#23 - When Your Name Means No

One of my cats is too smart for her own good.

Like open up the cabinets and slice open every package and eat the contents smart.

Like all of my pantries have child locks on them (and one time she kind of figured out the mechanics for a childlock and that was terrifying to witness her brain work it out in real time) smart.

But when she would start to do something—push a glass towards the edge of the counter, scratch at a door, walk across my pillow as to ensure that only a few strands of my hair are tugged therefore exponentially increasing the pain and annoyance of the act, I would shout her name.

Angrily.

“Booboo!”

She wouldn’t necessarily stop, but she would pause. She sometimes looked cowed, but often more defiant than before.

The other cat rarely misbehaves. She’s small and sweet and doesn’t like to be picked up (though that’s somewhat changed in the last few months to my unending delight) and rarely causes trouble on purpose.

Her name is only ever said with sweet, lilting voices.

She turns, slowly. If you say her name in any tone besides that, she doesn’t recognize it. Her one major vice is chewing on plastic, and no matter how many times I say “Weem!” she doesn’t pause. She doesn’t even glance at me. Her name is never equivocated to a scolding. My tongue has no memorized harshness.

Booboo was a stray who hung around in a friend’s yard.

She was hungry, and she’s remained in a perpetual state of food insecurity no matter how many times I prove to her that being my cat means that not only will she not go hungry, I will actually happily sacrifice my own budget to make sure that the quality of her food does not waiver.

I care for myself, but I have the agency. My cats have very little agency and so I take the decisions I make around their health and wellness much more seriously. They eat the best possible diet available on the commercial market. Their litter box is now scooped twice a day because it’s easier to do if it only takes 10 seconds, their litter is low-dust because I worry about them getting UTIs from backsplashes of dust. They get Furminated regularly to reduce hairballs, and after the terrifying claw incident of 2021, BooBoo now gets regular trims of front AND back paws. (I feel like this is the bare minimum since I have all the necessary means to make this a reality, but this is not the time for me to get judgemental about how past people in my life refused any help or education because they were vaguely ashamed of the fact that they needed one at all. But I would like to point out that no one ever tells anyone how to care for a cat, and the best information we had in the 1990s is not the information we have now, so yeah, maybe Friskies was what their parents fed but maybe taking just a single second to do some reflection and realize that there are many things that all of our parents did with the best of intentions that we do not repeat and what’s the point of being a pet nutrition expert if everyone is too afraid to take the advice out of the fear they’ll feel or seem stupid!)

I was still treating Booboo like a problem child. It was somewhat comical, the amount how much trouble she caused. But then I realized that she was not trying to cause trouble. What did she actually want? (Besides food.)

Love?

Let’s try that.

I stopped yelling her name.

Things got better.

Like, a lot better.

And it turns out, I don’t yell in my house anymore. I don’t raise my voice inside. I rarely express frustration these days, and it’s exclusively reserved for the massive structural failings that capitalism and the cult of the individual hath wrought or the unnecessary suffering of those I love that I’m powerless to help with.

I play with Booboo more. I bought her springs and let her hide them all under the fridge for me to dig out and I play fetch for as long as she wants to keep bringing those springs back.

I have a lot more patience these days. I don’t snap at her. We cuddle when she’s being a brat. She stopped scratching on the bathroom door because I leave it cracked in case she wants to push her way in. She’s got a new thing of hanging out on top of the toilet while I wash my face at night.

She grabs my wrist with her paws, claws kept in, to guide my hand to scratch at the spot behind her ear.

She sits when it’s time for food. She may follow me to Weems feeding area, but she runs to her spot when I point and say “kitchen”. She’s going to learn to jump up and perch on my shoulders—we’re already making headway and I’ve been half-heartedly training her for like five days.

Booboo is one of the smartest cats I’ve ever met. She also has a pretty decent judge of character and will, in fact, hiss at all my enemies for me. I love her for it.

I used to joke that she was put on this earth to teach me unconditional love and never-ending patience.

« and I don’t think it’s a joke anymore »

We’ve figured out the placement so she can lay across my arms while I work. I’ve left the right side of my desk empty so she can sprawl and watch the birds that my neighbor feeds flock about. She doesn’t wake me up in the mornings but does now sleep on the bed at night.

I really think that her energy has shifted so much, and I can only think that it’s a reflection of the massive shift that I can feel in my own these last few months. I no longer have this base resentment inside of me that built so slowly over the years I had failed to notice just how much space it was taking up. I’m calmer these days. I catch myself smiling at random, which I don’t think has ever happened before in my life. I love that the only two beings I am responsible for the happiness of are totally chill with sleeping for 18 hours of the day and keeping them happy mostly involves tasks that I too enjoy and benefit from.

Have you ever pet a purring cat? That shit’ll soothe your soul.

Have you ever pet a purring Booboo while she drools happily all over your hand and her purrs are so loud they become distracting for the other people on a Zoom call? Because that’s the good shit.

Street cat. Riffraff. I don’t buy that.

I started joking that Booboo needed a rebrand because so many people had heard of her past misdeeds and the level of destruction she was capable of. But then…I kind of followed through and really started giving her all the love I had suddenly come into a surplus of. And it worked! Goobs now got middle schoolers in the Pacific Northwest who call her The Void and write poetry inspired by pictures of her shrouded in the darkness of the open boxes she curls up in.

Is she laying on my arms while I type this? Yes. Will I send this and immediately stick my face in her fur and give her a little face massage? Also yes.

Her name should have never meant no.

Her name should only be said with the love I felt as I watched her put her two little paws up before popping her head out of the Amazon box that she made her initial journey home in. And I’ve promised her that from now on, it will be.