Practice or Review

I sit and write this with a kitten tucked between my arm and the keyboard of my laptop. She came home with us on Halloween–not because she was black or scary (she is decidedly neither)–but because when I pinned her down, her back against my legs, and rubbed her ears she relaxed into the affection I was forcing onto her, and I saw a glimpse of something in that moment of kitten bliss (hers and mine). It simply made sense to bring her home and watch her meld into the familial fold.

Her penchant for cuddling, for curling up on a lap, a chest, a shoulder, or a bodily nook serves to pin us down for indeterminate amounts of time while we revel in the love she brings to us in her purr and her napping posture. There is an informal (but often enforced) rule in our home that a sleeping or cuddling cat on human is an instant excuse for avoiding a chore. If the water is boiling on the stove, the phone is ringing, the dinner plates need to be cleared and/or washed, and a cat has suddenly appeared on a lap, that lap is free to remain immobile until the cuddly body is gone. Someone else will take care of the chore.

A cuddly kitten body not only helps avoid chores, but most other movement as well. It is all too familiar a feeling; many kittens have come before her. From the first night she crept in between Joe and I in bed and plopped down for the night we knew that she was the puzzle piece we hadn't known was missing. Now we spend our downtime held in our chairs unable and unwilling to move lest we disturb this lovely cherub.

These feelings are familiar, not just because we have lived through and loved kittenhood before, but because it is so reminiscent of babyhood. One of my earliest and favorite memories of my son is the first night we spent in the hospital. I was holding him, chest to chest as he slept. The place where our bodies touched warmed and expanded until it engulfed us both. I had felt connected to him from the first moment that I felt him move inside me, but this outside, physical connection was stronger and deeper than I could have imagined. It was intoxicating, a feeling I didn't want to end–which also meant that I didn't want to move. Once we took him home, I spent as many hours of those first days as I could sitting comfortably on a rocking chair, holding him as he slept, occasionally allowing a visitor or family member a few moments of baby bliss.

On days when my baby and I visited my grandparents, my grandfather would insist on staying home to babysit while Gram and I went out to lunch. We would leave him sitting in the rocking chair cradling the sleeping infant head in the crook of his arm. Hours later we would find him in the same position still happily rocking while baby Vincent slept; Grandpa often nodded off himself, all the while gently rocking them both.

Now my son is expecting a baby of his own. I wonder if this kitten (who came from my son's house) was meant to be with us so that we could be reminded of that all consuming love of a baby, that visceral need to stay in one spot while something warm and cuddly sleeps and we revel in the warmth and intoxication. Are we practicing the immobility of being pinned down by a sleepy, needy baby, or are we simply reviewing our favorite positions.