing it right,) how much labor hurts. 

With Sander, the epidural didn’t work. I had no pain relief, and the labor lasted about 12 hours. I came out of that emotionally scarred. Seriously.

So with this one, I told them I wanted an epidural, and I wanted one that worked, and the doctor took that as a challenge.

He said that since I was a redhead, I needed more pain relief than most, and he’d make sure I had no pain at all. Ten minutes later, I drifted off to sleep. Without pain. In labor.

Complete with little button to press if I needed more medicine.

That was around 8 a.m.

At 10:30 a.m., I came out of my fog to a crowd of  people starting to gather around the monitors, whispering words like “heart rate” “decelerations” “really lasting too long” and “got to get her out of there now.”

Then I heard a phone call to my doctor, with the same words whispered to her.

They did a check. Only 6 centimeters dilated. You need to be ten to have the baby. She wasn’t ready to come out.

The doctor ran into the room three minutes later. Looked at me and said, “We’re having this baby now. Let’s get you ready to get her out.”

She did a check, and I was ten centimeters and ready to push. She had literally scared me into getting that baby ready in under five minutes.

The doctor grabbed a vacuum, said, “I’m going to pull, you’re going to push, and she’s going to be fine,” and at 10:39, out she came.

And then silence.

No crying. No noise.

The crowd of people moved over to the baby.

They looked over at me. 

“She fine, really.”

“She’s breathing. She’s all right. She’s just not crying. Let me try a few things.”

Silence.

Mark was running back and forth. “She’s fine. She’s breathing, and she’s turning pink. She just doesn’t want to cry.”

More murmurs from the baby table. 

“Oh, that’s not a good sign. We need to get a neonatal doctor in quick.”

“We’re taking her to the nursery.”

Meanwhile, the doctor is stitching up the pieces of raw hamburger meat that ten minutes ago were my quite useful and much-valued sex organs.

She’s trying to fit together the pieces of the swollen edges of meat to put them back in the right places so they’ll eventually function again, so I don’t really want to stress her out, but this is worrisome.

She said, “The baby’s eyes are moving back and forth from side to side, and her arms are stiff. Babies should have curled up arms. It could be nothing, or it could be a lot of things. They’re taking her to the nursery for observation.”

And I held her for a minute, said hello, and she was gone.

A lot things means everything from nothing to cerebral palsy, brain damage, or seizures.

Not impressed.

I finally made it to the nursery to see her once I got cleaned up, and the doctor was looking her over.

The doctor pronounced her healthy and happy, except for the fact that she still hadn’t woken up and still hadn’t cried.

Worried.

Not impressed.

But I was able to take her back to my room, and coo over her, and have her brothers come to visit her and meet her, and she slowly started to look better and better. 

At 3 a.m., she finally woke up. She looked around, mewed a little like a tiny kitten, and went back to sleep. But I did get to see her eyes and know she was capable of being awake!

And now, I’m not as worried anymore, though I always will worry anyway. She’s bright pink, very cute, and starting to come around.

I think she just didn’t like the transition from womb to room in five seconds flat.

But she’s waking up a little here and there, and doesn’t like it if you change her clothes or her diaper, and I think she’s going to be just fine.

Scout’s a good name. I’m happy with it.

I think she’s going to be a keeper.

And as for me?

I feel like a Dr. Seuss character:

The things I can do! The stuff I can say!

And all because I had a baby today!

I can get up when I sit on the ground.

I look in the mirror and I’m no longer so round.

I can see my knees, my ankles and feet, and you know what’s the best?

I can eat, eat, eat, eat!

I could eat green eggs and ham --

I could eat ten cans of spam.

I could eat a horse, you see --

and another thing -- I’m able to pee!

You know what I did today that amazed me?

I brushed my teeth, with no vomit to faze me.

No more medicine, no more pills,

I feel so healthy, no longer feel ill.

My belly is small(er), diabetes is gone,

pelvis is fixed, nothing is wrong.

I love my kids, and new baby too,

but being pregnant? Well, I’m through.

Yeah, I might be a bit loopy from the painkillers.

But I’m happy. I hated, hated, hated being pregnant, hated being sick, hated having to have others take care of me.

But boy, I love being able to say I have a daughter.

And she’s very, very cute.

The Sloth Mom Manifesto

Originally published May 5, 2011

So, Tiger Mom’s daughter made it into Harvard. And it made the national news, and Tiger Mom has a best-selling book.

If, indeed, this is what Tiger Cub wants, then I say, good for her. There was a lot of hard work involved, and she deserves it.

But really, here’s the question: How the hell could she possibly know what she wants? 

One of my friends pointed out, reasonably, that it’s not exactly a BAD thing to force your kid to go to Harvard. 

When they graduate, he pointed out, they can decide they want something else and go be a firefighter or an artist or a writer.

But I don’t think they will. 

I think that by the time you’re done with Harvard, or MIT, or Yale, you’re so entrenched in “excellence” as a lifestyle that it has seeped into every pore, and I mean excellence as the literal word: To excel in every thing.

To what purpose? 

Really, truly, and without prejudice or cynicism: Why?

If excelling is the goal, when is it reached? Where’s the finish line?

Be the best you can be at everything, beat everyone at everything, and then die?

I don’t believe for one second that Tiger Mom or Harvard is about getting a good education: Education in the sense of being able to understand the world, appreciate art and literature and music, love logic and good conversation and know where you fit in, and be trained in a specific, rigorous discipline of your choice so you can follow a profession. I do believe that Harvard will give you that, and more. 

But I don’t believe that’s why people go there: It’s about, to quote Charlie Sheen, “Winning.”

About being the best. About having no slack in your world, no room for second place. No room for Bs.

And I reject that paradigm. 

Sure, there’s a part of me that wishes I’d gone to Harvard. I had the brains for it. Had the SAT scores for it. 

It represented everything I wanted: Someone to push me in the right direction. A tangible way to show that I was someone, that I was smart, that I was one of the “right” people.

But twenty years later, despite rational, reasoned input from the same friend, I’m not buying it. (I went to high school with this friend -- we were both whip smart and should have gone to good colleges and kicked ass. Neither of us made it. He, however, now has a PhD. I have a chip on my shoulder and a blog.) 

To continue the Tiger Mother concept: Who the hell wants to be a Tiger? You have to EAT SOMEONE to exist.

You have to hunt, every day, simply to stay alive. And you have to teach your children that in this world, you hit the ground running every morning, get up at dawn, and go kick some unsuspecting creature’s ass or you starve. Go get ‘em, tiger. Sharpen those claws. If someone’s intestines aren’t all over the ground, you have not succeeded.

Nope.

I’m going for the Sloth Mom concept. The rules are different for sloths. No one has to get eaten, as long as you’re careful.  

The world’s a good place, and you have a home here. Watch out for the bad guys (especially those damned tigers,) and you’ll be fine. There’s a lot to learn, but you have time. That’s all we have: Time to learn, and to play, and to look around. Sometimes things are upside down. Sometimes things aren’t.

And by Sloth Mom, well, it’s sort of a joke, because all homeschoolers know that you can’t be lazy and homeschool. We’re talking Sloths here, not slugs.

Hell, if you’re lazy, and want to be Slug Mom, send your kids to school so you can take a nap.

Here’s a peek at schooling a baby Sloth, instead of a Tiger cub:

Violin: Yep, my kids take violin.

And they practice. 

And they suck. 

Quite badly. 

Sawyer’s been taking violin since he was three. He’s now turning 11. We’re talking $20 a week for 52 weeks a year for eight years. That’s 400 lessons, and we practice about ten minutes to twenty minutes a day at home. 

That’s $8,000, in case you’re counting, and he knows six songs. Maybe seven. 

Yes, folks, that’s $1,000 per song, for a bad rendition of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

But I think violin is good for him, and I’m a Sloth Mom, not a Slug Mom, and I think that violin (and all that comes from learning to play and enjoy music) is a good skill for a sloth to have. 

And so despite his occasional tears, he’s still going to learn to play. 

Just not, as the Tiger Mom suggests, with threats and humiliation. Instead, he will learn that some things just suck until you get good at them, and it’s hard to learn a new skill, and maybe violin isn’t your thing, but you need to try anyway.

Reading: Sawyer couldn’t read until he was almost nine. He’s an odd, quirky child. 

I knew he was bright, I knew he loved words and stories, and we read together every night. For hours and hours and hours. And then one day he sat down and could read. 

And now he reads two or three books a day, and has a book he’s reading while he has another book on CD going in the background.

History: Sawyer has never been to “school,” where most kids think history is boring. He’s never taken history as a subject. And yet he can tell you the parallels between the Star Wars saga and the American Revolution, using the British Empire as the Death Star, Yorktown as the secret spot that would unravel everything, George III as Darth Vader and George Washington as a very old, ugly Luke Skywalker. 

But I have no idea if he could pass a standardized test about the Revolution. He can, however, re-enact the battle of Cowpens, which I’d never even heard of.

The really important stuff:

The critical, vital stuff to raising happy Sloths isn’t in school. It’s what happens when they’re NOT scheduled. And Tiger cubs are scheduled all day long, from the early morning rise until bed after all homework is done. 

Because SlothWorld is slow, there’s time for stuff. 

There’s time to hang out, and read, and listen to books, and read books, and color. One of the most important tools I know of is boredom. I love when my kids are bored -- that’s when the creativity starts.

We have rabbits, and we play with them (and no, we don’t eat them after pouncing.)

My kids both know how to cook scrambled eggs, and omelettes, and pancakes. Sawyer can make bean soup, gluten-free cake, awesome smoothies and chicken-fried steak. He cooks dinner at least one night a week. 

You know what else my ten-year-old son does?

He mows the lawn.

Changes the cat box. 

Does all of his own laundry. 

Keeps up with his own room and clothes. 

Cleans out the chicken coop, collects eggs and feeds chickens every day. Cleans out the rabbit cage and composts all the waste. 

Takes care of his section of the garden, and is in charge of weeding and watering and mulch.

He can change a diaper (yes, even a poopy one,) and put an outfit on a wiggling baby. 

He can make a baby laugh, and knows when to yell for help when she won’t. 

He is never sullen, or stressed, or put-upon. 

He wakes up eager to start his day, can’t wait to get to the middle of his new book, and loves to ponder politics, religion, a new video game or who’s going to win The Amazing Race.

He’s hurt by the injustice in the world, and terrified by the tsunami in Japan. He can clean out the car, vacuum the play room, put all of they toys where they belong and sweep the kitchen. Both boys love to get wet rags and scrub the kitchen floor -- it’s their favorite part of Saturday morning.

They have no idea what any of the top 40 songs are (neither do, I though, so that’s not a shock.) 

They love to go camping and fishing and to the kid’s museum and their absolute favorite thing is to go to Barton Springs, an amazing swimming hole in Austin, with their dad and spend the day there.

They can do all of these things because I don’t care one bit if Sawyer is the best at math. Better than who? What’s the yardstick? He’s in fourth grade, for Pete’s sake. 

I guess, after all this, my point is this: The philosophy of a Tiger Mom seems to be that life is Nasty, Brutish and Short, and you’d better be on the top of the food chain.

I think that Sloth Moms can raise happy, healthy, amazing kids, and no one has to sharpen their teeth.

"If you can't hear a rooster crow, you ain't living country!"

He was beautiful, but he sure was loud!

Originally published February 10, 2009

Well, I can stand the fact that we’re no longer living country.

Gonzo the rooster, hand-hatched and raised, had to be put out to pasture.

Sawyer was terrified of Gonzo. Scared to death. Sawyer is eight, and has, shall we say, a flair for the dramatic (along with a love for musicals, dancing, and theater. Jury’s still out on him.) He has one job on his chore list every day: Take care of the animals. Not that big a task -- five hens, a rooster, two cats and a golden retriever.

It would take Sawyer 45 minutes to feed the chickens, and he’d come in, sometimes shaking, sometimes shrieking, sometimes crying, but always with a story of how the rooster was about to peck out his eyeballs, or slash his throat with his “razor-sharp talons of death,” or he could just hear Gonzo sneaking up behind him, ready to pounce.

I finally got tired of it and went out one day to feed the stupid chickens myself, and Gonzo came after me, and I have to admit, he was a little scary, and I weigh considerably more than the 50 pounds Sawyer’s got on him.

Then Mark started in on the whole thing, because the rooster has a bad habit of sleeping under our bedroom window and crowing at 4 a.m. And then at 5 a.m., and again at 6 a.m., by which time Mark was ready to have soup.

So I put an ad on Craig’s List, and some very weird guy named Rhett couldn’t wait to come and get Gonzo. 

“Well, ah’ve got guineas and ducks and geese and who knows what-all out here and he’ll do just fine, God bless his little heart. Besides, if you don’t wake up to a rooster’s crow every morning, you ain’t living country.”

So, off goes Gonzo.  Rhett picked him up yesterday morning, and the only one who will miss Gonzo is Sander, who I’m sure sensed a kindred spirit.

A flat-out rotten day

Published May 9, 2010

Before you read this, I want you to imagine a little experiment. 

For those of you who have given birth, you already know this -- feel free to skip this part.  

For men and those few friends of mine who are women without children, imagine this: Take a nice, long, soft strip of fabric. Tie it around your waist. Then tuck a 14-pound bowling ball into the front of the fabric, as if you were pregnant. Sit down. Get back up.

Sit down again. Get back up.

Then kneel down. Try to get back up. It’s impossible without something to hold onto. The center of gravity is all wrong. You can’t get from a kneeling or squatting position with a heavy weight at the front of your body.

So. Here’s the story:

We’ve had a long couple of weeks and the boys have been cooped up in the house with a grumpy, tired mother. My pelvis has separated, not completely, but enough that both halves don’t work well together. I am not, shall we say, graceful. I would use words like flop, heave, hoist and flail when describing my movements.

Not pretty.

So I decided to cheer the boys up by letting them pick out some chicks. I was going to get three- or four-month-old hens, so we could have eggs sooner and they’d eat more bugs, but day-old chicks are $4 each, and laying hens are $10-12. Not a huge difference, but when you’re buying a dozen, it matters, and all children love chicks. Great big old pooping and pecking hens, not so much.

So I heaved my way to the car, shooing my old mean cat, George, out from under the van as we got in, and sat for a minute and made a list of errands we had to run, er, waddle, since we were out of the house anyway.

Then I noticed a bunch of cars stopped on the street in front of my house.

They were stopped because mean old George, who's 18, was lying in the street, half-dead. We had just shooed him out from under my van less than five minutes before, so either he got hit by a car in those five minutes and we didn't notice, or he had a heart attack or a stroke right there.

So I ran out to get him and got a blanket from the back of my van and scooped him up, and there was no blood, but it was obvious he was dying -- his mouth was open and he was gasping, and one pupil was bigger than the other. I was sick over it, and started waving the cars to go around me. He was so obviously in pain and miserable that I knew I had to get him to the vet as soon as I could -- I knew he was dying but thought maybe it was something like a seizure that could be fixed.

One of the girls who works in my back kitchen had seen the commotion and came out to help, and I told the boys to get in the van.

Then I handed George to Stacey, the girl who works in the kitchen, and I tried to get up. I was on my hands and knees, and got into a kneeling position. Nothing. Put one leg up, foot on the ground, and heaved. Nope. Got into a squat position. I could squat. I could crawl. I could kneel. Couldn’t stand up.

So I'm standing in the middle of the fucking road with this lady holding my half-dead cat, and I can't get off the ground to take him to the vet.

I felt like one of those poor upside-down turtles that you just know is going to get hit by a car by the time you pull over and rescue him.

Hello.... I need to take my cat to the vet. He’s dying. Legs, stand up please. Now!

We gave the cat to Sawyer, and Stacy tried to pull me up. She weighs 30 pounds. I almost pulled her on top of me.

And it wasn’t a weight thing, anyway. The center of gravity was all wrong, my pelvis was just not cooperating, and I couldn't get the right balance to get up.

So I finally had to crawl off to the side of the road while Stacey went to get a chair for me. I was able to use the chair for leverage to get off the damned ground.

Took George to the vet, where he died within five minutes. The vet thinks he was hit by a car. I don't know -- doesn't really matter at this point.

This was my "single girl" cat. I got him when I was 27 and single and determined that I was going to live alone and be on my own and travel the world, just George and me.

He lived with me in a 300-sq-ft apartment in Galveston and I was crazy about him. I used to come home from my job at the newspaper at 4 a.m. and he'd be there, waiting for me, with a dead lizard in his mouth as a gift. Sometimes it would just be the bottom half of a lizard. Lizard pants, my best friend and I would laugh. He brought lizard pants in homage.

He kept me company in my first garden, and kept the boogeyman away in the first place I lived and slept alone. He ate bugs from the first roses I ever planted. He slept on my bed, among piles of books. I’ve never been so comfortable or cozy.

I’d never had a pet of my own. I never wanted one. I’d raised my three sisters, did auntie/nanny help for my aunt with her three kids, and now for the first time had no one but me to worry about or take care of. 

I got George from the shelter at three years old, where they called him “YaYa.” I came home on my break from work to make sure he was all right. I gave him baths, God help me. I really did. He was all I had.

I named him George because of George McGovern, of course, but also because of the line in the old cartoon, “I’m going to love him and squeeze him and hold him and call him George and never let him go.”

He never forgave me for getting married, and hated me for having kids.

About five years later, when I was in the hospital, pregnant with Sawyer, they put me on an awful drug called magnesium sulfite. It made me loopy and crazy, and all I could think of was that I wanted George to hold and snuggle with me. I begged Mark to go get him and sneak him into the hospital. To Mark’s credit, he didn’t do it.

Lately, I knew he was old. For a cat to live 18 years is a long time, and his bright orange thick fur was looking mangy, and he was getting even more crotchety and mean, and in the last two years he never left a 20-foot circle near my driveway. He just sat and kept watch. Wouldn't come in the house because the kids he hated were here.

But I had him longer than I've had Mark!

And now he's gone.

Sigh.

That's it.

I'm tired and grumpy and I hurt like hell. I’m embarrassed at being caught like a turtle in the middle of the road.

And I miss my cat.

And I wish I could go outside and scoop him up and have him snuggle on my bed to make me feel better.