Corri- Thanks so much for clarifying... your point is now crystal clear-- YAY!
Regarding bf treating me badly, especially comparing that to behavior toward animals: THIS IS SO INTERESTING!!! I had a feeling it would be, if I could ever understand you!
You're so right that if someone treats an animal badly, I wouldn't tolerate it, BUT when bf treated me badly I looked at it AS IF A SCARED ANIMAL WERE TREATING ME BADLY.
Do you follow that?
In fact, there was a cat that came up to my house years ago. I called him Bigfoot. Very wild. I first started feeding him by putting the food bowl down and pushing it toward him with a broom. After a while, he would rub his head on the broom before he ate. Then I started to sneak my hand down the handle of the broom until I could touch him. Can you guess how long it was from the time I first fed him until the day I first touched him? TWO YEARS! THAT, my dear, is patience.
I had to catch him in a Havaheart trap to take him in to be neutered. When he went in that trap and it closed, I cried, because I knew he only went in there because he trusted me. He felt betrayed (or I imagined he did). The vet said Bigfoot was so banged up he could hardly locate his testicles! (Hmmm...)
Gradually over the next few years, it got to where he would come up on the patio to eat. I could pet him. Then he developed a large tumor and I had to lift him on the table to eat. But the first time I ever picked him up and held him in my lap was the day I had to take him in to the vet to be put to sleep. THE FIRST TIME... at that point it had been probably six years since I started to feed him.
Many times when I first started seeing bf, I thought of him as Bigfoot. I reminded myself that I have patience, that he was scared, that he didn't mean to hurt me (and I don't think he did).
Once after Bigfoot had been coming up on the patio to eat, I put food down and he swatted me and drew blood. I cried and cried... not because I was mad at him, but because he was still so scared that he could manage to see me as the enemy after all I had done for him. I felt sorry FOR HIM.
Does this sound like my relationship with bf...
OMIGOD: I just noticed BigFoot = bf.
Lil stares in astonishment at the computer screen.
Anyway, it was very important to me that that worn-out, snaggletoothed old kitty should live out his final days in UTTER safety and comfort and I saw to that. If I get to heaven (if there is a heaven) my care of that animal is my ticket there.
He is buried in my kitty graveyard around the roots of an ash tree along with nine or ten others. That tree fell down a few years ago and then new growth sprang up from the roots. It's now kind of a bushy tree, and I imagine that the leaves and bark are made from the molecules of all my cats. I look right at that tree during my early morning poetry breaks.
