Prayers of a little girl, and other reflections on parenting and animal ownership

(From my original Blogspot)

At intermission, the stray black kitten seemed to single us out as if she already liked us. Outside the opera house in the cool of the evening, black and glossy eyed, she pranced by tantalizingly close to my little girl’s legs, begging to be picked up. My daughter squealed with delight! I leaned over and scooped up the ebony black kitten, sleek and black, fighting back the voice in my head that said it was a stray and who knows what disease it could carry. But the healthy looking kitty purred and cuddled reassuringly. I set the soft package in my daughter’s eager arms. Her eyes glowed as she hugged her package tight, with a look in her eyes both a mixture of hope and longing.

Only a few months ago, our own black kitty had died. Poisoned on Halloween night. Not some kind of conspiracy, but an unfortunate encounter with some rat poison. We had picked him up at from a pet rescue sale held at the local pet store. Only a $20 donation and he was ours. I had called my husband from the pet store. “Is it okay with you if we bring home a cat?” Not expecting him to be too excited, the kids and I were ecstatic when he charitably agreed to survive the torment of owning a dander-producing-good-for-nothing cat. He knew how much our kids loved pets. My little S. adored that new cat from the minute we brought it home: pushing it in her shopping cart or stroller, cuddling it during her TV shows, and even letting it sit on her lap when she ate her breakfast cereal. That Halloween when he died, she was so very sad. She didn’t run to her room and cry or anything, but a great crease wrinkled her brow, and questions brewed in her head. I know this sadness passes. She is young; only three. She won’t remember long.

But she remembered. As time went by she still asked for “Whiskers.” Being tucked into bed at night she would plead for understanding in her own three-year-old way. “Whiskers got his body off, but Jesus will get his body back some day?” Many nights she would start this conversation, and I would point to her picture of Jesus and tell her that He loves all of the animals, and that Whiskers is very happy in paradise. Some day Whiskers can have his body back, but right now his spirit is with Jesus. She never became tired of these reassurances. She seemed to need me to read her little scripture board books to her more and took comfort in spiritual reassurance of a God who is watching over all, even the animals.

During the day, at play, she would thoughtfully ponder on Whisker’s fate and make small comments that told me he was still on her mind. Really, part of the beauty of pets is the chance they offer us as parents to discuss life and death; to encounter themes so serious to all of human existence in a form only slightly more palatable than our own mortality. To a sensible adult, the death of a high-maintenance kitten may be a relief. But to the child this death is to touch the border of a horrifying truth they have not yet grown accustomed to.

I find it an understatement to say that the faith of a child is a beautiful thing. It is awe-inspiring. Since Whisker’s death, how many times had S. mourned? Not surprisingly, eventually she began pleading with me for a replacement. Dear little girl, kitties are such a nuisance. They make your brother sneeze. Their food gets spilled on the porch and attracts bugs. Water gets on the spilled food and gets mashed and then tracked around. And don’t you know those stinky lumps in the sandbox are of his making? Dear girl, no more kitties, I thought to myself. Out loud I would say soothingly, “yes dear, sometime we’ll look for another one” knowing full well that I didn’t intend to go looking.

But at the opera house that evening as she held this new little kitty in her arms, I had the feeling that God had answered a prayer of hers, perhaps not worded as carefully as The Lord’s Prayer in the Bible, but with more sincerity than most prayers ever even pretend to be. Only a heart of stone could have pried the kitten lose from those tender little hands. Yes kitten, stay. Answer a baby’s prayers. Bring joy to a child. Perhaps that is why you were created. You serve no other purpose that I can see (well, kill a mouse or two) than to delight a child. Stay with us and serve your purpose.

Or course we took the kitten home with us and a few months have passed. This kitten is so completely identical to the one that was killed that the two kitties have merged in S.'s head; both being pure black. Negligent cat owner that I am, this new cat turned up pregnant when she wasn’t entirely grown up herself (let’s hope my parenting is better than my cat-raising). I announced to the children that the cat was feeling plump, and as her plumpness expanded there could be no question that we would soon be witnessing one of nature’s miracles. They talked about this coming event in excited tones to their friends, “did you know our cat is going to have kittens?”

We live in the city where nature is so sterilized that our “chicken” comes to us in pre-cut and frozen portions. The chicken looks so unlike it ever was part of the animal kingdom that it often does not occur to us that we are eating something that was once living. I explained to my children that when I was a child we had chickens and you had to break their neck to kill them, then scald them to remove the feathers, after which you had to navigate their anatomy in a gruesome fashion in order to eventually come up with any meat for dinner. They stared at me blankly. But now we were going to have baby kittens. Now we would see something of nature. Life on the M. Farm, I called it. An animal of ours was going to give birth.

My oldest son was the first one to discover the baby. The mother cat was in labor, and the first wee thing had already arrived. “Everybody come see! The kittens are being born!” I called the children to come watch. Our back porch, under the glow of the porch light as the evening darkness pressed around, became a laboratory of life. The education that those kids received over the next couple of hours was of better quality than they could have received doing anything else. They saw the babies emerge, one by one, about 20 minutes apart, in a shiny sack that the mother cat had to bite in order to release the kitten into the world. Then through some incredible force of instinct, she would turn and bite off the placenta and devour that organ. When she took too long to get to the placenta we would wonder if this time she would forget, but she never did. God told her what came next.

During the quiet moments during the birthing, I spoke to my children of how the animals obey God; how the very elements of this earth obey God; and how we are the only creation of God who has this free will, this pride. Our job, I said, was to become so in tune with what God wanted us to do that we simply did it. See how this cat knows what to do? She is in perfect tune to what God is telling her to do. Let us try to be like that.

We own a lot of pets: fish, iguana, parakeet, cat (well, cats), dog, and a huge catfish in a tank all of his own. Over the years we’ve owned gerbils, mice, more iguanas and birds and cats and dogs. I, believe it or not, am not an animal person. Despite all appearances, I never wanted to work in a zoo. I can certainly do without the expense or the mess. But what I cannot do without is that something that animals bring into my children’s lives. Somehow I sense that, starting with Adam’s naming of the first animal, we as humans have a kinship with our creature companions, and would do well to learn from them. --

Post Script: Just as I typed the last line, my ten-year-old came running into my room to report that the baby kittens had just been killed, every one of them by a stray dog in our back yard. The dog had come to eat out of their mother’s food dish, but he senselessly took more than he came for. The kittens were found scattered on the lawn, dog saliva covering their little bodies, their last mews silenced in their tortured expressions. Their eyes had only opened this week. One hour earlier they had been nursing in their little corner of the porch. Just one hour.

Would it be horrible to say that that there could be some sense of relief on the part of the adults? No need to try to find homes for these illegitimates now (Bob Barker, you were always right). None of that was spoken, only exchanged in knowing glances between mother and father.

A grave was dug; a family prayer was said as we held hands to remember these little creatures. The struggle for life is the oldest kind of drama and we were first-hand witnesses. Dear children, remember that God is here even in this sorrow, even if you ever have to go off to a war, even if one of your own children were to die. Remember these things.