A Fat Cat Gets Busted (and what it means to me and you)
/Cats slink. Cats connive. Cats ponder, purr, pretend. They meow their way into our hearts and play with our emotions. These are the reasons we love them (and sometimes why we do not).
Gracie, my cat, found herself to be two pounds overweight late last fall. In consultation with her veterinarian, we cut her portions and mixed her yummier food with another kind – called metabolic and really meaning diet. Oh, the shame of it. How she longed and begged for the other food as her portions shrank. How we suffered together – her for the food of better days and me because of her incessant begging.
However: It worked. Within a few months, Gracie shed the excess poundage and rediscovered her formerly playfulness. She leaped. She ran. She tumbled. In short, she rediscovered her True Self.
When January 2021 arrived, she and I flew to Florida. The cat in the shoulder bag on my right side felt light and less burdensome as we walked through security and to our gate at the airport.
Fast forward to early April. Suddenly the very lively cat companion stopped waking me up at dawn for her portion for food. The leaps left. The skittering across floors sputtered to slow speeds. The toys bored her. She stopped eating all her food, something previously impossible to imagine, yet she seemed bulkier. After two weeks of this strange behavior, and worried sick, I called her Florida vet for an exam.
After being poked, prodded, and pushed, the perplexed vet said, “Gracie seems like a perfectly happy and healthy cat. However, she’s regained the two pounds she lost which may account for her sluggishness. We’ll cut her portions (again? I thought!), and alternate with some soft food to keep her interested. Maybe as she loses the weight, she will feel better and act differently.”
You must understand: Gracie’s curiosity often “gets the cat”. Her interest in water, for example, sometimes means she slips into a filling bathtub. Her obsession with jumping often results in clinging to the laundry sink because she found herself a little short of the counter around it. You get the picture. So, two weeks into the new weight-loss program, I found myself puzzled by her continued disinterest in her food. No pawing on the side the bed or tenderly combing through my hair to awaken me for food in the morning. No plaintive mewling, “Feed me. Feed me.” I felt sad and worried about her.
For some months, Gracie has liked to play in the pantry where her extra toys and cat paraphernalia reside. She pokes around in there, rustling in the cat bucket for a soft pretend mouse and a catnip-filled ball. Sometimes she stays in there for 30 minutes while I work nearby. Or so I thought.
A few days ago, my curiosity about her growing interest in the pantry got the best of me. When I opened the door as wide as it would go, and pushed deeper into it, what did I behold on the floor of panty?
A cat’s body – but with no visible head – leaning hard against her backup bag of food.
As I pulled her head out of it, I realized wily Gracie, using the only tools available to her – her claws and sharp teeth, over the months worked a hole in the bag. Now it had grown to a long slit, just the right size for a small cat’s head. Busted! I tossed her out of pantry, poured the food into a large glass jar, closed the door, and turned around to find Gracie gracefully sitting on the tiled kitchen floor, calmly licking her chops and proud as could be. Stunned, I told her, “You are not sick. You are sneaky!”
What, you might ask, does this have to do with me or, for that matter, you?
Like Gracie, we can be sneaky. We feel our bodies changing – a little extra weight, a few less minutes of exercise or movement there, a nagging ache here. We turn a blind eye to what our bodies are really telling us.
Like Gracie, we can convince ourselves that all is well and lose connection to our body’s True Self. We “cheat” in ways little – a purloined cookie now and then or an avoidance of going to the healing center or the doctor when we sense something is a little bit off.
In the end, I realized, Gracie and I are more alike than different. It’s easy for both of us to convince ourselves that our actions (or inactions) do not have consequences.
Unlike Gracie, most often no one else is going to act on our behalf for what we are sensing in our beautiful, magnificent bodies. We alone need to be aware of that and act accordingly, whether giving it more water or healthier food, more movement or more rest. To be aware of the joy and the challenges all through life, even when agedness arrives.
Are you listening to your body?
Am I?
