mothering

 

Princess and three of her kittens (#4 is under the others) when they were hours old.

This morning I was getting ready for church and heard one of our kittens crying. I thought little of it and blow dried my hair. After I finished my hair more than ten minutes later I noticed the kitten was still crying, so I went to investigate. When I got to their room I saw that one of them had somehow escaped the box and was wandering around. The mother cat was in her box nursing the other three although she had her eye on the escapee. Upon seeing me she meowed in an abrupt manner which I interpreted to be: Help me out here! I picked up the small kitten (which in 5 weeks will belong to our friends Rebecca and John) and returned him to his box. Both he and his mother seemed grateful.

I walked away wondering why the mother hadn’t simply picked up the kitten by its neck with her mouth like all the cats I’ve ever seen can do and returned it to its box. It occurred to me that she just doesn’t know how to do it. So much for animal instinct!

We weren’t home when the kittens were born. We returned from Father’s Day dinner late one night to find an exhausted mother cat, one freaked out male (fixed and not the father) cat, three healthy kittens, one not-moving kitten, and one kitten soaking wet, freezing, and meowing loudly in the corner of the box. I don’t know if they came too fast, if there were problems, or what else, but for whatever reason, she’d only managed to clean up three of the babies and get them nursing. We let the kids peak at the kittens and promptly sent them to bed. We picked up the non-moving cat and with heavy hearts realized that it had already passed. Our attention quickly went to the forgotten kitten in the corner. I sent Taylor to Wal-mart for kitten milk and a kitten bottle and set to warming and cleaning up the freezing little guy. I warmed up a rice pack and nested him in it. I kept trying to get the mother to pay attention to him, but she refused. In desperation I even tried to get Harvey (our boy cat) to lick him (he licks everything and everyone!), but he wouldn’t.

By the time Taylor returned the kitten was ready to try the bottle. I kept the rice pack warm and tried to bottle feed him for hours. Sometime past 2am I returned him to his mother and hoped for the best. The next morning she had cleaned him up ,and he was nursing, and now he’s just fine.

It has been interesting to see Princess (formally known as Queen Princess Fiona) try to mother these kittens. She’s terribly inadequate. And I think she’s terribly reluctant at times. For the first few days we had to lock her in the room with them otherwise she’d head outside to lounge her day away in the sun. She’d try to nurse them sitting up, I’d correct her and help her lay down. It got so that every time I peaked in the room she’d lay down and roll to her side (sometimes on top of the poor little things), begrudgingly allowing them to suckle. (Can you blame the poor thing? Nursing one hungry mouth has brought ME to tears; I can’t imagine four mouths at the same time, each mouth accompanied by four sets of claws!).

And yet now, three weeks later, they thrive. They are healthy, clean, fat, and adorable. She still goes outside, but she runs back in whenever they call. She’s still honing her mothering skills---apparently some (how to pick up your kitten) she’ll never gain.

Watching her I imagine it must be that way with so many of us. Some women seem to be natural mothers. They get pregnant seemingly without effort, easily blossoming as a fertile flower in springtime. Their skin and hair radiate throughout pregnancy, and they deliver a nine pound bundle of joy with minimal effort and without medication. The baby nurses immediately, they leave the hospital in their skinny jeans, and make dinner for their family the next night.

I honestly never considered how I would be as a mother. In my later teenage years I excelled at everything---school, pageants, anything else I put my mind to. I was good at everything I wanted to be good at---beyond good---top of my class and top ten at Miss America. I probably naturally assumed I’d be an excellent mother. And I’m not. It’s disappointing sometimes. It didn’t come naturally. Sometimes I really struggle. I think Princess and I have a little bit in common.

Here’s me: It takes me a year or more of testing and temperature taking and trying before I get pregnant. Then, if I stay pregnant (I’ve lost two already this year), I throw up for twenty weeks, then blow up for the next twenty. Then sweating, and throwing up (again), and swelling from water retention---and only with help from an epidural---I deliver my (admittedly beautiful) babies. Claire probably almost died it took me so long (five days!) to figure our how to get her to latch (and even then I suffered for three months until we figured it out). Although I had read the books and babysat and talked people’s ears off about babies, I had no idea how to nurse, how to soothe, how and when to diaper, or how to feel like I was keeping my head above water at the end of the day. Most of the time I have no idea what I’m doing. In fact, once I handled something badly with Claire and I literally thought: Your real mother would have handled that better. Realizing too late that I was her real mother, and (sometimes too bad for her) I’m the only one she gets.

And yet, nearly six years into being a mother, my children thrive. They are healthy, clean, fat, and adorable. (By fat, I mean healthily fat. We don’t do stick-thin at our house---none of us!) I don’t know exactly how I do it, but somehow they are smart and responsible and extremely well-behaved in public (99% of the time at least). The kittens certainly haven’t made it this far on their own (do you know they can’t even poop by themselves for weeks? The mom has to make that happen for them!). And I’d like to think that my kids haven’t made it this far on their own either (they even poop by themselves now, that’s lucky!).