His Understanding and Love, all the same

Today was a hard day. My cat had to go for his check up and had to stay at the hospital for the day. When the time came to fetch him the vet told me that they had problems getting him out the cage because he was so hostile. When my husband and I finally arrived at the cage we saw exactly what the vet was talking about. Our cat had morphed into wolverine, ferocious and scary. It took us an hour to get him out the cage and I was crying. I remember the story my mom told me about the knee op I had back in 2004. It was my first operation ever and I was scared. The ligaments in my knee were severed so the surgeon reconstructed my ligaments from fibres of my hamstrings but when I finally woke up in the ward, I was thrashing. I remember not being able to feel my leg and in my anaesthetic – induced state, I begun pulling at the bandage on my leg while shouting and screaming. I was trying to rip the thing off, so much so that the nurses came and gave me one of those sedative injections in my bum. It didn’t work, so they gave me another and I was out but not before I glanced up in to my mother’s face, it was red and she was sobbing, shaking for her child. That was me today. Sobbing at the cage trying to convince my fluffy son that mom was going to take him home but he hissed, after all he is a cat not a human and he just doesn’t understand like we do and we can’t blame him.

When we finally got him home, my hubby sat with him on the floor and fluffy son was all over his dad. When I went near him he went for me. Somehow in his mind I was to blame. Yet I had no hand in anything that transpired, but I understood it, I am his primary caretaker, the one who rescued him from the pound all those years ago. I saved him from the death sentence that waited for him the very next day and he stayed by my side, nursed me through sickness and sadness. So why mom, why, why the vet and why did I have to stay there. I get it and he is a cat so he must be a cat, so I left him to rest and sleep while I processed. Processed the very long list of grief and pain that has now come up through this experience and in my woundedness that is pulled from one of the many layers that makes me a human being, I curl foetus – like up on my bed and sob and in that moment God is so close, in every breath and every molecule. And I ask, why God why, it hurts.

And then fluffy son walks towards me as I dry my eyes and make that yummy batch of muffins and I see him lick his lips with a newly developed habit. A habit that says I don’t want to eat out of a bowl anymore, I want to eat out of your hand mom. So I grab the cup of pellets and sit down on the floor and I feed him from my hand. And while the pellets slide across the floor, I cup my hands until my palms are upwards and form a barrier from where he can eat. And in that moment I begin to weep as I know that in every way my Daddy is never scared of the way I feel but even when I am upset or asking why from my primary care giver, He opens His Palm and from His Hand I eat.

And when Pilach was finished eating we took a silent walk out on to the veranda beneath the most beautiful still sky and then he decides its time to go inside. As he walks in he begins caressing his face on the coffee table with a smile on his dial. He looks up at me as if inviting me in and I bend down and begin stroking his little face and he rubs even harder. Seems I am forgiven, because when I stop he glances upwards and begs the question, where are you going? Then he stares up at the couch and I know what that means so I lift him on to my favourite red blankie, my Yeshua blankie and there he rests and eats just one more time from my hand and we finish with a kiss on his head, like so many times before. And in the turmoil and grief of my feelings, My Primary Caregiver and Father loves me still the same and His heart burns with passion as He kneels down as I open my heart and invite Him in to all this pain and grief, and in a deep understanding He teaches me something I cannot explain.