“I don’t want to talk about it.”
That’s how I’ve been feeling for the past few days, too. But I need to record this. I’ve spent most of my life, since age 12, recording the dysfunction that is my family. Here’s the latest in the series:
I was talking with my Ma a few days ago, catching up on the last couple of weeks, when she mentioned that her cat Stinky was no longer around. I felt sad and said “Oh no! What happened?”
My Ma had that cat since she was a kitten. A friend of my brother’s had dropped her off at my Ma’s house back around 1990 or 1991, saying he couldn’t keep her but would be back for her. She was this teeny black ball of fur, and although my Ma protested him dumping her off like that, she found that she grew fond of the kitten.
My brother’s friend came back a year later asking for the cat, and by then my Ma had raised this thing, so she basically told the guy to go get bent, that it was her cat, now. 
The cat had been named by my brother’s friend as ‘Stinky’ because she let these aweful farts all the time. My ma never changed her name.
Ma allowed Stinky to become an outdoor cat, but she didn’t get her fixed. So within a year, Stinky was knocked up and had her first litter of kittens. This continued out of control. It seemed like every 3-5 months, Stinky was having another litter. I took two black balls of fur home with me to the apartment I was staying at with my boyfriend at the time.
I named them Noir and Siva. This was around 1993, when the album Gish by The Smashing Pumpkins was still popular. I was a fan of the band, so that’s how my boy cat got his name as ‘Siva’. The girl cat was named Noir, both because she was black and because I like the French language (I’d taken a couple years of French in high school and can still ask you where the bathroom is, ask for the time of day, tell you my name, ask for yours, and count to either 12 or 39 depending on my memory on any given day, recite the days of the week and tell you that you’re sick in the head. )
When my cats reached six months of age, I took them in to get fixed. Noir came through fine, but Siva died on the operating table. Seems he had a heart defect and reacted badly to the anesthesia.
I however was convinced that the humane society had killed my cat - gave him too much anesthetic because he was unruly, or broke his neck or something. I was SO angry and accusatory back then. They did an autopsy for me to confirm that he’d had a heart defect.
I came to collect my cat, dressed in full black goth/mourning attire. I think my hair was dyed black by that time, too. I was sobbing uncontrollably as the people in the waiting room looked on. The staff was very apologetic. I took Siva home and buried him in the next door neighbor’s back yard with their permission. The next door neighbors were my boyfriend’s grandparents. I lit a stick of Sandalwood incense atop the fresh grave to help carry Siva’s soul to the next world.
After the grief passed, I joked from then to the present day that one should NEVER name their cat after a Hindu god of death.
In 1994, my boyfriend and I got into a car accident that was partially his fault and partially the fault of the SUV that hit us head on. I bowed out the windshield with my head and to this day I swear I almost died. I entered the Summerlands and spoke with my paternal grandmother.
Anyway, after the accident, my boyfriend promised my parents he’d take care of me. That was a fucking lie. Worst summer of my fucking life with that asshole, and trying to recover on my own with a major head injury. Ugh.
That autumn, I split up with my boyfriend, and I left my cat Noir with him because I couldn’t have a cat when I moved in with my dad.
I lived with my dad until I graduated college, and this is when that relationship started to go downhill. He’d met a woman in the bar he frequented after work at the auto plant where he was an executive. His buddies had been trying to hook him up with the bartender/chef for some time. They finally did hook up, and within months it was apparent that she was staying over more and more frequently to the point that I figured he’d have her move in soon. Well, to my dismay, I found out she had a kid, and she WAS trying to move in - WITH HER SON.
Now, this woman is only 15 years older than me, and she had a kid.
There was a spare bedroom for her pre-teen son, so I thought, fine, I’ll deal.
Sorry, no.
She had plans to kick me out of the house. She didn’t like my all-black clothing and bad attitude, and now suddenly my father couldn’t stand me anymore, either, and started hounding me to get a REAL job now that I’d graduated college. I was still working in the daycare. I told him I’d gone to school to become a teacher, and that I was trying for the daycare director position at work. That meant NOTHING to him. He wanted me to be employed in a corporation. THAT was REAL work.
When politics at work conspired against me, and removed my chances from becoming daycare director (i.e. whoever sucks up the most to the director gets the vote), I said fuckit, threw in the towel after five years of impeccable service, and sought out corporate work.
I was one month shy of landing a corporate job when my father’s girlfriend got her way. They both kicked me out and she moved her son in - not to the other bedroom mind you but to MY old bedroom. Their reasoning for kicking me out was that I was too scary for them to handle, and that she’d overheard me talking to my friends about my newly pierced nipples, and what kind of example was that to set for her precious A-student pre-teen son?
Meanwhile, back to Story A.
My ma still had Stinky the cat, and Stinky was still breeding out of control. At one point, there were 14 cats in the house. I kept telling my Ma to get the cats fixed, that the Humane Society would do it for free. She refused.
So I called animal control on her and she was ticketed a couple of times. She relented and took some of her cats in to get fixed, but not all. I advertised word of mouth for people to come buy kittens off of my Ma. That whittled the household down to about 10 or 11 kittens. The reason for so many kittens was that as Stinky gave birth, so were her first few generations of children, who’d also by this time reached maturity. This time, it was Stinky and her daughter Baloo who gave birth - in the same week. Baloo however only had one baby, and she abandoned her. So Stinky was feeding the abandoned baby along with the others from her own litter.
I took another kitten off Ma’s hands as I moved into my very first apartment ever on my own. It was March, 1996. I brought the abandoned black ball of fur home and she screamed bloody murder. I swear, I never knew a 4 week old kitten could scream that loud. It sounded like someone was trying to gnaw her flesh off of her alive.
So I went back to my Ma’s house and asked if I could take another kitten home JUST TO COMFORT my kitten. My ma said yes. I chose another black ball of fur - this time, a boy. He was the runt of Stinky’s litter.
This did the trick - the two bonded and the screaming subsided.
A few days later, I took the boy back, but to my horror, my Ma laughed and told me that he was now MY kitten. She refused to take him back!
So I brought him back home and stared at them. They needed names but I had no clue what to name them.
I think a month went by where I only called them ‘Boy’ and ‘Girl’. I got out my baby name book that I’d only ever used up to that point for the short stories and books I loved writing (not a one of ‘em published to this day).
I’d sit on my bed, which doubled as my couch, and stare down at my kittens playing on the floor as I skimmed through ‘baby names from around the world’. I’d call out a name to see if the cats perked up. Either the name sounded wrong to me once I said it aloud, or the cats didn’t look at me.
Eventually their names emerged - I can’t remember who responded first. But their names became Kijika (pronounced Kah-yee-kah but I just call him Kiki for short), which is supposed to mean ‘He walks softly’ in Native American, but the stupid book doesn’t tell me which tribe.
The girl’s name emerged as Zenaide (pronounced Zah-nigh-ed) which is the Portuguese spelling of a daughter of Zeus.
It rapidly became apparent that Kiki didn’t live up to his name. He can’t even balance on a window sill, he’s so clumsy.
Zenaide however can be like a daughter of Zeus in the sense that she can be firey, *mischievous or downright malicious. I mean, Kiki can too, but only when provoked. Zenaide used to just go off.
Now, I’ve had these two cats ever since bringing them home to my tiny apartment back in March, 1996. They moved across country with me, and endured several moves around the Bay Area with me. They’re twelve years old as of the beginning of this month!
That makes Stinky roughly 17 years old!
My man got to meet Stinky when I took him home to meet my Ma back in 2001. He remarked how incredible it was that Kiki looked just like Stinky, his mother. When we flew home again in 2004, my man again marveled at how much the two looked alike. 
Fast forward to me on the phone with my Ma a few days ago, when she mentioned that her cat Stinky was no longer around. I felt sad and said “Oh no! What happened?”
Ma said that it was the coldest nights of the year back at the end of February, and Stinky had stopped eating and was constantly curled up in her favourite chair by the heater, trying to stay warm. Ma put her sweatshirt and other items of clothing down in a nest for Stinky to curl up in, and the other cats in the house started coming up and laying in the chair with Stinky to provide further warmth.
Ma said she’d been giving Stinky medicine for a thyroid issue, and is now wondering if that made things worse. She refused to go into detail about any visits to the vet regarding Stinky, however.
Ma said that one night, Stinky simply passed away. 
I told my Ma how sorry I was for her loss. She said she’d been so sad, that she didn’t tell ANYONE until now, not even my brother. She just didn’t want to talk about it because it was so horrible.
I asked why it was horrible and what she did with Stinky.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
MA, WHAT DID YOU DO WITH HER? Did you bury her in the backyard?
“No, the ground is frozen with too much snow!”
DID YOU TAKE HER TO THE VET?
“No.”
DID YOU PUT HER IN THE FREEZER? IT’S OK…
“No, I don’t want to talk about it.”
OH MA, YOU DIDN’T….
“I couldn’t keep her in the house! I don’t want to talk about it.”
She won’t talk about it but I know her mindset and I know what she did.
She threw Stinky in the trash and took out the trash that night.
How horrible. Seventeen years of companionship and she throws her friend in the garbage. Ugh, so horrible!
This is the same woman who never taught me as a child how to care for a dog. We had a mutt terrier named Lucky, and she got fleas badly every summer. We’d give her flea baths to no avail. Eventually, we had fleas in the house year-round. I’d wake up itching at night because there were fleas in my bed. I shit you not. Ma never got Lucky fixed, so every season, she bled. I’m shocked that she never got knocked up.
Lucky died shortly before my Ma got Stinky the cat. Lucky had gotten cancer, and a huge tumour was growing in her abdomen or uterus or something… and Ma never took her to the vet to get treated. One day, Lucky walked off and never returned. She was found either days or weeks later, in the wheel-well of the camper RV next door.
This is the same woman who also got a black lab female puppy named Indicus dumped off on her doorstep by my brother. My brother was still living there at the time, but eventually moved away, leaving Ma with the dog. Black labs are prone to skin conditions. Indie was no exception. Eventually, Indie went down the same way Lucky did.
Now, full grown black labs are BIG dogs.
Ma buried her in the backyard.
I shudder at the thought. I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that the grave is shallow.
Ugh… anyway, I changed the subject to her living cats and told her how well mine are doing at age 12, and told her that her other cats - Stinky’s kids and grandkids - still have several years ahead of them. Ma liked to hear that, it cheered her up a bit. I then asked if she’d gotten her remaining cats fixed. She said no.
I asked her why, and reminded her again that because she’s low income, she can get the cats fixed for free at the Humane Society. I’ve told her this countless times over the past dozen years and she never takes the advice. She said she didn’t want to take the cats in to get fixed, and I asked her again WHY.
After all these years, she finally admitted WHY.
It’s because I took my Siva in to get fixed and he died because of a heart defect.
Ma reasoned that since Stinky was pregnant so often, and likely inbreeding, that it was highly likely that her other kittens had heart defects or other health problems too, and could die while getting fixed, too. She just didn’t want to go through with that.
*sigh*
It all makes sense, now. I scarred her with my own sorrowful story of Siva at the time, and didn’t know it. She saw how traumatised I was and didn’t want to go through that herself.
I feel bad for my Ma. I really do. I’m mad at what she did to Stinky but I just feel really, really bad for Ma.
She’s always lived in poverty since the divorce. She’s always denied herself nice things. She worked three jobs to support my brother and I. She moved us from a nice suburban home to a shithole Unibomber shack when money got too tight. I used to give her my hand-me-down clothes so she’d look presentable at work or while in the grocery store, because she refused to buy anything new for herself - everything was done for my brother and I.
When I moved away from home, it was just her and my brother, and he didn’t take care of her at first. Then he got some chick knocked up and became a father so he had his own family to support (they’re still together and I happily call ‘that chick’ my sister-in-law by the way). When my brother left home, it was just Ma.
Now nobody looks in on Ma, and she declines further and further into her world of being a hermit. She works midnights at the grocery store still, after all these years. She comes home and it’s just her and the cats and her cigarettes and her Christian God in that shitty house.
She has no friends because she’s afraid of people. The last time she allowed a man into her life, it was the early 90’s, and she later found out he was married. So she swore off letting ANYONE into her life ever again.
I don’t like that she lives this way but I have no means to change it - I have no money to give to elevate her into retirement to live comfortably and not worry about bills and house payments. I can’t force her to get friends or join any clubs so that her mind doesn’t continue to deteriorate to the point of dementia. Hell, I swear she’s been mentally ill as it is for the last 26 years.
UGH.
She’s chosen her path.
Her path is not my problem.
She’s made her bed.
But man, it hurts to watch.
*Side note on the word “mischievous” - I had the memory hole happen again. I couldn’t think of that word and wracked my brain for several minutes trying to think of it, then spent five minutes on an online thesaurus looking for words like “sly, sneaky, malicious, disobediant, misbehaving, rascally” before the word was found as a synonym to ‘rascally’. In fact, the word was listed from the getgo as a definition of or synonym to ’sly’, as well as to ‘malicious’, but it didn’t click in my head until I got to ‘rascally’ and saw “mischievous” listed - my brain finally clicked.
I can’t tell you how much I hate it when this happens to me. I hate the hole in memory and speech and writing. I hate it.
