A Cat By Any Other Name

David Rodriguez — A Cat By Any Other Name

Hello. For a man, a miscarriage is a particular kind of pain. And if anyone is thinking, like, for a man, really? Well, that’s kind of the point, because even as… I’m going through one of the most painful experiences of my life. I’m very aware that my wife is going through more pain, physical pain, the same loss that I’m feeling, and also just society and gender things. I don’t really understand, but I know how real they are. And the ticking clock. It doesn’t help they call it a geriatric pregnancy either. I don’t know. The medical field needs a marketing person or something. And she didn’t want to talk about it.

And that might serve a lot of men very well, but I’m a Berkeley beta male. I talk about it. That’s how I go. This isn’t Iowa where she grew up. And she’s a stoic person. She just conquers life. And she didn’t want to talk about it. So I couldn’t talk about it, because I didn’t want her to see me cry or anything like that. And then you go into this post-miscarriage purgatory period where you can’t plan anything. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t know if it’s forever, what it means, and the doctors kind of doesn’t give you good information. It’s all a mystery. It’s like no science. It’s all painful. And we just kind of went back to our life and kind of pretended that being able to drink champagne again was this awesome thing, when it really wasn’t. And one day I was laying in bed, and I was thinking about my childhood, and I said to her, I’d really like to get a fish tank.

And she turned to me and said, that is a terrible idea. You’re not going to clean it. You don’t know anything about fish. And she got up and she stormed off and slammed the bathroom door behind her. And you’re probably making the connection that there was a larger thing going on here. But at the time, I was just pissed off that she didn’t like my awesome fish tank idea. And I didn’t put it together. And then she came back and she looked at me and she said, I want a cat. And we… We had had that conversation before, and it was, I’m allergic to cats. There’s nothing to talk about. This is one argument I should win. And she said, are you really allergic to cats? Is that the truth? I was like, I think it is, yeah. And I just couldn’t say no. But I had a plan. Okay, we’ll go to Cat Town. I’ll play along. She’ll see me have this terrible allergic reaction. She’ll know that we can’t do this, and then maybe we’ll have that other conversation we’re not having, and maybe I’ll get a fish tank.

Instead, we left Cat Town with two cats. And at Cat Town, they kind of counsel you like you’re a criminal. They’re like, are you ready for this? These are feral cats that we recondition, and they’re not gonna love you, and are you ready to not be loved? And I saw she was not hearing any of this. She’s like, those are those people they don’t love. They’re gonna love us. But when we brought them home, one of them kind of was comfortable, the other one hid, and you would just hear a hiss as you were walking around the house, you didn’t know where it was coming from. And my wife, Rude, she just took it on. I would come home and there’d be piles of boxes of toys and cat trees, and I’d be like, we already have a cat tree. She’s like, we have one. But mostly I would come home and I would go into the bedroom, not even realizing she came home from work, didn’t come say hi to me, and she would be half under the bed, because that’s where Hemlock hid, and she would spend hours, inch by inch, building trust with this animal until one night Hemlock jumped into the bed and snuggled with her.

And she put her forehead against hers and I’ve never heard her do a voice before. It was very jarring. She went, hey baby, hey baby. And then we fell asleep and I woke up to Hemlock ripping my feet to shreds. And this every day, every night, no sleep. And when you’re half awake, it is actually terrifying. But I couldn’t bring myself to say, let’s not have Hemlock sleep in the bedroom because of this larger thing we weren’t talking about. And I guess that’s chivalry, I guess. I don’t know, letting Hemlock shred my feet. And then one day at work, I was in a meeting with my manager, and he had actually had a baby recently, and he had actually named her what we were going to name our child. He didn’t know that. And he was distracted the whole time because she was doing adorable things. And after the meeting, I went to my bedroom, and I just sobbed. uncontrollably and was confronting that I don’t know if I was ever really honest myself about how badly I wanted this.

And I laid in bed and I just sobbed deeper and harder and louder than I ever had. And Hemlock jumped on the bed, I hid my feet out of instinct, and he laid on my chest and just started rubbing his face against mine. And so now I was crying tears of joy and sadness at the same time and petting Hemlock and then also reaching my phone for one hand to take a video Because I know the rules. And I wanted to show the people at Cat Town that they were wrong about us. Because they would send us these shaming pictures of Hemlock in the laps of the volunteers. Be like, oh, it worked for us. Anyway. I recently read some research that… Oh, my allergy. It just went away. I don’t know how she does it. She’s right about everything. She wins every argument. She still thinks I was lying. And I was questioning, how did she win that argument?

And why did I ever have it allegedly? Who won the election? What is truth? What’s going on? So I don’t know how she did it, but she wins everything. Wife is always right, that’s the lesson. Get two cats. And I read this research that people that grow up with animals are less likely to have allergies. And that made me so happy because when our son is born in a couple months, He’s going to be a cat person. Thank you.