On (Not) Being a Cat Lady

As I mentioned in my previous post, a good topic for me lately is the decision I made not to become a cat lady.  At one point in my life when I was single with no hope of finding the 'one', I thought to myself that I'd become a crazy cat lady.  I LOVE cats (but not as much as the girl on the eHarmony video) and when I don't have a cat I'm kind of weird and collect anything I can find that has anything to do with cats.  That includes, pictures, cups, bowls, figures, websites, apps, calendars, decorations, fabric...well, you get the idea.  And growing up at home with my Mom and brother at the time, after my dad passed I obsessed over getting a cat until Mom finally caved, and eventually we got a second one as well.

Second cat was named Neo and he was THE BEST CAT EVER.  Okay, no cat is perfect, but for me he was the best, not to say my darling little Olivia isn't a good cat, but I still love Neo dearly and his life was cut short by some disease that destroyed his kidneys.  He went downhill for a good year before he finally passed away sleeping at my Mom's house.  Luckily I didn't have to be there when it happened (she lives a state over from me) and I got to say my goodbyes a few weeks before.  Anyway, he wasn't the reason I decided never to be a cat lady, it was actually the show Animal Hoarders that nailed me on the fact.

Now that I have Olivia I realize just how much work goes into owning an animal.  I didn't have to pay all the bills (some of them with Neo, but not all) and didn't have to do all the cleanup and playing because my Mom and brother were around.  Now it's just me and my husband and it's a LOT of work.  Just knowing how much work one cat takes, we've kind of decided not to bother with looking for another cat right away, if ever.  Olivia's enough for the two of us to handle right now.

Skip into the world of animal hoarding and you'll see a whole new world to the 'crazy cat ladies' out there.  As I said, even if my husband were to die, I'd never hoard cats.  NEVER.  In fact, I wouldn't get cats to replace the emptiness in my life, because you know what?  It's not worth the time and money and anguish, and I'd never want to do that to a cat.  So... I'll never be a 'crazy cat lady' with a dozen or more cats.  I might still be cat-crazy and buy a bunch of cat related things to the point where people buy me things that have cats in them and when people come over they think my decorating style is 'cats' - which it isn't really, it's more anime, but that's a whole other topic for another day!

I think I might like to stay on the topic of hoarding for a bit though, so in the next post I might delve into what it's like to be on that brink between "collecting" and "hoarding" and how easy it can be to slip over that edge if you aren't careful.