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5 Problems Only People with Multiple Cats Will Understand

Posted on by Hearts everywhere
22
Mar
  1. You’ll never know who had diarrhea in the litter box.
  2. You never know who shat out a red string. Or a gold thread. Or a rubber band (or two).
  3. You don’t know who left the surprise pile of puke in the kitchen. Or the hallway. Or in the precise place you step when you get out of bed in the morning.
  4. You’re not sure who ate all the dry food. Or the wet food.
  5. You’re not sure who left those scratches on the fake leather ottoman. Or the new leather chair.

The bottom line is there is a shitload of uncertainty and mystery. Unless you install hidden cameras all over your house and watch them, like a psycho stalker (no judgement), these animals co-exist with us, often active when we’re asleep and we have to find the zen with this lack of control and knowledge. I imagine the TV reality family, The Duggers, with their 19 children, had to also acquiesce to this kind of lack of ungovernability.

On the flip side, multiple furballs have definitely translated to multiple bliss. Watching the interaction between kitties is equal to watching an older sibling hold the baby’s hand. There are moments of a feline fairytale, which cuddling cats, echoing purr sessions, and lick-fests, which I call kiss-fests. The love you get from one cat is exponentially more from two cats – or three.

Additionally, cats have a biological need to roughhouse, scratch and bite (LOVINGLY). When cats have sister/brother/roommate cats, they have buddies with whom they can get their aggression out. I recommend getting cats in pairs because innately they are animals who are most content with their pride. They feel happier, safer and more social with cats around them.

About the author:

Galina Nemirovsky is a freelance writer and essayist, transcribing the human condition using examples from her life. She contributes regularly to The Huffington Post on life, love, relationships, clowns, cats, and catastrophes. Galina dedicated 2016 to her 365 Project: Life Clubs where she wrote an autobiographical essay a day on her blog: www.HeartsEverywhere.com

Follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/heartseverywher and Instagram, where she is working on this year’s “365 Project: Documenting Life 2017”: https://www.instagram.com/galinanemirovsky/

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hearts everywhere

A modern renaissance woman, finally letting the insanity out of my head. I’m a writer, an opinionated talker, a photographer, a clown pimp, a button artist, a shrinky-dink aficionado, a professional hypochondriac, and consequent self-proclaimed medical professional. Born in Kiev, my family defected to New York City in the 1979 wave of Russian-Jewish immigrants (aka refugees). This dramatic transition has apparently left me with an eternal quest for a sense of belonging and a perpetual cultural identity crisis. Growing up, my mother persisted that we were neither Ukrainian nor Russian, but simply Jews from the former Soviet Union. “Just imagine you were born over the ocean,” she tried to explain as I demanded a nationality to go with my religion. As a child, I preferred the animated conversations of grown-ups, sweetened by the sexiness of coffee and cigarettes, to that of playing with children my age. I spent my adolescence starring in an ironic, Russian immigrant coming of age story amongst vodka and donuts in my family’s dinette in Staten Island. By the time I got to NYU, certain I’d be the next Barbara Walters, I was living more like a 30-year old than a college student. I crushed my own broadcast journalism dreams, caving into the monetary temptation of the falsely glamorized world of advertising agencies. I got married. I dipped my toe into a piece of the dot-com bubble. I became a mom of a boy. I got divorced. I started Hearts Everywhere as a blog where I documented my Life 2.0, chasing the American Dream of life, love and pursuit of happiness. I fell in love with a clown – in the romantic comedy, NYC-is-your-backdrop, fairytale, real-life movie, make-others-around-you-gag, kind of way. I got drunk on a fishbowl’s worth of booze and broke my foot. A woman fell on me on a NYC corner and broke my knee. Then, I lost my job. So my 6-year-old and I moved into the clown’s second floor walk-up, above an Indian restaurant, and I took over the business aspect of the clown company. We enjoyed many perks of NYC living such as bed bugs and rats, and despite such romantic conditions, I still managed to get pregnant. I threw up for 9 months and wrote about it ad nauseam [involuntary clown-infused humor] into a 400-page book still to be edited. We moved to Wall Street, since that’s the obvious place for a clown to live with his pregnant wanna-be writer girlfriend and her kid. I became a mom of a girl. Then, our $1,000 rent increase forced our new family of 4 into 3 months of purgatory, shacked up with my dad in his Staten Island basement (aka refugees 2.0). Eventually we made our way to NJ, went to court with our contractor, survived Hurricane Sandy … and I started a business making button collages. Then, ten years from the day we met, I married the clown. Life has been narrating stories way faster than I have been able to write them down. My brain has reached maximum story-storage capacity and now it’s finally time to let the insanity spill out from my head onto the page.

14 thoughts on “5 Problems Only People with Multiple Cats Will Understand”

  2. franhunne4u says:

    I, too, recommend a second cat, unless you know pretty well your cat HATES other cats. Cats are usually social creatures. They might hunt alone – but they have a whole dimension of communication they can only share with another cat: Pheromones and body language. We just cannot get our tales up to greet them, we cannot send them interesting chemical signals – we are useless in those ways.

    Reply
  3. ohdarlingsoul says:

    I have two and although they’re not siblings, I pretend that they are. Sometimes they scrap, mostly because Odin wants to play and Freya doesn’t. But it warms my heart to see them snuggled up to one another whilst they have a grooming session <3

    Reply
  4. Robert Varga says:

    We have 2, both huge blessings of course. We see too daily the shows they provide, fantastic fight matches, Morcat Kombats, sometimes WWE rounds all over the place. And the nights? Well, the biggest chunk of those they sleep with us.

    Reply
  5. helentastic67 says:

    Yes. But I’ve only got one hand that works. Which cat do I pat? The line from Sad Cat Diaries about the “sadistic habit of patting with only one hand at a time despite the fact that we have 2 hands…..” or something like that.

    Reply
  9. ravenhawks magazine says:

    I have five little furry fiends and I do know who does what usually because their favorite past time is being where ever I am, like now I have three right here in front of me and two in my bed. I still seem seem to be their favorite playmate, especially when I am at the computer.

    Reply
  10. terrepruitt says:

    To me I am not so much concerned with the “ungovernability” as I am the health issues. I think is important to know who has diarrhea and to make sure both are eating and not just one. Oh well. 🙂

    Reply
  13. heretherebespiders says:

    Oooo, I know by the size and stank which cat left that particular poop gift! The barf is usually identified by what is in it, too – one eats fabric and one just eats too fast.
    I’d never have just one again. But here is a serious question: do cats do better in odd or even numbers? I do think with three, two will gang up on one – quite like horses do!

    Reply

  14. Pingback: 5 Problems Only People with Multiple Cats Will Understand – Kitty aCATemy

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