Trust Banks

She’s under the bed and won’t come out.  I know what to do when this happens on a date, but what do I do about a cat?  Dates can usually be coaxed out with a little belly rub.  It’s not working for my cat.  She slips further under the bed.

 

There’s a serious hitch in our relationship, and this one calls for antibiotics.  Yeah, one of us has some serious explaining to do.  I asked about her history, and she purred that she was ok, as she nuzzled my hand.

 

She lied. 

 

See, I brought her home and she was sick. I didn’t know it, but yeah.  Sick.  Her first day home she showed her love by peeing blood on my sheets.  Then she made sure to spot my comforter and quilt too.  Persephone is a thorough cat with a big bladder.

 

Bladder day was Sunday.  Being a dog guy, I’m not familiar with most cat bonding rituals, but I felt safe in assuming this process wasn’t one of them.  I called everybody I knew with a kitty--ok, my pervy readers, stop giggling. Please?  Besides I’m practically a recluse.  I don’t know that many cat people of any nature. At this point if I were doing what you’re suggesting, I’d have called MyEx. 

 

So I called MyEx. I called others too.  I called other people who had cats and could tell me what was the appropriate level of panic.  I believed Friskies freak-out force 5 was where I belonged, but everybody else said, no.  This was a mere murmur in the meow mix.

 

The vet agreed.

 

“I should lock you up for what you’ve done!”

“I’m sorry, I thought your assistant was coming on to me.”

 

Ok, on that we disagreed, but when it came to the cat, we were kits of a litter.

 

“Take her home and give her these antibiotics.”

 

Now in any relationship there’s a breaking in period.  No matter who it is, each bond is a stretch for trust. The earlier you are in a relationship, the less elasticity that trust has. If you can’t find trust in a relationship, then the bond gives way and you fly away from each other.

 

We’ve all had that happen.  People in our lives we thought were the Mary Anne to our Ginger, or maybe even the Fred Astaire to our gingerly dancing Ginger Rogers beat.  Time and trust teaches us that they’re nothing more than a lame moment, and we fall mute thanking God that we’re not trapped on a desert island alone with them.  There’s nothing more to say.  For some that’s a friendship, for others that’s marriage.  For me, it’s a cat, hunching dead center under the bed. 

 

Well, not dead.  She still moves away if I reach for her.  See, she’s learning to trust, and I’m learning have much. Oh, and she also doesn’t like the taste of the antibiotics.  I can’t say that I blame her, the whole application process sucks: I pry her mouth open then squirt 1cc of fluid towards the back of her throat.  Yeah, she’s not that kind of girl and she makes sure I know it—from under the bed.

 

I’ve tried friendly foreplay. I drop in at random moments and offer her pets without drugs, but she scrunches away remembering the bad.  And that’s where she bases her trust.  Now in the long run, we’ll be ok, because I only have a few more doses, but will she let me close again?  Can she learn to trust?

 

When we brought Cosmo home for the first time. He hid behind the Jacuzzi for a week. He had trust issues.  He also wouldn’t eat from a bowl.  His food needed to be poured on the ground.  An odd little guy that Cosmo. In the end though he warmed up though.  It took time, and care, but he learned who I really was by my actions. 

 

Sure there were things about me that scared him, like when I yelled at him for digging up the rose bush I’d planted hours earlier.  That was the only thing he ever tried to fetch.  Every time I planted it, he’d bring it back to me.  That’s probably why I never buried bodies in the back yard.  I didn’t want those back.

 

 The same thing happens in our human relationships.  Well, not the backyard body pile, but the trust thing.  I’ve seen relationships fall apart for less trust—or even more trust misplaced.  Of course the problem with misplaced trust is it creates baggage for our relationships in the future.

 

 I don’t think Persephone and I are that different: she hides under the bed, I hide in my office.   She’s furry; I’m furry. She laps blue water from the toilet; I do the same.  We’re practically blue-tongued twins.

 

I think we have things going for us.  We both have trust issues, but we understand each other.  We watch animal documentaries on TV. We know the score. We’ve seen Trusty the gazelle mauled by Hungry the lion.

 

“Welcome, friend. Care for a sip of this fresh wat—AAAA!”

 

Oh, Persephone roots for the lion every time, but I’m still hoping she’ll come around. I think she hopes the same for me, and that I’ll just cut it out with the antibiotic.  In the end, I think that we’re looking for that in all of our relationships: the comfort and the safety of trust.  Somebody who’ll show us that it’s ok to come out from underneath the bed and be who we are in the wild.